Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  When they moved on they travelled more slowly than before; it seemed that the rest had broken the rhythm of the thing. And there were still fifteen miles to be covered. It was hotter, too. Admittedly the sun couldn’t find them; its long fingers couldn’t reach through the everlasting ceiling of branches. But the ceiling itself was blazing hot: it was roasting up there in the tree tops. Walking beneath it was like trying to keep cool under the bottom plate of a boiler furnace. Dunnett felt himself swaying. One of the soldiers soaked a strip of cloth in a pool and applied it to the back of Dunnett’s neck. The water was tepid as though it had been heated for a bath, but once on the neck it felt like an ice pack. Dunnett noticed that the man who put it there was not even sweating.

  Their afternoon ride was interrupted suddenly by an ambulance convoy following the same road. Only there was no ambulance. The wounded were getting along as best they could, aided by the encouragement of their officers. They were not a pleasant sight—wounds putrefy quickly in the tropics— and the flies were pestering them. The two soldiers stood politely to windward as their brothers passed. The men marched on with their heads bent forward on their chests, their blood-stained bandages black with midges. They were all on their way to avail themselves of the incomparable medical facilities of Canagua.

  They slept that night at a military post on the route. It was not much of a post. It was a two-roomed affair, and the first thing to catch the eye was a corrugated iron roof that had rusted a deep crimson in places and now gave the appearance of having burst out into a blotching skin disease.

  The main room was about eighteen feet square and the back room, the dormitory, was the size of a passenger lift in a small hotel. A double row of benches ran round three sides of it. The officer in charge had the look of surprised blankness which settled on the faces of those who have been stationed too long in the jungle. He came out putting on his belt as he came and examined the credentials which the soldiers carried. As soon as he was satisfied he took off his belt again and went back to his work.

  His was not easy work, and he appeared to resent interruption. What he was doing was trying to teach a toucan to remove a cork from a bottle. The first part was easy; nothing could shake the immense beak once it had got its hold, but the bird’s claws kept slipping up and down the bottle with a noise like a slate pencil. The soldiers turned in early and Dunnett with them. The last sound he heard before dropping off to sleep was the rattle of bony plumage and the soft words of encouragement with which the officer was urging his pet to try again: he could not help but admire the perseverance of the Bolivian gentleman in the outer room who was diligently and assiduously preventing himself from going mad in the jungle.

  They started early and rode all day. It was a grim, untalking ride: they simply rode to get there. The only break in the monotony of those close green walls that slid past them like scenery wound on some gigantic spool, was when an armadillo ran across the path. It was an oddity, an armour-plated pixie from another aeon. It paused sniffing delicately in their direction and then, on small, telescopic legs made for the opposite side of the path. One of the soldiers took out his revolver and fired at it. The shot missed but the noise of it collided with every tree in the forest. After that, the jungle closed in silently again, and they plodded on silently over the blotting-paper surface.

  They reached the secondary military post at sundown. For the last five miles the soldiers had been heeling their horses all the time; apparently they did not relish being caught on the trail after dusk. And it was small wonder. The jungle had reversed the natural order of things. It slept by day. After sunset the track was wanted by other bodies, not human. It was just coming into life as they left it. Things could be heard moving about where there had been silence before. And, sure sign of evening, large cockroaches, four inches long, came rattling through the air like clockwork.

  The military post was like the first they had met, except that someone had carted a small brass cannon up to the front door and left it there. The cannon itself had grown green from age and exposure, but its presence was symbolical. It stood for the whole terror of gunpowder over unprotected native races. The officer here was less resigned than his brother-in-arms up the line. His first question was whether the soldiers had brought any newspapers with them. On hearing that they had not done so he lost all interest in the party and sat with his back to them preparing some obscure official report.

  They left him next morning before he was up. At six o’clock the same evening they were in Subrico. The path had wandered off at right angles to itself to find the river— the military river from which civilians, even favoured ones, were debarred—and they could see Subrico from a distance. It was a frontier rather than a town; and moored alongside the landing pier was its navy, a thirty-foot launch with an old-fashioned ten-pounder mounted in the bows. It was, Dunnett imagined, about the heaviest piece of artillery in these parts.

