A Royal Maze exclusive — told here for the very first time
Fifty years after John Starr Cooke’s passing, we open the archive on a story that has never before been shared publicly. It comes from the unpublished manuscript of Rosalind Sharpe Wall, preserved in John’s own words. It belongs to his early travelling years — Angola, the new Moon of February 1950 — long before Carmel, long before the Books. But everything that came later is already here: the board, the trust, the humour, and the grace that arrives with a roar.
“Where shall we go?” they asked the ouija board.
“Go as you feel. You will find it.”
They were hunting a tea plantation, and John was baffled. He knew tea bushes when he saw them, and mile after Angolan mile produced none. When they stopped for lunch and asked the board again, it was blunt: You passed it. Turn around and go back.
So back they went — two vehicles, Mary and John up front, the African driver, Peter and Daniel behind. Then the Land Rover simply stalled. The chauffeur, a mechanic besides, could find nothing wrong, yet it would not move. They consulted the board once more.
“Are you blind?” it wrote.
Mary looked up. “Oh my God — look at that!”
Straight ahead stood a great tree, and carved into it, enormous, was the letter T. Not a tea tree. A T tree. This was their plantation. The board confirmed it: this was the place they had come to Angola to find.
They camped half a mile off. After supper, strange sounds moved through the forest. “It’s a lion,” Mary said — and then it roared. She set a forked branch upright before them, like two eyes staring into the dark. Soon they understood there were several. The chauffeur passed out by the fire. Dan reached for a gun, but Mary stopped him: “No guns. Remember — no guns.” The board had forbidden it. He set it down but kept it near.
What to do?
“For some reason I said, ‘Let’s sing,'” John recalled. And sing they did — Yankee Doodle to Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, Christmas carols, everything. As they sang, the lions circled — behind, then aside, then to a fourth quarter, ringing them at the four compass points. Mary turned the forked branch to face each new direction. They kept singing, foolishly, and it worked. The lions never came near. Then, suddenly, they were gone.
They thought it finished. Instead came a hush so charged it seemed all of Africa was aimed at them from every side. Then — boom — a detonation over their heads, vaster than any thunderclap, like standing beneath a bomb. And in its wake, John said, descended something like a rain of grace and peace, one of the most beautiful spiritual feelings of his life.
The chauffeur woke, yawned, looked around — and never knew a thing had happened. He had slept through all of it.
ONE IS IN MOTION!
For more on the story of John Starr Cooke and the Book of T, check out Mark Walker’s YouTube series, The Time of Telling, at https://www.youtube.com/@TimeofTelling.