Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  It was not like a summer house inside, however. The atmosphere had the peculiar thickness of air that has been cooped up and slowly grilled. For a moment he stood quite still. The horror of the place—that it would be a perpetual midnight inside even though there might be a full Bolivian sun without—had only just struck him. He sweated suddenly at the thought. And then he found that he was wrong. It was not black inside but chocolate, with light shafts of yellow where the diamonds were cut. One of these shafts fell on Captain Leach and lit him up where he lay.

  For some minutes neither of them spoke. There didn’t in the circumstances seem to be very much that could be said. It was Dunnett who broke the silence. “How the devil did this happen?” he asked.

  “I was set on,” Captain Leach told him. “Set on and beaten up.”

  “Where?”

  “Ina house I went into.”

  “What sort of a house?”

  “A bad one,” Captain Leach replied sadly. “A very bad sort of house. I didn’t know just how bad it was.”

  “Why did they beat you up?”

  “Because it was reserved for officers. They didn’t want me with them and I didn’t want to go. I dared them to throw me out.”

  “And did they?”

  Captain Leach nodded. “But I got back again,” he said. “Got back and raised hell. There was an automatic piano playing and I wanted to hear the end of the roll. When it finished, I broke loose.”

  “You’re a drunken fool,” Dunnett told him.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Captain Leach answered. “They came at me. All I wanted was a bit of quiet fun.”

  Dunnett did not reply. He walked over the uneven floor— it was the ordinary bare ground tramped hard by human feet—and put his eye to the cut-out diamond. He withdrew it again immediately, however. There was another eye on the outside regarding him. It belonged to one of the native soldiers, and the man did not seem disposed to budge: he had evidently been told not to let the prisoners out of his sight. Dunnett sat down with his back against the wall and waited.

  His initial feeling of stunned astonishment had passed, and only rage remained. A five-foot General and four dirty soldiers had deprived him of his liberty! He was living only for the moment when the British Consul at La Paz should hear of it: his tormentors would then find out soon enough whether it was safe to confine a British subject in an airless box on suspicion.

  A couple of hours later, however, the rage had completely passed. It was the heat that had changed him; no one could go on being angry for ever in that temperature. The rage gave place to a new mood of stoic endurance; it left him with a strange feeling of superiority just to be sitting there patiently waiting for his warders to make the next move. He kept wondering shamefacedly what Mr. Govern would say if he knew; there was something so inefficient in having got arrested. But even those doubts passed and were succeeded by a kind of dumb passivity. His mind became a blank screen across which there flitted the scenes and episodes of those last weeks. —Señor Muras sitting back with his small eyes half closed, staring at his guest through the darkness; the girl at the Avenida getting her father up the hotel stairs on his way to bed; the Fiery Mountain going up in flames; Carmel Muras entering the room in a white dress.

  Finally the scenes and the episodes merged into a long continuous stream and he slept. It was a deep unnatural sleep with his head bent forward on his knees and the blood pounding in his ears. He stirred more than once, but each time the heat drugged him again; and when he finally woke it was dark. The amber diamond in the wall was no longer there. Then it reappeared again as a lozenge of deep violet. It shed no light and the rest of the room was tomblike; black and unsavoury and without escape. Dunnett held his own breath and listened. From the corner of the room came the hoarse breathing of Captain Leach: he was evidently sleeping and it seemed likely that at any moment he might snore.

  Perhaps Dunnett was asleep for most of the five hours of that night, or perhaps he sat there awake. Time lost count of itself in the darkness: extra seconds were slipped into every minute and an hour became a lifetime; the whole of waking and sleeping became blurred and confused. Did something hairy—a spider was it?—really run up his forearm with cold, scuttling feet and leap somewhere from his shoulder. And was there really a moth the size of a lady’s handkerchief that drifted in through the aperture of the diamond and kept brushing against his face with silly frightened wings like cat’s fur? Or were they both, the spider and the moth, merely the smaller fry out of the dreams he had been having?

  The disorder of his mind was his salvation, for whenever he came to think of his position he became desperate. He began to experience the fundamental sensation of imprisonment. It was a sensation that worked slowly and systematically to its climax. The first stage was harmless enough: it began simply with an intelligent awareness of the fact that there was no way out. Gradually this fact grew painful and the smallness of the room impressed itself. Then the single idea of smallness superseded everything else. And the real horror, the tormeriting part of it, began. For the room seemed to be steadily growing smaller still. The walls gradually drew in closer and the roof began to descend. It was no longer liberty but space as well that was being denied him. He could feel forces, intangible as yet, pressing in on him from all sides: it was as though the room in which he was sitting were being slowly and remoreselessly pressed out of shape. When he could stand it no longer he thrust his hands out in front of him and felt wildly about in the air. There was something in the action that brought him abruptly to his senses. He realised that, for a moment, he had lost control over himself. At the idea of his becoming hysterical simply because he was shut up in the dark, he laughed aloud—only the laughter was unsteady and went on too long.

