Eventually a searchlight was brought up from the Harbour and when it was erected, Culbertson turned it on the faces of a group of stupefied women who had come up from the Daisy. He shouted at them: ‘Get back. You’re only a nuisance here’, but the women were hemmed in by the crowd and had to remain where they were.
The only outside help came from the Indian shopkeepers who cleared the south-west corner of the site and found Pedley and two women secretaries. All three were dead. The Indians worked near the women from the Daisy. They worked in silence but between them and the women there was an understanding created by years of business contact. People came up from the Dobo and offered to work for money. The more likely ones were employed. The Dobo men brought the news that the Praslin had also suffered. The detonation had brought down a cliffside which had buried the hotel.
‘I don’t know what’s being done there,’ Dixon said: ‘There aren’t enough police to deal with two sites and, of course, the offices are of first importance. I’m told that some of the Dobo people are scrambling about the Praslin – no doubt looking for pickings. Well, Mrs Foster, I advise you to go no farther. The ambulance can take you back to the hospital and you’d be wise to have another day in bed.
Kristy shook her head and said: ‘I’ll stay here till they find him.’
She went on towards the ruin of the offices. As she reached the edge of the block heap, one of the Indians gave a cry and the others hurried over to see what he had found. From their excitement, she knew they had discovered someone alive and, running to them, she shouted: ‘Who is it? Who is it?’ They were too intent to answer her and she climbed over the blocks till she could see for herself.
The men were uncovering an oblong steel case with a grille on its upper side: the office lift. Within, someone lay on his back, quite still, his arms down at his side, as though in an over-size coffin. The figure was so covered with dust, it looked like one of the human shells found in the ruins of Pompeii. It did not move but one of the Indians assured her: ‘He is alive. He opened his eyes and looked at me. He looked directly into my eyes and he knew I was the one who had found him. Yes, he is alive and I found him. With these hands, I lifted the blocks and uncovered him. He should be grateful.’
They all stood round and looked down on the man in the lift. Those who had not come to help but merely to see what was to be seen, were particularly gratified by the spectacle of the trapped, dust-covered body that looked more dead than alive. The police officer pushed through the crowd and took over the discovery. He tugged at the lift gate but it was jammed and could not be opened. As the grille was shaken, the man inside opened his eyes and Kristy recognized him. She called: ‘Mr Simpson, are you all right?’ Simpson looked at the faces above him with an expression of bleary inquiry, then he closed his eyes and did not open them again.
The officer shouted for the police to move the lift but the cable was buried in debris so even if they could raise it, the lift could not be moved. While the matter was being discussed, Kristy saw Simpson’s mouth fall open and she knew he had quietly died.
She said: ‘Don’t waste time. There may be others alive. My husband is here somewhere. We must go on looking.’ She started pulling at broken pieces of rubble and one of the police, a large Negro, burst out laughing. ‘No, lady,’ he said, ‘you no damn good. You go away, away. We find your husband.’
Taking herself to the perimeter of the square, Kristy sank down on the ground and set herself to watch. Though Simpson had been found alive, the men still worked half-heartedly. Simpson had been protected by the lift. The other officials had had no protection. Not a sound came from under the debris. And – a worse omen – a stench of death was filling the air.
As the bodies were found, they were placed at the back of the square and later carried on stretchers to the church. Kristy went to view each of them. They looked much alike, shrouded in the white dust, but she was sure that none of them was Hugh.
Mechanics were brought up from the harbour to release Mr Simpson and behind them came a procession of women from the Daisy. They were a bedraggled company, led by Mrs Axelrod with her hair hanging about her face, her skin glazed by weariness. She had probably not slept the previous night but she advanced with an exaggerated air of purpose, as though even now she would lead the others and defeat their despair. She glanced at Kristy then looked back as though trying to decide who she might be.
Kristy, scratched by thorn apples, dress torn, face and hair grey with dust, said: ‘I’m Kristy Foster. They haven’t found my husband.’
