In the Land of Magic Soldiers ONE There is a place where the bend in a path--just that, a slight curve in a narrow strip of mud--can produce an ache, a longing, a bending of the heart. Within the jungle on either side stand the cotton trees. Twelve stories high, their monstrous trunks fan out toward the earth in giant buttresses, forming the walls of strange rooms. To step inside those chambers, to have the massive growths enclose you, to lean with your feet on the spongy ground and your back to the cool damp bark, with almost all the sounds of the world absorbed by the misty air and the immensity of wood, is to exist in some other atmosphere, some softer medium, some fluid capable of sustaining you between this world and another. And maybe it is only the nearness of those magical trees that causes the longing on the path. Or maybe it is the way the rainy-season light, filtering through the haze between storms, flickers off the undergrowth at the path''s edge, making the leaves flash dimly like coins dropped into water, bright objects of little value sinking painfully out of reach. Or maybe it is the sheer thickness of all that greenery, the entire earth a depthless pillow to fall into. But I think it is also, up ahead, the minimal bend itself, leading the path so suddenly out of sight amidst the lush terrain, that puts a crimp in the chest, as though the heart has tried to close around something--haplessly, like going after jungle butterflies with a catcher''s mitt--before it is snatched away.

This is where that spot is found: just beyond the village of Foria, in the country of Sierra Leone, in West Africa. On the rim of the continent''s western bulge, the country is a tiny shape engulfed by the tiny shapes of Guinea and Liberia. It is so obscure that you may never have heard of it; if you have, you likely know it as the place of lost hands. That is the small fame its war hasbrought, and as the war burned closer to Foria, as it burned within a few miles, the Kortenhovens put off leaving. They came from Grand Rapids, Michigan. But this had been their home for fourteen years.     To reach there they had flown across the Atlantic, flown to the capital, Freetown. In that city on the coast, on the streets above the estuary that spread--gleaming, listless--into the ocean, the elaborate colonial architecture, the pale stone and wrought-iron rails, stood beside stark office buildings of smooth concrete.

It had been nearly two decades since the end of British rule. Freetown could appear a functional place, half quaint, half modern. The airlines had been willing to land there, then. From the capital the family drove inland. The road cracked and caved and disappeared. Branches hooked across the windshield and wrapped around the hood; the family couldn''t see five feet into the forest that crushed inward from either side. Even in a four-wheel-drive, to cross most of the miniature country, to travel a distance less than the span of Massachusetts, took fourteen hours. Boulders blocked the route and bridges didn''t exist.

To make their way across the creeks they built their own bridges, roping together logs with vines. They were white. And they were missionaries. But they meant to bring basic health care and safe water as well as Christianity; they felt that the gospel''s call to "preach good news to the poor" referred at least as much to reducing poverty on earth as to uplifting the poor in spirit. "You can''t spiritualize that passage," Paul, the father, tall, sturdy, and bearded, believed. "You can''t just go around telling people Jesus loves you, so everything'' ll be hunky-dory if you have faith in Him. You can''t just tell people this world is not my home. The gospel means action as well as words.

The biblical mandate is to treat the whole person, not to divide things into the spiritual and the material. I want tobuild water systems so little kids will stop shitting themselves to death." "Lord," he wrote in a booklet of prayers, published by his church back in the States, "Lord, give me a heart that breaks." Paul and Mary''s three skinny blond children--Matthew who was thirteen, Sarah who was almost ten, Aaron who had just turned six--tried the vines for swinging, Sarah''s ponytail and long, loose skirt floating through the heavy air, when their parents stopped to rest on that first drive up. And they played at the rubber trees-- real rubber trees , Sarah thought, cutting at the bark with a Swiss Army knife, expecting to fashion rubber bands and Superballs from whatever substance emerged. She had to settle for white sap. It was Christmas, 1980. When the family arrived in Foria, the cotton trees were shedding their delicate fiber.

