IT WAS THREE IN THE MORNING IN LONDON AND THE PHONE WAS RINGing. At that hour, you answer with your heart in your mouth. The last time I'd had a 3 a.m. call, it was a man I had met on a bus in Nigeria who had carefully kept my name and address over three tempestuous years that culminated in his arrest for drug smuggling at Heathrow Airport. He had used his one statutory phone call to wake me up.

This time, vague twanging noises and crashing waves came down the line--and then a voice said "Pong" and I knew who it was. Pong is a title of respect in the Torajan mountains on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (also called Celebes).

Indonesia is composed of roughly 14,000 islands, and Sulawesi, east of Borneo and north of Bali, is one of the largest and wildest--a huge, orchid-shaped piece of land, with four narrow peninsulas twisting around three large gulfs. (When the Portuguese arrived, they didn't realize that the islands' arms were joined at the center, and named the land mass the Celebes Islands.)

Several hundred miles north of Ujung Pandang, the capital of southern Sulawesi, is the region of Tanah Toraja or Torajaland. About five years earlier, I had organized a Torajan exhibition at the British Museum in London. We imported a container of wood, bamboo and rattan--all the materials necessary to build a traditional Torajan rice barn--and with it a family of four Torajan carvers and painters, who built the structure from scratch at the museum.

The four builders were a living history of Tanah Toraja in miniature: The grandfather, Nenek Tulian, was a high priest of the old religion and spoke Torajan. The sons were Christian, and spoke Indonesian as well. The grandson, Johanis, wore jeans, worshiped nothing but the U.S. dollar and studied English at the university. It could be no one but him on the phone.

"I am calling you from the middle of the forest," Johanis now said, "to say that grandfather is dead. Will you come? You promised when we were in London to come to his funeral. Wait."

There was a click and suddenly I heard the voice of Nenek chanting, bardic, melodious, the voice pitched high, intoning an ancient religious poem from beyond the grave. Abruptly he broke off and said in Indonesian: "You, my friend in London. Come again even if I am dead." Another click.

"He just came out with that at a ceremony days before he died. I was recording it," Johanis said.