‘They haven’t found mine.’ Mrs Axelrod spoke angrily, pushing back her damp red hair with fierce, trembling hands: ‘Culbertson said they’re all dead but now they’ve found Simpson alive. So they’re not all dead. If the police won’t put their backs into the job, we’ll do it for them. No good you sitting there, moping. Get up and give a hand.’ As Kristy got herself up, Mrs Axelrod took another look at her: ‘No. I forgot. You look all in. You stay there and we’ll let you know when we come on him.’
She formed the women into two groups of four. Each group was instructed to tackle a block between them. As soon as they started work, the men came to a stop and stared at the extraordinary spectacle of Englishwomen exerting themselves. Mrs Axelrod shouted at the men, trying to shame them into greater efforts, but they only gawped and grinned until Culbertson arrived with a convoy of cars.
‘I thought I told you to stay away,’ Culbertson said and Mrs Axelrod, on the point of breakdown, screamed at him, accusing him of incompetence and heartless indifference. He turned from her and went to supervise the release of Mr Simpson. The lift gate was opened and Simpson lifted out. Culbertson returned and said to Mrs Axelrod: ‘Simpson is dead. We don’t intend to work with women. Now, either you clear off and leave us to finish the job or I take my men back to the barracks.’
Mrs Prince said wearily: ‘Come on, Dulcie. Leave the men to it. I know I’m no use and I’m going, anyway.’ She walked off, leader in the hour of defeat, and the other women followed. Mrs Axelrod went after them but first made a furious show of contempt for Culbertson. Kristy, forgotten, was left alone.
She moved to a corner where Culbertson would not notice her. His presence speeded the work so that by five o’clock the black and white hall floor had been uncovered. The last of the dead were the supplicants, the only non-British victims for, with Gopal and the ministers away, the ministerial floor had been empty when the explosion occurred.
During the afternoon there had been visitors to the square. Mrs Hampton had driven down in her Mini-Minor, bringing with her a weeping Mrs Ogden. Akbar and the cook from the Daisy had stood for a while, gazing blankly at the ruin. Other Englishwomen, some of whom Kristy had never seen before, came to the edge of the site then went to the church. Kristy herself went to the church and confirmed that Hugh’s body had not been found. She saw other women in tears but she could not cry because she had nothing to cry for. Even after Culbertson and his men had driven away and the Indians were returning to their shops, she went on sitting in the square, expecting Hugh to reappear and explain himself.
Just before sunset, Musa with his court of friends came down the road and paused on a piece of high ground near the church. They kept close together, with a sort of cautious insolence, and surveyed the fractured, dusty chequer-board that had been the hallway of the Government Offices. The young men – Kristy recognized several of them – were in Arab dress and Musa wore the gold algol of rank. When no one accused them, or even spoke to them, they came slowly down into the square. Seeing Kristy still sitting in her corner, Musa sent one of the men to speak to her. The man was Mohammed. He said: ‘I am your good friend, sayyida. I saw your husband at the office and said to him: “Run, run.” I ran with him. I put my hand here,’ he slapped his hand down on his own shoulder, ‘and I made him come with me. He is alive, sayyida.’
‘But where is he?’
‘I cannot tell. He fell up there by the wall, but he was alive. I could no
t stay and cannot tell where he went.’
Mohammed returned to the group and Musa raised his hand to Kristy in a gesture of farewell. Then, twitching their robes about them, the young men turned together and went, like conquerors, up the hill.
As the sun dropped and the sky became coloured over with sunset, Mrs Axelrod returned and spoke firmly to Kristy: ‘You can’t spend the night here, young woman. Get up.’ She caught Kristy by the hand and pulled her to her feet.
Kristy said: ‘My husband is missing.’
‘My husband is dead.’
