Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  Something disturbed him and he turned to find Captain Leach sharpening a knife with a twelve-inch blade on the sole of his foot: the Captain volunteered the information that no one but a fool travelled unarmed in the Sandar district, and dropped off to sleep again.

  They reached Sandar at nightfall and the narrow gauge ended unceremoniously in a cluster of corrugated iron huts, beside the white-washed terminus. The town itself had that melancholy, unfinished appearance common to most subtropical towns. Nothing quite seemed to belong, and if anything had been taken away it would not have been missed. A main street that contained two inns—the Gloria and the Hotel de los Extranjeros—faded ignominously into what was no more than a cart track at the far end, and the native residents sat dejectedly either singly or in groups, scratching and meditating on the unsatisfactoriness of life. The only local inhabitants who did not sit were the dogs: these wandered everywhere, raiding refuse dumps and eating everything they could find while still remaining miraculously thin. There were also the soldiers. They roamed the streets with the strangely predatory air of a soldier on leave, and helped to keep the red light of Sandar burning. Outside certain of the houses, orderlies patrolled up and down on sentry-go to indicate that these particular establishments were reserved for the officers.

  Captain Leach, conscious of his new importance and of the role that he was expected to maintain, insisted on booking the best room at the Gloria: it was nearly twelve foot square and smelt powerfully of urine. The smell, Dunnett discovered, was no special fault of the Gloria’s. It was merely that urine was the characteristic odour of Sandar, just as rottenness and decay was of Canagua; and the four walls of the bedchamber had isolated and preserved a rich specimen of the essential atmosphere. The truckle bed stood inside a large meat safe of muslin; a permanent notice requesting patrons not to spit or forget themselves in the bedroom hung over it like a lay blessing.

  The river Calatete, a broad, slow-moving flood, bounded one entire side of Sandar; the town had just grown sloppily along the bank. From the pontoon landing stage, flat-bottomed boats ran down the turgid stream to Canagua. The journey was scheduled for five days, and sometimes the boat did it in time. More often, however, the entire load, the fifteen ton monitor, the passengers and crew and all, would find themselves for hours on end perched like an ornament on top of one of the perpetually moving sandbanks. Then there would be the arduous and precarious task of unshipping freight and personnel in midstream and getting started again. The boats themselves, built like enormous punts, never came to any harm: they were designed for any kind of adventure except speed.

  Captain Leach again showed himself at his most resourceful next morning when it became time to catch the boat. He insisted on their being there at five-thirty, despite the fact that the time-table reported seven. You could never be sure, he kept emphasising, what tricks they would be up to with the sailings unless you were actually there to see. He spoke as one with experience in such matters and kept slapping his chest with the rare exaltation of a lazy man up uncommonly early.

  The walk to the jetty was its own reward, however. It was one of those fresh, pearly mornings that restore a white man’s faith in the Tropics. Down by the river there were skeins and streamers of mist, but the main street was so sparklingly clear that it even looked clean. And the smell that later was to permeate the whole place like a plague was still lying dormant waiting for the sun to rouse it. Altogether it looked like a model village in a new and experimental world.

  At a quarter to nine the boat, the Santa Veronica, came in sight. She wobbled along the surface of the water, throwing out a cascade of churned-up sediment from her single paddle wheel in the stern. Someone began ringing a bell on the bank, and the whole of Sandar turned out to welcome her. It was not, however, until the boat was actually berthed that Captain Leach discovered that he had forgotten their papers; in the dawn getaway he had somehow overlooked them. Pushing his way through the crowd that had assembled he set off back to the Gloria at the double. A quarter of an hour later he returned: he was panting and held his hand to his heart as he ran. It was obvious that if the distance had been a hundred yards more or if the time had been ten seconds less he would not have made it. He just stumbled up the gang plank and collapsed onto one of the deck seats. With eyes closed he lay there gasping. At ten forty-five prompt the Captain blew a whistle and the boat started.

