Chapter 10: The Khanum Khatun

First contact with the Khanum Khatun

The guilt I had felt just a few minutes before was gone. In its place was wonderment. We were in the twenty-first century and had made first contact with a new group of human beings! Of that much I was certain. It wasn't just that they hadn't seen white people before: Bruce had asked that question of virtually everyone he had met since leaving Mabul and the answer was always 'No.' I was convinced that these men had never even seen an Indonesian face before, and probably had not even heard of white people.

Not in my wildest, most adventurous childhood dreams had I ever imagined such a possibility. I knew that, technically, we hadn't discovered anything - it was already known that people lived there - but that wasn't the point. To me, it was a discovery. Suddenly the earth had changed for me: it was now refreshed, made even more remarkable somehow. There wasn't supposed to be anything like this left. Before leaving London, Bruce had contacted a leading anthropologist to ask how we should deal with a first contact. He had shrugged us off with the comment that such ideas were merely 'popular romantic notions' because there were no longer any uncontacted peoples.

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