The retirement of Britain's Prince Philip from public life led world headlines on Thursday, but his most devout and remote followers have only just heard the news.
A tribe in Vanuatu was shocked and dismayed to discover on Saturday that the man they pray to as the son of an ancestral local mountain god will likely never return to their Pacific Island home.
The British royal, who said he would no longer take part in public engagements, alone or alongside his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, is part of the fabric of life in the village of Younanen on Tanna Island.
According to local legend, the pale-skinned son of the mountain god had ventured across the seas to look for a rich and powerful woman to marry.
Anthropologists believe Philip, who fitted the bill by marrying a powerful woman, became linked to the legend in the 1960s when Vanuatu was an Anglo-French colony known as the New Hebrides. Villagers at the time were likely to have seen portraits of Philip and the Queen at government offices and police stations run by colonial officials.
The belief that Philip, also known as the Duke of Edinburgh, was indeed the traveling son was reinforced in 1974 when he and the Queen made an official visit to the New Hebrides.
Younanen is not marked on maps. Finding it requires a local guide and a three-hour drive through dirt trails from Lenakel, the capital of Tanna, itself little more than a shed and a shop.
Children play naked, some of the women wear traditional grass skirts with bare chests while the men, clothed in old t-shirts, carry machetes.
There is some irony in Philip, who has been by the queen's side throughout her 65 years on the throne, being considered a god by a primitive community thousands of miles away from London's civilization.
His reputation for making politically incorrect gaffes has been partly earned by comments about foreigners. He once advised British students not to stay too long in China for fear of becoming "slitty-eyed".
And on a trip to Australia, he asked a group of shocked Aborigines if they still threw spears at each other.
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