  The presence of Subrico became more formidable the closer they approached. They had to show their passes three times before they were allowed to enter. Even so they were admitted only as far as the gates of the barracks. There they were stuck until the officer commanding had been advised. The two soldiers who had ridden with Dunnett remained close behind in the gateway. He gradually had the uncomfortable feeling that they were less of a bodyguard than an escort; they seemed all ready to plug him if he moved into the inner military zone without permission. When the sentry returned he was accompanied by an intelligence officer. The man was wearing the green ribbon of the Bolivian staff. He saluted formally and asked Dunnett to follow him. When Dunnett turned to say a last word to the two soldiers who had accompanied him, the officer appeared surprised; he allowed his two jet eyebrows to go up into his forehead in an arc and made it quite clear that in his time he had experienced every manner of human folly except that of thanking noncommissioned ranks. He slapped his field boots with his cane in impatience and began to move off.

  Dunnett followed grimly, his heart beating a little faster. He was ready for anything now. The trip had long since stopped being an adventure and had become a nightmare. A useless nightmare, he suspected, now that Señor Muras had been given warning. But he wasn’t going to give up. He wasn’t going to fail now.

  The officer pushed back the canvas flap of a hut in front of them and signalled for Dunnett to enter.

  The room was a large one, dimly seen through a blue screen of tobacco smoke. An oil lamp in a green shade burned on the table, and there were maps and syphons and a typewriter. Vague forms with chalky patches for faces were grouped around the room. But Señor Muras was clearly visible. In a white duck suit he seemed larger than ever. He half filled the room. He almost glowed in the darkness. As soon as he saw Dunnett, he came tottering forward.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I want you to meet my friend from England, Mr. Dunnett, the explorer.”

  Chapter IX

  As Dunnett stood there his eyes grew accustomed to the broken uncertain light and he took in some of the scene around him—the unbuckled swords of the officers, the ash-tray full of the broken stumps of cigars, and on the table a heap of documents, all bound together with sealed tape and covered with clumsy official seals. It was evidently a conference of an important sort that he had broken into.

  “Am I interrupting you, Señor Muras?” he asked.

  The question appeared to amuse Señor Muras. He expanded his sodden tussore jacket—Dunnett could see now that it was clinging to him as though he had been running— and laughed. “The English!” he said. “Señor Dunnett comes five hundred miles into the jungle at the peril of his life, and he asks if he is interrupting.”

  “It looked as though you had some business on hand,” Dunnett explained.

  “Our business is completed,” Señor Muras replied. “If only you had been earlier you could have witnessed our signatures. But these gentlemen did not feel able to wait. In war, everything is urgent.” He paused, and passed a coloured handkerchief across his forehead.
“You had a good journey?” he asked.

  “I got here,” Dunnett said.

  “But you should have told me that you were coming,” Señor Muras protested. “I could have got you a pass on the military river. No one comes to Subrico by the road. Perhaps you’ll let me help you when you go back.” He paused again and began mopping his face once more. “How long are you stopping?” he asked.

  “Only until we’ve finished our business,” Dunnett told him.

  Señor Muras did not reply. He stood, swaying backwards and forwards on his tiny feet, contemplating Dunnett through narrowed eyes. In the half light he looked like a nodding Buddha in a more than life-size waxwork show. When he did speak his voice was casual and a little surprised.

  “So you made this journey simply to see me?” he asked.

  “I did,” Dunnett told him.

  “I see,” Señor Muras continued. “I thought perhaps you had undertaken a little something on the side. Most men do out here. There is plenty of money to be made in official circles if only you go the right way about it. My friends here can tell you that.” He turned and smiled expansively at the officer seated at the head of the table: the man dropped his eyes and played with his pen-holder.

  “I’m here,” said Dunnett, “on behalf of Govern and Fryze. That’s the only business I’m engaged on.”

  Señor Muras nodded his head appreciatively. “I admire you,” he said simply. “Such single-heartedness! Such perseverance!” He bent over and said a few words to one of the seated officers. Then he faced Dunnett again. “General Orero,” he said, “has invited you to consider yourself at home anywhere in the camp. In the meantime as we have something to discuss perhaps you would accompany me to our hotel.” He smiled as he said the words, and resumed, “It is not quite what you have been used to, but Subrico is not Buenos Aires. Unfortunately it is not even Amricante.”

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” Dunnett answered. Then he turned to General Orero. “I am much indebted to you for your kindness,” he said. “I shall look forward to our next meeting.”

  The General bowed. He was a short, sallow-faced man, rather like a sinister head-waiter at some dubious riverside hotel; but Dunnett felt very strongly that it would be as well to remain on the right side of the military. At the back of his mind there was an uncomfortable awareness of the fact that he was rather embarrassingly cut off from the world.

