Island of Aquarius: The Missionary God-Man

Escape from the Island of Aquarius, pp. 83-92

Jay and Dr. Cooper are not, of course, dead.

It was a watery tornado, a tossing, tumbling, spinning, rumbling, dangerous carousel of water, black as midnight, cold as stunning ice, fierce as a constantly crashing tidal wave. Dr. Cooper and Jay were like tiny splinters of driftwood, or helpless seaweed in the surf. Their bodies were twisted, beaten, tossed about by angry, merciless water. There was no air, there was no surface, there was nowhere to swim.

There was only certain death.

Every once in a while, Peretti will write a passage that completely surprises me. This is one of them. This is actually good. Really good!

And then we get things like this:

Pain! Salty stinging water. A heave of the stomach. Vomiting? No, coughing … hacking, more salty water spilling out, splashing on the wet, cold rocks. Water all around … someone’s holding me.

This isn’t even italicized, as though we’re reading our character’s thoughts. It’s just … weird. 

Jay’s eyes opened and saw nothing but a salty, briny, streaked blur of lights and colors.

Jay and Dr. Cooper have been pulled from the water. The two of them lay side by side on the rocks, coughing and hacking and retching. Who pulled them out? Where are they? Well.

Their rescuer was a kind-looking man with black, curly hair and a stocky build. He sat between Jay and his father, a hand hanging onto each of them, a kerosene lamp before him. He was soaking wet, and very concerned.

This is, of course, the real Reverend Adam MacKenzie. He’s been living under the whirlpool for a year, ever since he, like Jay and Dr. Cooper, was thrown into the whirlpool. He’s also been building a boat, which he calls Adam’s Ark. He explains to Jay and Dr. Cooper that the island is sinking—the rising water, the earthquakes—and that as long as Stuart Kelno has the only boat on the island (that’s Fake MacKenzie’s real name), he controls the people. The Real MacKenzie intends to save as many as he can in his ark.

He’s been building the ark with the wood, nails, and other materials pilfered from MacKenzie, with the help of an unnamed person (hint: it’s The Dude). The Real MacKenzie figures that this stealing is justifiable because they were originally intended for the building of a church. The boat is almost complete.

But wait. Where is this boat? How is the supply pilfering going on? Where exactly are they? These are all very good questions!

They stood in a huge cavern; the ceiling was at least a hundred feet above them, and the room seemed to stretch out in all directions like some immense, dark stadium made of black, crusty rock.

“We must be under the island,” said Dr. Cooper.

“Yes,” said Adam, “that’s right. This is the center of the volcano that formed the island. All the lava is gone now, and so we have a huge, empty shell, sort of an upside-down cereal bowl.”

…

The Coopers looked behind them at the rushing river from which Adam had pulled them.

Jay asked, “So this is where all the water from that whirlpool goes?”

“Yes,” answered Adam. “You see all the water over there, bubbling up from below that big wall? It rushes down underneath that wall and then comes up in this cavern and flows out to sea in this underground river. I just now happened to be doing some fishing when I saw your hat, Jacob, come bobbing up, and then both your heads.”

So, let’s review. They’re standing in an underground cavern—like a cavern in a cave. To one side of them, in this underground cavern, is a “rushing river.” I’ve seen streams in caves before; this sounds far bigger. The river is “bubbling up” from under one of the walls of the cavern—this is where the water from the whirlpool goes, apparently. This underground river then flows “out to sea.”

This whirlpool does not make sense. Where does the water in the whirlpool come from? Why is there a whirlpool in the island’s caldera in the first place? A whirlpool in the caldera that then drains into the empty magma chamber in the form of a rushing river—this does not make sense.

There’s something else odd here as well. Magma chambers are usually far underground, beneath the earth’s surface, but as the Real MacKenzie explains to the Coopers, when the tide is low, the “river flows out from under the island through a very large tunnel, but most of the time the opening is underwater.” In other words, “under the island” appears to be a misstatement. The river actually flows out from within the island.

This image makes the question of where the water in the caldera is coming from all the more obvious. And again, based on the diagrams of volcanos I found, that magma chamber should actually be way, way below that, not nearly to the top of the volcano (remember that volcanos that form in the ocean are actually mostly underwater—the island part above water is only the very top of the volcano).

I’m sparing you an awful lot of text here, because this section is mostly just Dr. Cooper and the Real MacKenzie having themselves a nice long getting-to-know-you chat. It’s not terribly interesting. We do learn more backstory on the natives of the island—and on what Kelno actually is and what he did.

“Stuart Kelno is ruthless and claims power over this whole island. The Christian believers have all fled, and now he is totally free to do whatever the wants.