Mrs Axelrod’s face crumpled and dropping her chin to her chest, she broke into hoarse and violent sobs. Appalled by this grief, Kristy realized how great was her own good fortune. Hugh was not dead: and she knew, with sudden, inspired certainty, that wherever he was, he would return to her. Caught up in a fervour of compassion, she put her arms about Mrs Axelrod and led her gently back to the Daisy.
3
Simon wakened Hugh by flinging a pair of wellington boots into his tent, ordering him: ‘Put these on. If they’re too big, stuff something into the toes.’
It was still dark but before Hugh was dressed, the eastern horizon had split like a ripe pomegranate and the sky had flared up. A crimson light coloured everything with its own colour. The grass was crimson. The great peaks and the rocks of the ridge, all sheened like glass, glowed under the crimson sky.
Hugh, who seldom saw the dawn, said: ‘It’s like the last day of the world.’
‘Or the first. Come on.’
As they drove eastwards, keeping parallel to the forest edge, Simon said: ‘I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before: a shore without a footprint.’
‘I don’t share your enthusiasm for an empty world. Those peaks, for instance. They’re too close for comfort. They threaten me.’
‘What? Those!’ Simon looked at the peaks with quizzical scorn: ‘They’re about as threatening as a couple of ice-cream cones.’
The forest clamour had ceased as though its creatures were hiding from the daylight. Driving beside the solid baulk of trees, Hugh heard no sound from it except the occasional squawk of a parrot. Simon went slowly, choosing his route over the uneven ground, so nearly an hour passed before the sea came in sight. When they stopped beside Simon’s cassava plantation, the sun was high enough to hold a spark of the day’s heat. A few yards away was the shore, a white crescent of sand touched by nothing but the delicate feet of sea-birds. Looking to the left, Hugh saw the landfall he had once tried to surmount. This pretty strand, on which the sea threw laces of foam, looked to Hugh the only natural thing on this side of the island. But they were not going that way. They were going in the other direction. There, where the forest met the sea, the shore was rough with pebbles and fallen trees.
Simon had brought a small rucksack that contained medicaments and coffee. They had had no breakfast and would not eat until their return in the evening but at least they would get coffee.
‘Come on. No time to waste.’ Simon jumped down to the littoral and strode away between the forest and the sea. Palms and thorns hung out over the sand, often forcing the men to wade in water. The edge of the forest was a low cliff of earth so clotted with roots that they groped out, seeking sustenance among the stones. Some had stretched so far, they were blanched by seawater. The trees that had fallen across the shore, thrust out by the swelling life of the forest or washed by storms from their beds, now lay with roots exposed and heads drowned. Their lacings of creeper had come with them and bushes, torn up by the upheaval of the roots, had rolled down to the water and were washing about in the waves. There was something disquieting about all this, a menacing wildness so Hugh knew what Simon had meant when he spoke of an inhospitable shore.
Simon took the hazards with an athlete’s ease, vaulting over the smaller trees, ducking under the larger ones and climbing over those that were so large, their weight had carried them to the ground. Hugh, struggling behind, ignorant of the dangers of the place, tripped again and again and putting his weight on rotting wood, fell on his face when it caved in beneath him. The wood had become riddled with ants that swarmed over his hands and bit his flesh with white-hot venom. Spiked by thorns, a-tingle with ant bites, suffering the continual attacks of wasps and forest bees, Hugh gave up his first attempt to keep Simon in sight. Plodding after, he was thankful that, if nothing else, he had the wellingtons to protect his feet.
As the heat grew with brutish force, the forest moisture turned to steam and clouded out from the trees, rank with rotting vegetation.
Rounding a turn in the shore line, Hugh saw Simon a long way ahead, waving to him to hurry. When he was near enough to hear, Simon shouted: ‘If we don’t move fast, we won’t get back before dark.’
Hugh kept moving with an obstinate perseverance that Simon seemed to enjoy. He waited till Hugh caught him up, then laughed at him:
‘Want any help?’
‘No.’
‘The ants have been at you. I’ve got some Ultradil in the pack. I’ll get it out when we have coffee.’