  The boat did not seem slow once it got moving. The single oscillating-cylinder shook the whole vessel from end to end and the awning flapped vivaciously. It was only in terms of objects on the river bank that it seemed something less than fast. A dead tree, or a piece of rock that caught the sun, would be a familiar object on the landscape before they passed it. Even stray objects in the river—broken branches or the white, distended corpse of some little animal—travelling down like themselves with the stream, seemed to be making as good time as they were. Dunnett tried to re-assure himself by saying that every throb of that loose, wheezing cylinder was bringing him nearer to his destination. But it seemed hard to credit. Men’s destinations were not to be found in places such as this. The world into which they were passing was a world of mud and running water and loneliness. Even the reassuring presence of laid metals was absent. What they were travelling on was something that nature had quietly designed for her own purposes. Their puffing contraption was like an intrusion from another planet. It was a part of the invincible conquest of science against things primeval. Not that the Santa Veronica had it all her own way. There were hidden currents in the Calatete that swept her along just as they saw fit; in one place where the river was at its broadest, perhaps a quarter of a mile from shore to shore, the Santa Veronica turned completely round in her path before her dark and sweaty Captain got control of it again. He stood at the wheel, screaming reproaches down the hatch to the still sweatier engineer below for having left him in a moment of peril without sufficient steam, and tried to keep his vessel’s blunt nose downstream. Captain Leach hazarded the opinion that the man at the wheel must have been drinking.

  By the time evening came the river changed from liquid, sliding amber to a dull, unburnished red. Upstream only a few yards away by fast motor boat lay Sandar, but already it had drifted out of his mind. Even Sandar, was too much of a town to be the stepping-off place for such an odyssey: houses and a railway station did not belong anywhere in this landscape. When the sun dropped, cut off suddenly by the knife edge of the Cordilleras, it was as though at a single stroke they had been transported a thousand miles into space. They were not even natural forests that lay along the river bank, but a kind of creeping, continuous life that only this moat of water could withstand. Its dim outlines showed faintly menacing on either hand. They lacked the clarity of things seen, and remained there formless but forbidding like a thought kept at the back of the mind. The moon, when it rose, restored a certain melancholy security to the scene. The hostile dimnesses on either side became banks with trees once more and the vague ghostlike element on which they had been steadily sliding south eastwards was a river again.

  Next morning they continued through the journey of the previous day; and on the day after they began again. Nothing changed as they proceeded: it was always the same water, the same spreading mudbanks and the same massed barricade of trees. The only relief occurred when a macaw suddenly decided to change its quarters in the natural zoo it lived in; it was the first macaw that Dunnett had ever seen. It came into existence right overhead. At one moment there was nothing there and, at the next, something blue and yellow and as vivid as a football jersey was moving there, trailing a tail like a piece of animated bunting. Dunnett asked Captain Leach if he had seen it. The man opened one eye and nodded. “Rank,” he said. “Rank and bitter. Parrots are rank as cat’s flesh.” A moment later he was drowsing again.

  Another something happened that divided this section of the river from all others and printed the memory of it on his brain. They were passing a native village where squalor had reached one of
its minor pinnacles of South American achievement. The piles of fly-infested human rubbish, the hovels that had long since collapsed but were still inhabited, the small black pigs that rooted about even inside the dwellings, all indicated that life was being lived without even self-respect to support it. And in the middle of the village a lonely figure was standing waving at them. The Captain of the Santa Veronica responded, as one would to a child. “He always waves,” he explained. “He waves every time he sees a boat.” The man on the shore shaded his eyes for a moment. He was dressed like an Indian, with a two-penny wisp of rag about his loins. But it was obvious that he was, or rather had been, a white man—it was merely that the nationality had become rather obscured with time. It would have been difficult to say just what it was that most distinguished him. It was at once something in the way he stood and something in the way he raised his hand to wave—a weary, hopeless sort of gesture as though he had been waving at boats for years and none had ever stopped.

  Captain Leach regarded him with interest. “They’ve got him there,” he said. “And they won’t let him go.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “The Indians.”

  “But how can they stop him?”