  It was very silent in the cell. The whistle of a night bird outside came through feeble and attenuated like a squeak. The room itself was noiseless except for a faint scraping sound as something scaly and clawed that lived in the timber of the roof stretched its legs and changed its position. But not quite noiseless. For there was also the heavy, faltering breathing of Captain Leach. It was a stifled sort of sound, choking and throaty, as though any breath might be his last. It was the undying regularity of it that began to wear upon Dunnett’s nerves. It didn’t even sound human at all. It was like the throb of a gas-engine. At last, he could stand it no longer.

  “Wake up, Leach,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

  The everlasting death-rattle in the corner continued.

  “Leach,” he said, louder this time, “wake up, I tell you. I want to talk.”

  The sleeper made no sign of having heard.

  Dunnett waited and then called again. There was still no answer. He groped into the darkness with his hands and began crawling forward to investigate. The room seemed larger this way. He kept pausing and reaching out in front of him. Then suddenly his hand touched Captain Leach’s foot. It was sticking up there in the darkness. He pulled and it came in his direction stiffly but without resistance. He went on pulling and still the sleeper did not stir. When he let go, the leg remained exactly where it was. He grew desperate and began shaking the inert figure. It let him do as he liked with it. But still it did not wake up. He shouted out Captain Leach’s name a dozen times, struck him, kicked him on his foot. But the result was the same. The laboured, discordant breathing continued.

  And then he noticed how rigid the body was; it moved in one piece when he pushed it. Something in the fact frightened him; it was the way that a dead man would have behaved. Idiotically, he wondered if Leach really were dead all the time; dead and still breathing. That smothered taking of breath did not seem to mean anything, it was not the way that people in this world breathe. He thrust his hand out to feel the dead-alive man’s face; and he encountered his tongue. It was nipped between the teeth as though he were trying to bite it through.

  That discovery frightened him still more, and he wiped his hand hurriedly as though it were unclean; Captain Le
ach’s saliva was over everything. It must be a fit, he told himself; and began crying out for someone to come. At first they were merely little cries, short yelps of alarm. But when no one came his cries grew louder. Soon he was shouting at the top of his voice, screaming out for help. It was the first time he had ever cried out so loud. The noise that he was making startled him. But it did not have the effect of bringing anyone along. He could still hear the regular tramp of the sentries and the clump as they set their rifles down, preparatory to standing at the corner of their beat; they were apparently as unmoved as though the entire camp were in silence.

  This lack of interest frightened him. Perhaps they really had not heard him? But if this was so what was there to prevent the egg-headed General from striking his camp and leaving his prisoners where they were for ever? Then he remembered the diamond cut in the wall. He stood on tiptoe and bawled through it. This soon had the awaited effect. One of the sentries paused on his beat and came straight over to the detention hut. When he arrived he battered on the side and shouted for silence. His voice sounded astonishingly loud and at hand: it was almost as if he were in the room too. He threatened to shoot if the noise went on. Dunnett dared him to do so, dared him to open the door for one moment and see why he had been calling out. The sentry ignored him. Dunnett could hear him relieving himself against the outside of the hut. Meanwhile, the noisy, stuttering breathing of Captain Leach continued.

  The dawn when it came had its own terror. All night he had been praying for it and now that it was coming he was afraid of it. He did not want to see the face of his cell mate; he wished that he and Captain Leach could have kept the darkness between them. The first hint of something different outside was when the diamond aperture changed suddenly from violet to purple; it was like a parallelogram of stained glass. At first it didn’t give any light, it merely glowed there. Then, with equal suddeness the violet changed to rose and a shaft of carmine filtered through into the cell. When the carmine changed to pink it was already morning; and there was Captain Leach lying there, his head thrown back as though he had been trying to raise his shoulders off the ground. His eyes were open. They had been staring at Dunnett all night.

  But now that it was light his nerves were firm enough. It had only been the blackness that had unsteadied him. He looked round the hut and wondered what it was that had made it seem so unearthly before the dawn broke. Then he found that it had not been all imagination. The moth was really there; a thing like a piece of brown wall-paper with the pattern still on it, was clinging daintily to the ceiling. And there was something else in the corner, something hairy and disgustingly round; it was wedged there very comfortably in a folded up bundle of ingenious legs. Perhaps that was what it was that had balanced on his shoulders and then jumped. At that thought, the night fears returned. But only for a moment. It was daylight and there were the thousand sounds of a waking camp. He no longer felt cut off from the world. Very gingerly he got to his feet and stood over the arched body of Captain Leach. And then he saw the explanation of this impregnable coma: Captain Leach’s spirit flask was empty on the ground beside him, it was the one thing that the guard had not taken away. It lay there, Captain Leach’s passport to oblivion.

  When the guard arrived, the day felt already advanced. The opening of the hut door let in a great flood of brightness as though a searchlight had been trained on the place. Dunnett came over to the door blinking stupidly and tried to explain what had happened to his companion.

