“Hi, guys! You know, I’m very worried. Adam is missing. He boarded a ship a day earlier than me, sailing through the port of Eilat to Africa in Mombasa. And for several days now I have not been able to get through to him,” Ariel told us with a longing in his voice.
“Yaron, what could have happened to him? Maybe he just lost his phone? Let’s try to call him too.”
We dialed Adam’s number on Whatsapp and heard that someone answered.
“Shalom, Adam!”- my son greeted.
“But this is not Adam at all. There is a man answering in an incomprehensible language and I do not understand what he is saying,” my son told me.
“Strange! Let’s try to ask him about our friend, maybe he will say something.”
“Good afternoon! Please call Adam!” – we asked.
“Snip-snip” answered the voice on the phone and from there came sounds like a knife being sharpened. “Snip-snip”
“Where is Adam? Please call him,” we asked again, and in response we heard that the knife was being sharpened even more intensively than before. “Snip-snip”, “Snip-snip”, “Snip-snip”.
“Yes, Yaron, somehow all this is strange and joyless. I hope that he is alive and well and this is just some nonsense.”
“Yaron, the phone is ringing! Look, there’s a strange number. Someone is calling from the Republic of Chad in Central Africa. Who could it be?
“Adam!”
We literally shuddered with joy when we heard his adrenaline-filled voice on the phone.
“Hello! Guys, don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m alive and well, I’m in the desert, it’s very beautiful here, I’m driving around the Sahara in a car with Bedouins. I boarded a ship sailing to Kenya, to Mombasa in the port of Eilat.
I hurried away and did not make inquiries about it. And in vain! When we had already sailed, I was surprised to find that this is a rather strange vessel. First of all, I was surprised that all the sailors on the ship were very large, huge men from Africa, just giants with a height of 7 to 8 feet and weighing more than 400 pounds.
We were very worried about him, but one day there was a call from an unknown number from the Republic of Chad in Central Africa. And we shuddered with joy when we heard Adam’s voice filled with adrenaline on the phone.
“Hello! Guys, don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m alive and well, I’m in the desert, it’s very beautiful here, I ride across the Sahara in a car with Bedouins.
I boarded a ship sailing to Kenya, to Mombasa in the port of Eilat. I was in a hurry to leave and did not inquire about it. But I should have!
As we sailed away, I was surprised to find that all the sailors on the ship were very large, just huge men from Africa, ranging from 7 to 8 feet tall and weighing over 400 pounds.
The conditions for normal life on the ship were completely absent. During the day, it was heated like a frying pan in the sun, there was a terrible heat, stuffiness and there was not even normal drinking water and any other food except stew, an incredible number of cans of which the sailors ate every day and drank 40 cans of beer for each. These amazing Africans just amazed me, I’ve never seen such huge people before, and they didn’t even sweat in the sun. I was scared when I accidentally saw that they were carrying contraband goods, and many other strange things that were happening on the ship . In addition, these giants began to show too much interest in my person and I realized that this trip might not end well. And I decided to run. One day, when the ship was cruising near the shore, with the approach of the dark time of day, I made an attempt to bribe the sentry.
He, after thinking about it, agreed, but asked for a considerable sum for not noticing my departure – 500 thousand Kenyan shillings.
I wrote him a check and he let me go. And, relying on the will of God and the skill of a freediver, I jumped from the ship into the sea. I swam for a long, very long time, but the sea helped me, I felt its support and I managed to swim safely to the shore, which I could not see in the dark, but it was something like a desert.
I was afraid of poisonous snakes and predatory animals that go out at night in the desert to hunt, so I decided to wait for the morning, standing near the water’s edge.
And when the sun rose, I saw an incredibly majestic and boundless desert. I realized that it was Sahara. I had no idea where to go and went where my eyes were looking.
I was barefoot and as the sun approached the zenith, the sand became more and more hot and burned my feet more and more. So I walked about 25 miles.
In fact, I could have walked a hundred miles and not met anyone, but a real miracle happened, I met Bedouins who decided to drive a car through the desert.
I was madly thirsty,they gave me water, gave me clean clothes and took me on a trip, although I do not know where we are now,but they treat me like a brother and promise to take me to some port. I still want to get to Mexico…”
Adam’s voice trembled with indescribable sensations…
And many more people and many more stories…
We were just in the maelstrom of events happening to our friends and acquaintances, experiencing them together with them and trying to help them at least in some way. And in these conversations, day after day passed, and we did not even think about our own situation and how we ourselves could live on, that we simply continued to get entangled in the fake web more and more.
We wanted to go outside the huge and crowded Istanbul, to Antalya, Dalaman or just outside the city to calmly think about and analyze the situation, but we were constantly waiting for the arrival of one or another of our friends…
True, we understood that something was wrong here, all these stories were very strange, but we also did not understand what the trick was here, and we believed them since almost every one of them gave in his story such details that NO one could know except for us and him and maybe a few other people, and because in our head there was no idea that the voice of a person we knew may not be HIM WHO is talking, or even a person or robot at all. Who was talking to us then?
For a long time we did not realize that we were not talking to these people or even to people in general, although the timbre and intonation of the voice that we heard from the phone were exactly the same as those of our friends.
But at some point, the events they described seemed too incredible to us and we realized that all these conversations could not be with real people.
And even now, more than a year after our departure, we have not been able to contact any real person from Eilat.
And the only thing that we realized is that none of them had gone anywhere and was not going to leave and did not know about our departure, and that we did not talk about leaving with any of them in Eilat, and after our departure we did not talk with any of them.
Amazing Life 