  “He burned his boats,” Captain Leach replied. “He married one of ’em.”

  “But he could still get away, couldn’t he?”

  “Not him. He couldn’t walk so far,” Captain Leach answered. “He used to be quite a trader in his way, before it happened. But he’ll never get away again now. They’re too proud of him. They’ve made him into a sort of bleeding little brass god.”

  The outcast on the bank still waving, slowly receded into the distance and was gone. The last that Dunnet saw of him was a tiny figure vaguely semaphoring, a minor agitation in the remote shoreline. Captain Leach said something about Indian women being dirtier than monkeys and less moral and the episode was closed.

  On the afternoon of the fifth day they reached Canagua. The town was not a large one; it was merely a focal point for what life there was in that hundred miles square of forest. But at that moment the place was buzzing with the kind of activity which only an army can produce. Soldiers were everywhere—thrown full length in the shade, sitting alongside the landing stage, absentmindedly polluting the river, and swaying about in the main street drunk on spirits. Leach regarded them with disfavour and advised Dunnett to keep close to him. Then without warning he lurched down the gangway with the impetuousness of an unsteady man, and they set off to find an hotel.

  It was not easy. There, a thousand miles into the jungle, rooms were at a premium; they were in the middle of an acute housing shortage. Dunnett felt like laughing at the craziness of it. But the desire to laugh passed when Captain Leach reported that they would have to sleep on the quayside. The only alternative was a windowless room ten foot square with a corpse in it; the mourners, he said, were prepared to sink their own feelings in the matter and let the room for the night, but decency forbade that they should disturb the late occupant. Dunnett declined, and the two of them sat down outside a mercado to drink beer at three shillings a bottle and discuss the position. Their luggage—a single suitcase: Captain Leach had brought nothing but himself—stood on the steps beside them.

  It was as a last moment’s stroke of resourcefulness that Captain Leach suggested that they should approach the military authorities. He told Dunnett to remain where he was, and went off to find the commanding officer. Dunnett bought himself another bottle of the odd unexhilarating beer and waited. At the end of half-an-hour Captain Leach had not returned and the shopkeeper tried to sell Dunnett another bottle. For ten minutes Dunnett resisted him and then he gave way. Even sitting drinking such beer as that was preferable to just sitting. Leaning back against the ant-eaten arm of the seat he wondered what mischief Captain Leach had got into. He found out almost immediately. And when he found out, things began to happen very rapidly.

  An officer, accompanied by two privates, who walked behind him like a bodyguard, came down the street, peering anxiously to right and left. When he saw Dunnett his whole face brightened. He halted the soldiers and addressed him.

  “You have a friend, Captain Leach?” he asked.

  Dunnett admitted it.

  “Would you please come with us?” he asked.

  “Is anything wrong?” Dunnett asked.

  The officer was dignified and impersonal. “I know nothing,” he said. “It is the General who wishes to see you.”

  Dunnett got up and joined him. Now that he was on his feet he found that the beer had not been so insignificant as he had imagined. It gave him a feeling of strange lightheadedness, as though he were walking on springs. He noticed with a kind of contemptuous amusement that one of the soldiers was now marching ahead of them while the other was following up behind. The officer had taken an outside position, and the little cortège moved off with a dignity all its own. The rear soldier carried the suitcase.

  They passed through the barracks gate with an exchange of salutes, and the officer halted his men outside a long wooden hut with a bulbous corrugated iron roof. He politely requested Dunnett to remain, and went inside; as the door opened Dunnett could hear the voice of Captain Leach raised in displeasure about something.

  A moment later the officer returned and said that the General was ready to receive him. They entered the room and the soldiers tramped in dutifully after them. It was not a cheerful group which they confronted. Backed by two other officers, the General himself, a small, round man with a gleaming naked head, was sitting at his desk, his fists clenched, regarding Captain Leach. He appeared to dislike the man. And quite a lot had happened to Captain Leach since Dunnett had last seen him. One eye was now closed and the flesh round it was broken. Also his shirt was torn : he had evidently been in some sort of rough-and-tumble since Dunnett had last seen him.