Above the huts of mud and thatch, and the few squat houses of cement and corrugated metal, the white fluff drifted down through the heat, coating the ground like a layer of snow. The Kortenhovens'' denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist sect based in Grand Rapids, had dispatched ahead of them a sort of roving missionary advance man to help choose a village, to meet with village leaders and negotiate for an unused house where the family would live, to set a metal roof upon it. Their church was sending, too, a few other missionaries into the region around Foria, the most remote in Sierra Leone, and one other couple to Foria itself. Quickly, the advance man left, out from that epicenter of isolation, and gradually the other missionaries would follow him away. But even at the start, there were only a handful of Westerners spread over the territory of the Kuronko. Unable to communicate with the people they now lived among, the Kortenhovens struggled to learn the tribal language, Paul and Mary hiring Samba Koroma for their teacher, Samba the rare villager who''d managed to get several years of schooling at a Catholic mission in a distant town, who knew a bit of English, who spoke at high-speed in all his five languages, sothat " Ah foh tungh doni doni "--"say it again very slowly"--was the first Kuronko sentence Paul learned. For months Aaron could learn nothing. Friendship, at the age of six, seemed to end forever.

He could talk with no village child. "I hate Africa!" he screamed constantly through the house, high voice holding endless depths of helplessness and grief. "I hate rice! I hate cement! Why don''t we have carpet on the floor? I want to go home to America! I hate Africa! I want to go home! I want to go home! I hate rice! Please, why can''t we go home?" And at night, with the kerosene lanterns blown out, they all listened to the termites, tk-tk-tch, tk-tk-tch, devouring the door frames and the flimsy wooden substructure supporting their concrete walls. Was there only an ocean between the country they had come to and the country they had left? Living beyond electricity, beyond phones, beyond mail seemed the least of it. When Aaron got sick that first year, when Mary pushed gently at his right side and the pain was sharp, she figured appendicitis. She and Paul rushed him to the closest hospital, five hours away. There the Seventh Day Adventist doctors cared for a colony of lepers. After he was diagnosed with hepatitis, Aaron recuperated among the patients whose nerves had been claimed by leprosy''s bacteria, whose eyelids could no longer blink, whose flesh had turned necrotic, whose hands were crabbed, whose toes had fallen away, whose feet had eroded to twisted fins.

Back in Foria, school was Mary in tears, leaning over Aaron''s shirtless bony shoulder, trying to teach him to read despite his dyslexia. Matthew and Sarah studied by way of a University of Nebraska correspondence course. They sent off their tests, their papers, whenever anyone journeyed to Freetown. From there the schoolwork made its way to the States, and made it back to Foria months later. And while the termites feasted on the house, cobras and puff adders, mambas and Gabon vipers--species whose bite, if it didn''t kill, could leave a leg, especially a child''s leg, quickly black with gangrene and treatable by nothing except amputation--slept by the bathroom drain and slid across the paths. Malaria was rampant, and the drug that fought it gave Aaron hallucinations. Rabies infected the dogs the family took care of for a villager. Elephantiasis was endemic.

Lassa fever, with its Ebola-like hemorrhaging, lurked near. They had come to a land of plagues. Then one night, to make the ocean between countries seem all but infinite, a bush devil danced outside the Kortenhovens'' windows. Opposite their house, the village planned to build new huts; a patch of forest needed to be cleared, and before this could begin, devils needed to be purged. They surely lingered amidst those trees, cotton trees and others with trunks so terribly thick and horribly tall, the natural homes of evil spirits when they rose to visit the surface of the earth. For the Kuronko, there was only the magic of peril, not solace, in those fantastic growths, and to step between the buttresses of the cotton trees, to be enfolded by those gargantuan wings, was not to feel ensconced but to guarantee misfortune, disfigurement, sickness, death. The specially sanctified might enter those chambers to leave offerings, sacrifices--colonial coins, chicken''s blood--to stave off general disaster. Otherwise the alcoves, so otherworldly, were best avoided.

The beings of the underworld felt too at home there. In a society that was, with only the most scattered exceptions, preliterate, in a territory so besieged by illness that one-third of all children died before the age of five, in a place without any modern sense of science or medicine, in a land so overwhelmed by nature, devils were behind every calamity.