Jalamanta

the long version

It's been thirty years since Amado was banished to the desert by a government that considered his ideas about religion and the state to be subversive. Now he returns to find his people living in squalor outside the glorious Seventh City of the Sun. Calling himself "Jalamanta," meaning one who strips away the veils that blind the soul, he has come home to old friends, young strangers, and the woman who has waited for him. A man transformed, whom the elders of many tribes have imbued with their collective knowledge, Jalamanta has learned the Path to the Sun. Through suffering, he has attained wisdom; through introspection, he has acquired grace. His mission is to share what he has learned. Jalamanta sees the abandonment of hope everywhere. He witnesses the ever-escalating violence, sure to peak as the millennium dawns...and he knows that only the symbolic light of the Sun can provide salvation. He knows that to follow its brilliant Path is to open one's soul to the clarity of light, to arrive at a new awareness of Earth and high heaven, to fathom the natural mysteries, to understand one's connection to the Universal Spirit. Yet even as Jalamanta spreads the word, his inspiration must line in the dark shadow of the Central Authority: a regime still determined to repress him and everything in which he believes.