CIMMARRONS!

In the desert lands where nothing grows child raiders and bandits frolic with machine guns and bayonets. These are the Cimmarrons. The grouop was formed by child soldiers, generations ago. Enlisted to fight a grown-up war they rebelled and slaughtered their officers and fled to the desert lands where nothing grows, their numbers swollen by runaways from the labour camps and miltias. Here they have built their homes and shrines and lives of fierce fantasy. Lives overgrown with the vines and creepers of wild myth, a living green world, dense and humid jungle of the imagination in which they are completely at home. Fed by their own daring raids and artful burglaries. Watch them running, fabrics which glitter, flutter, catch the wild sun. Turbans unraveling, the rattling and jangling of improvised jewelry made of bird beaks and tiny bones, coloured plastic, feathers, beads, shells, tin foil and aluminum. All are dressed as emperors, viziers, sultans, demented shamans in platypus masks and condor wings, magicians in robes and conical, star patterned hats, spacemen and jumble-sale samurai. Monkey bands of whooping boys, crashing through paradise.
Their camp is ringed with flags, fetishes and totems. Ragged pennants, banners of independence. Boys doze in hammocks strung between totem poles.
At puberty the boy must descend into the pit. This brings together all the members of the pack in a mood of great and childlike solemnity. Drums beat and the children chant. The pubescent child is descending into another world and shall never return to this one. He wears a false beard of horse hair and a wooden phallus strapped to his crotch.
The Cimmarrons have no agriculture. They neither hunt nor gather. They refuse to engage in anything resembling work. All their needs are met by the spoils of raids and ambushes. By theft and robbery. Masters of guerrilla warfare. Of cunning and stealth. They are utterly ruthless. Slaughtering the Overseers of the brick pits and copper mines. Massacaring the commanding officers of two-bit militas and liberating their child captives. They melt into the scenery like mist eaten by the rising sun.
"They just disappeared Sir, it all happened so quick sir. Took all the kids with 'em Sir, I'm the only one left alive Sir, look Sir, all dead Sir."