The following day Ashley and I woke up early and, after a very fast breakfast, we gathered with Uram, who would have guided us to the nearest stream. Luke went with the hunters, wearing the red piece of cloth around his arm. We would have seen him again in two day time because he needed to go far, to find a herd of mountain goats with the rest of the hunters.

While getting ready for the walk, a pregnant woman passed before me and I looked at her. The moment she looked back, she smiled in a way I've never seen. I couldn't stop staring at her. She was such a vision.

After she went away, I turned to Ashley and I told her.

"Have you seen the smile of that pregnant woman?"

"No I haven't" she replied, "what was like?" Said Ashley.

"I've never seen something so amazingly alive!"

"Of course, that was the smile of two souls!" she said laughing.

Once reached our destination, we left all the nets and instrument we had brought  there in a big group, then everyone took something randomly and, depending which thing it was, he or she went to the river, using it. Surprised, Ashley and I decided to follow their example understanding that like we had done during the previous week, we needed to act like them. When we had  almost reached the group of utensils, we heard Uram voice.

"Ehi you two! I've got something special to do for you!" he said

"You need to find some good wood and make your hook for fishing and personalize it! Once you do that, you can join the rest of the team."

Then he went down to the river, fishing with the others. His last words were "Sharing is caring", giving us a knife to carve our hooks out.

We looked at each other with a frown and start searching for a good piece of wood.

Ashley was still worried about Mike and John and, while using the knife, she cut herself.

"Careful" I said taking her hand. "Let me see"

She  opened her skin and started bleeding.

"I know I was thinking about our friends and I wasn't focused on the present. I am awful"

"No, you are not" I replied with extreme sweetness.

"Come here"

I hugged her very tight and she started crying and telling me about all her fears. Before that moment we never  realized how hard was the new path we began, so it was just a matter of time that someone would have felt  the change, suddenly. I was very worried too, but I knew I couldn't reveal my cards because I was the one who had to be strong and help in that moment. The strength and the courage I showed  calmed her down.

We finished our work and we went back to Uram, who fell asleep next to his line. We woke him up and we told him that our hooks were ready. He looked at them and said "Well done! Well decorated and carved. Now you need to exchange them and take one the partner's hook."

We glanced at each other perplexed without understanding that there was a lesson in such nonsense order.

Following this in his opinion, we would have learned to detach from material world, the objects and to connect with more energies. We started fishing and Uram taught us to meditate watching the ripples in the water as we did the week before, staring at the flames.

"Just sit quiet and stare at something deeply" he said. "The space between your thoughts will get wider and wider and you will experience pure white light"

After a long day fishing we made our way back and Mara told us to prepare ourselves because that night we would had danced for the reds who went hunting and they had possibility to nurture the tribe. So, we went down the nearest stream and bathed ourselves. A full moon was up in the black sky.

Mara gave us some strange costumes made of skin and feathers, and once lit the fire, a young woman began singing and everybody started slowly moving around the flames. Tov was standing on a rock and painting the face of everyone.

Ashley and I got close to him but he didn't recognize us, so we called him and he smiled at us when he heard our voices. He draw on our face strange symbols like those we saw carved on the shelves. Ashley's was a semicircle attached to a line not connected at the bottom.

Mine was a kind of trident or flame made with wavy lines coming from a single spot, both of them were painted on our foreheads with some juice obtained by fruits from the forest.

Even Tov got one that got the shape of a U letter upside down with the left end part divided by a space.

I later knew that these were hebrew letters: mem the water, the womb; shin the fire, the teeth and hei the revelation.

In the beginning Ashley and I watched the dance and then we learned a few moves and joined the others. I stopped a while to realize what was happening all around me. Colors, music and the singing were melting into the shadows and all the jungle, normally silent, was full of life. Time and space were completely changed and we started to live in a very simple way. The thought of my life before this adventure seemed so far away and everything I was learning kept inside wisdom that once was  among the people, but now nobody was paying attention to it.

Women were singing and playing very simple instruments, men were making noises and altogether the music was made. We had danced before in the previous week, but this dance was precise and very rhythmic. Painted faces were spooky, and everyone looked serious in the beginning, but then the atmosphere became less tense, once a strange drink was distributed among everyone. It derived from some vines and it helped talking to the spirits to ask them a great hunt for those who weren't with us. The drink smelled very bad and had a strange taste but in little time, I swallowed it up pressing my nose. Everything changed. I smiled big and my body didn't feel like mine anymore. Closing my eyes, I saw geometric pictures and wavy lines dancing to the rhythm. Suddenly I felt such calmness and stillness inside me, although everything was moving, growing and vibrating. I had no control, but I wasn't scared at all, that feeling gave me peace and acceptance of the situation. Ashley and I reached the rest of the group and got lost in a crazy weird and ecstatic dance filled with imagines coming from elsewhere.

The couples moved like one only person and our foreheads touched, like our noses and our hands. I can't remember how that night ended up, but I remember I woke up with Ashley hugging me and sleeping on my shoulder.