  “Do you know this man?” the General asked.

  “I do,” Dunnett replied.

  “He is charged,” said the General, “with assaulting two officers in pursuit of their duties, damaging a chair, the property of the Bolivian Government “—he indicated a plain deal chair with the back broken: it had evidently been thrown at someone—“and using obscene lauguage when arrested.”

  “Lice,” Captain Leach observed tersely. “Just a lot of crawling, military lice.”

  The General ignored the interruption. “Who is this man?” he asked.

  “He’s Captain Leach,” Dunnett replied. “He’s come to Canagua to be my guide.”

  “Why should you come to Canagua at all?” the General demanded.

  “I had business here.”

  “What sort of business?”

  “I wished to see the Bolivian agent of the firm I worked for.”

  “What firm is that?”

  Dunnett told him, and the General made a note on the charge sheet before him.

  “What manner of business is it?” he asked.

  “Import business,” Dunnett replied non-committally.

  “Who is your agent?”

  Dunnett paused. Thanks to Captain Leach, the carefully concealed details of their plan were now to be discovered; he could see Señor Muras getting wind of the visit and removing himself in time. At that moment he shared the General’s view of Captain Leach: Captain Leach, however, was oblivious of his discontent.

  “Who is your agent?” the General repeated.

  “Señor Muras,” Dunnett told him.

  The name appeared to cause some excitement. The General withdrew to the other end of the room and conferred with his fellow officers. Dunnett could hear them whispering; at intervals one or other of them would turn round and inspect their two visitors. Then the General returned and took his place at his desk, his aides beside him.

  “You are under arrest, Señor Dunnett,” he said.

  “But I haven’t done anything,” Dunnett protested

  “We shall find that out in the morning,” the General answered.

  “Do you realise tha
t I’m a British subject?” Dunnett demanded; he produced his passport and threw it down on the desk in front of him. The General examined it and then locked it away in a drawer. “It is safer there,” he said briefly.

  “May I ask by what authority you are keeping me here?” Dunnett asked.

  “By article thirty-seven of our Criminal Code. You are a suspected person in a Military Zone.”

  “Suspected of what?”

  “Suspected of being a Paraguayan spy,” the General replied with astonishing vehemence. “That’s what you are,” he said. “Paraguayan spies both of you.”

  The outburst appeared to rouse Captain Leach. “Call me a Paraguayan again,” he said, “and I’ll knock the chops off your face.”

  The pocket General ignored him. He turned to the officer who had escorted Dunnett to the barracks. “Take him away,” he said, coldly.

  One of the aides assisted Captain Leach to the door. Once there, however, he stuck. He put his knees against the jamb and refused to move. From where he was standing he could survey the whole length of the room. The General looked up to see the cause of the delay.

  “Pigsface,” Captain Leach shouted at him, “you stink worse than a skunk.”

  One of the soldiers brought his rifle butt down hard in the pit of Captain Leach’s stomach, and Captain Leach ceased to be dignified. He fell to the ground moaning. Dunnett stood there regarding him. Only the feel of something hard thrust suddenly into his own back reminded him that he, too, was meant to be moving.

  The hut to which the guard conducted them was on the far side of the barracks, beside the latrines. It was the solidest looking building in Canagua. The walls and roof were of quebracho nearly a foot thick. There was no window, only a narrow diamond cut in each side; the officer opened the door, which was of half man height, and stood back for the soldiers to deposit Captain Leach. They were carrying him between them like some hunting trophy. His body sagged in a limp arc. Occasionally, he would groan and make some reference to his high standing in the eyes of the British Government. But his captors ignored him. They halted in front of the open door and steadied themselves. Then they one-two-three’d and shot him head first into the timber cell. The officer beckoned to Dunnett to follow. He did so with a calm that surprised him. But there did not seem to be much sense in arguing with a hostile officer and four native soldiers. He just ducked his head and stepped within like someone entering a children’s summer house.