“The Christians have fled?” Jay asked, and then he recalled, “We saw a deserted village up there…”

Adam nodded. “That was our village. That was where the Lord first sent me, and He really blessed the work there. Almost all of the local natives in that village found Jesus as their Savior.”

“What happened, Adam?” asked Dr. Cooper.

“Two things, I guess. First of all, Stuart Kelno and his followers came here and just—took over. They claimed to be followers of Jesus, and maybe they were sincere at first; but as Kelno got more and more fascinated with the island’s pagan traditions he turned to Satanism and witchcraft, and his friends followed suit. So they took over all the resources and renamed the island Aquarius. Some of our own people, the ones who rejected the gospel, actually joined up with Kelno’s bunch and continued their pagan practices.”

“Firewalking?”

Adam looked a little sick as he said, “Yes, and some times human sacrifice to pagan gods, just like the heathen nations in the Old Testament. It was awful! Jacob, the people here were in terrible spiritual darkness before they found the Lord, and now some of them have been ensnared once again in the same old trap by this—this modern-age witch doctor! I pray for them every day.”

Two themes I’ve noticed in these books. First, the white, Western missionaries are always always always the good guys. They’re never at all deep or complex as characters—they’re one-dimensional cut-outs. Second, the native peoples almost never lead—they follow. Notice that those natives who didn’t follow MacKenzie to the gospel left not to live their own lives but to follow another white Westerner—Kelno. In another book, those native peoples who don’t follow another white Western missionary instead follow Russian communists.

The only exception to this is in Toco Rey, when a native group in Central America remains relatively autonomous, and we meet the group’s chief, and get to watch him make decisions to protect his people (against arms dealers looking for biological weapons, in that case). That book had no white Western missionary.

So. What else has changed?

“What was the other thing that happened?” Jay asked.

“Well, it’s what’s about to happen. I can always hope I’m wrong, but I think this island is in big trouble!”

“Your note!” said Jay. “‘The island is …’ We couldn’t make out the rest of it.”

Adam looked about of them and said in all seriousness, “This island, dar brothers, is sinking. It started very slowly a year ago, but since then it’s been happening faster and faster. I’m afraid it could all sink at once, at any moment. I don’t think there’s much time left.”

I am fairly certain islands don’t work like this. The idea that the island started sinking a year ago and that the rest of it could go at any time seems like a bit much. Processes like this typically take a lot more time.

“The natives, the new Christians from the village, all left in canoes and rafts, anything they could find. They left behind all their earthly possessions. I remained here on the island, trying to warn the people here, trying to reason with Kelno, trying to persuade some of the people who came from our village that they should leave with their families…”

This was all before he got thrown into the whirlpool of course. He also says he knew about the African tiger fly trick and tried to expose it—that apparently was the last straw. It’s worth noting that this island appears not to be as remote as it had seemed—the natives were able to leave for other islands in canoes and rafts.

“All I can do is try to build this boat. Kelno has his own boat, but that means he controls all the transportation to and from the island. There is no escape from here except what we can build ourselves.”

While it is not stated, it seems reasonable to conclude that the island’s native population was able to escape in canoes and rafts—an avenue apparently not available to the people now living in Kelno’s cult village—because they had learned knowledge of the sea passed down from generation to generation. Kelno’s people now are more stuck, because they don’t have the knowledge to leave in anything less than more conventional boats—see what happened to Tommy and his raft, for example.

So this is where we are: The Real MacKenzie has built a boat out of pilfered lumber intended for a church, and is hoping to find a way to rescue the island’s inhabitants and take them with him before the island sinks.

What does this boat look like?

“Wow! Did you build that?”

Jay was referring to a very large boat, sitting beside the river on blocks of wood and stone. It was crudely built, and seemed to be constructed of countless different odds and ends of lumber, logs, and other scrap. The big hull looked like a deep, clumsy tub and a name was painted on the bow: “Adam’s Ark.”

Unless the Real MacKenzie is a shipbuilder by trade, he might have done better to have The Dude show him how to build more traditional native modes of transportation, instead of trying to construct a western-style boat out of building materials intended for a church. After all, The Dude and the other native peoples in Kelno’s village that the Real MacKenzie hopes to take with him would presumably be on hand to navigate.

Look, I have built a lot of things, but I would have genuinely no idea how to even start building a western-style boat. This just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But of course, we all know it’ll actually work, since this is Peretti’s book and in his books white, Western missionaries don’t make mistakes. They’re basically gods.

(If you’re wondering how the Real MacKenzie plans to get his boat out of the underground cavern exited only by a river flowing through a narrow tunnel at low tide, you’re asking the right questions.)

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