  When he saw the guard’s face, however, he was in some doubt as to whether he would be able to do so. It was a native face. The features had been flattened out and the eyes narrowed until what remained was a crude papier mâché mask. Talking to that would be like trying to explain to a piece of plaster statuary. But the man understood at once. Apparently the phenomenon of unconsciousness in the detention hut was not new to him. He left his two companions outside and went over to the corner to inspect the body on the ground. He seemed very expert in his task, using no part of him except his foot.

  As soon as he had rolled Captain Leach on to his back again he told Dunnett to accompany him. They walked through the camp together over to the superior hutment which the General had made his headquarters. When he reached the door something made him look back over his shoulder towards the detention hut. The two soldiers were tenderly removing Captain Leach. With their rifles slung across their shoulders they had each got hold of a leg; Captain Leach was sweeping a broad track in the dirt as he came.

  The reception which the General gave was very different from anything that Dunnett had expected. It was obvious from the start that the little man was out to make amends. He jumped up from his desk as soon as his visitor entered and proceeded to explain how the misunderstanding had come about. He had received special instructions, he said, to be on the look out for spies, as the Paraguayans were understood to be preparing to launch an attack; and in any case no General in time of war can afford to be too careful. A word with Señor Muras on the field telephone, however, had put everything right in a moment.

  “Señor Muras knows I’m here then?”

  The General nodded.

  “If you leave at once,” he said, brightly, “you will reach him by to-morrow morning. It is very rapidly, the military road.”

  At the thought of the exposure of all his plans Dunnett swayed. He felt suddenly sick, sick and very faint. The General helped him to a chair. “It is the heat,” he said, caressingly, “the terrible heat.”

  Dunnett sat without answering, his head falling forward onto his chest. But the little General was making conversation again. “And your companion?” he asked. “The excitable one. Where is he?”

  Dunnett told him.

  The General did not seem surprised. “He is a great fighter,” he said admiringly. “We will look after him. He will be very comfortable here.” He turned to Dunnett charmingly. “I wish you bon voyage,” he said. “I can only apologise for the misunderstanding. You will find your travelling case is quite untouched.” He held out his hand; it was plump and smooth and unwrinkled.

  “I beg you,” he said, “not to let this disturb our good relations. I appeal to your famous English sense of humour.”

  The military road to which the General referred was an impressive thoroughfare for all of a quarter of a mile. But there it stopped and became merely a track that had recently been only a bridle path. Altogether it looked as though it might be leading to some second-rate and probably derelict farmstead.

  Within half an hour’s riding it ceased to be even a bridle path and became a tunnel. The track led straight into the heart of the forest; and the clearing where Canagua stood was forgotten. The transition was gradual so that Dunnett did not notice the first moment when the branches closed overhead. He noticed only that he was now riding through a dim green world that was without sky; a world where the earth was no longer important and the whole of life was soaring madly upwards to blossom and flourish three hundred feet above his head. It was not only the trees that made the forest. There were ferns, too, as tall as parish churches; and creepers that fell in shifting screens like waterfalls. The lianas were everywhere; they spread out in a sinuous, uncheckable invasion. As thick as hawsers they swarmed up the tree trunks and were lost to sight in the upper branches. They fought among themselves in dense snaky tangles on the ground and snatched at things to climb upwards in their desperate hunger for the sun. The whole forest was bound together and entangled by them; they were like autumn cobwebs on some unthinkably grander scale of things. And this was only the edge of the jungle. A thousand miles south it was impenetrable.

  Dunnett was trying to forget Captain Leach. But it was no use. The man’s face distorted as he had last seen it remained in front of him like a ghost’s; Captain Leach was still sleeping it off when Dunnett had left him, and the process of sleeping off looked like being a long one.

  Dunnett turned and looked at his escort. They were native Indians. They rode with eyes half shut and
shoulders drooping under their ponchos. Soon Dunnett found himself drowsing, too, as he rode. His head sagged forward on his chest and his shoulders drooped: his eyes were half closed. He realised to his surprise that he was riding like an Indian. But there was still a difference. The thin dark eyes of the Indians kept slanting from side to side as they rode. They were as much awake as cats.

  It was silent in the forest. The only sound was the noise of the horses’ hoofs as they were pulled out of the warm sodden ground: they came away with the sound of great smacking kisses. But soon even that became too familiar to be noticed. They moved on in a noiseless, steaming world.

  At noon they came to a clearing in the jungle. It had been a village once and there were still traces of huts that had not yet rotted back into the ground. The soldiers did not venture near them; they had the primitive terror of any place that had once been inhabited and is now deserted. They just squatted down in the first open space they came to and consumed their midday meal. It was dried goat’s flesh, hard and rubbery. But they taught Dunnett how to eat it. He grew tired of chewing it; but it was only after being in the mouth for some minutes that it began to taste like meat at all. And then, as though by a miracle, the blood began to flow from it again. One of the soldiers lit a fire and began to boil some water: he was doing the thing properly. He removed his maté and started to make tea. The tea-pot was a gourd with yerba in it. Dunnett found that he was meant to drink from the tea-pot; there was a small metal tube, a bombilla, provided especially for this purpose. The soldier who served it was very polite: he took a long drink and spat it out again just for formality’s sake before handing the maté to his guest.