It had occurred to Hugh that, forced on this jaunt, he could employ the strategy of the weak and bring to it such impatience, unsympathy and unexpressed anxiety that Simon would be glad to cut it short. But it was not a thing he could do. Though he felt disillusioned about Simon, the man’s attraction remained. His independence, his energy, his eager pursuit of knowledge, inspirited Hugh so he had to follow. Simon, though limited in his humanity, seemed to him, in spite of everything, an exceptional human being.
Simon clambered on to a bank of sand and stood there until Hugh came up beside him. They had reached the mouth of a small river. Hugh, gazing into the channel that the water maintained between the trees, saw that here was the way into the forest. They were to walk through shallow water which had a bottom of brown sand. He began to tug off his boots, thinking he could move faster without them, but Simon told him to keep them on: ‘The leeches would make a meal of you.’
The shaded river seemed to offer relief from the sun but beneath the trees, the air was clogged with heat and full of the steamy effluvia of decay. Added to the wasps and bees, there were now mosquitoes. Though the transparent, quietly moving stream made for easy going, there were obstructions here, too. Trees, brought down by lightning, lay across the water, their thick ligatures of creeper stretching like nets about them. In places the undergrowth reached out of its overcrowded environment to meet the undergrowth on the other side.
A grey-green twilight hung on the air with here and there a spot of sunlight lying like a coin on the water. They came into a region of romantic beauty where dragonflies skimmed the river and the hanging creepers were in flower. The trees were grown over with ferns, orchids, moss and lichens. Some of the orchids were blue and some of the red and gold kind that Simon called Vallambrosa. As the stream narrowed and they made their way into a tunnel of gloom, the flowers were left behind. Here the fallen trees were white with age and bearded over with lichens.
Closed in by trees, the men were assailed by a whining, galactic army of wasps, bees, mosquitoes and tiny flies. The forest came so close that Hugh could peer between the interwoven branches and creepers but he saw only the inner darkness. He felt a nervous dread of the forest coming too close to him. For stretches of this monotonous walk in oppressive heat, reality left him and he felt himself back in the suffocating mystery of his dream. He was lost, with no more knowledge of his surroundings than a grub hatched in a carpet. They were supposed to be moving towards an objective, but how could he be sure of that? For all he knew, the forest darkness was an eternity, like space, without habitat or goal.
He stopped for a moment, trying to throw off his surroundings that were like a sack over his head, smelling of vegetable death, and asked: ‘Is it all like this?’
‘No. The trees naturally crowd towards what light there is but farther on, the stream opens out and becomes a swamp. Just beyond it is . . .’ Simon paused and did not go on.
; ‘What is beyond?’
Simon was silent and Hugh wondered if he, too, were affected by their stifling passage along the stream. After a moment, Simon regained himself and answered the question: ‘The place where they made their last stand.’
‘The slaves made a stand? But against what?’
Hugh again had to repeat his question before Simon, laughing, gave an answer: ‘Forgive me. Yes. Against what? I don’t know and there’s no one left to tell us.’
The stream was petering out and the water, that scarcely covered their boots now, trickled over a wide area of ground, forming a swamp. Patches of scrub and saplings had grown up among the several small tributaries of water. Where the water formed pools there were the large, raft-like leaves of water-lilies. Some of these pools were covered with emerald weed and Hugh, walking on what looked to him firm ground, sank into slime that threw up a sickening stench. At the edge of the swamp, trees lay lifeless and brittle. Those that survived were covered with fungoid growths that extended from them, pink, like deformed hands. The forest stood as firm-set as ever on either side of this diseased area and closed in beyond it. But they were reaching something which showed through the tree tops, flashing white against the solid blue of the sky. A few yards ahead, they came out of the forest and Hugh saw a cone-shaped structure set inside a wall. It was the first of some thirty or forty buildings, all alike, that faced each other across a passageway choked with weeds. There was no sign of human life and no noise except the forest noises.
The Rain Forest Page 28