  The walk across to the hotel was not a long one. Subrico was simply a barracks with a civilian quarter attached. A mercado that sold every kind of purgative patent medicine and an insecticide guaranteed to kill ticks even under the skin, had been the centre of the town before the hotel came. The town itself was no more than a collection of mud huts, a discoloured tin church and a leper colony. International events, however, had promoted it to a new kind of importance: it now enjoyed the distinction of being regarded by the Bolivian higher command as the nearest that anyone of the rank of General could afford to go to the firing line without being in any danger. The exact position of the Paraguayans was, of course, uncertain. Reports conflicted, as the reports of spies always do. But it was generally agreed that the opposing forces were lined up somewhere between fifty and one hundred miles away; and that distance suited the Bolivian General Staff to a nicety.

  When Dunnett saw the hotel he admitted that Señor Muras’s misgivings had been well founded. It was a square box of a building hastily built on stilts to save it from ground rot. There were no foundations; only four enormous sections of tree trunk, one at each corner. But something in even that simple design had evidently gone wrong, and already the entire hotel was leaning over foolishly in the direction of the river.

  To enter the hotel the guest climbed a steep and irregular ladder of seven steps, pushed open the corrugated zinc and butter muslin front door and stepped into the grand saloon. The saloon was furnished with four marble tables (marble table tops are heavy to carry, but once they have been got to any place they possess the advantage of being inedible to even the most voracious of termites), an automatic piano, two pin-tables and a green baize fix-up for the more serious kind of gambling. One whole wall was the bar. It was the pride of the house: there were seventeen different ways of getting drunk—mostly native ways—on view as a permanent offer to patrons. Two sleeping figures in the far corner suggested that the offer had already been accepted.

  “This is our little home,” Señor Muras remarked as they entered.

  “Do you mean to say that you’ve got your daughter here?” Dunnett asked.

  Señor Muras squeezed Dunnett’s arm above the elbow. “You give yourself away by asking after her,” he said. “I felt sure that it couldn’t have been only me that you came to see.”

  “This is a business visit,” Dunnett replied. “I told you so.”

  “For you perhaps,” Señor Muras answered. “But not for her. She has been talking about you ever since you first met. Remember there is a special dispensation for travellers.” Señor Muras’s voice trailed off almost as though he had been talking to himself.

  They were interrupted by the arrival of Señorita Muras herself. The bead screen parted and there she was. She looked young and fresh and excited. “Oh my! Mr. Dunnett,” she said. “This is a surprise. I never expected to see you here.”

  “She has been waiting at the window ever since she heard you were on the way,” Señor Muras remarked. “She could not sleep at night for wondering if you were all right.”

  “I couldn’t sleep at night because of the bugs,” Carmel Muras corrected him. “This is the lousiest dump I’ve ever fetched up in.”

  Señor Muras began to stroke her head. “Only two more days,” he said. “Just until the launch has come. And then we go on. I have finished my business.”

  “Which way do you go?” Dunnett enquired suspiciously.

  “Straight on down the river to Los Calpas,” Señor Muras replied. “And then to Asuncion. After that we shall go to Rio for a little. Our final plans are not yet fixed.”

  “But if you go down to Los Calpas you’ll be arrested,” Dunnett observed.

  “By whom?”

  “By the Paraguayans.”

  Señor Muras laughed. “I have arranged that,” he said. “You see, I have connections. In fact it is a Government launch that we shall be using. The Captain is a very old friend of mine.”

  “It’s your funeral,” Dunnett reminded him.

  “Say, you’re kind of cheerful, aren’t you?” Carmel remarked.

  “It is better than going back, anyhow,” Señor Muras observed placidly. “If I returned to Amricante now I should be arrested. There is a warrant out for me there.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The Chief of Police told me. It is usual for the Police Department to pass on word when a warrant has been taken out. It is their chief source of living. The corrupt ones sometimes give a false warning just to collect the reward.”

  “Pop thought it was you who’d taken out the warrant,” Carmel explained. “That’s what made him so mad with you.”

  “I was thinking of doing so,” Dunnett replied.

  “Now you two men don’t start quarrelling again,” Carmel interrupted them. “I’m hungry, I’ll say I am.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Dunnett would like to wash first,” Señor Muras suggested.

  He pointed towards another doorway concealed by the bead screen. The word Hombres had been inscribed above it on a piece of hammered out bamboo. Dunnett took his advice. When he got inside a plate of tired brown mirror was facing him, the tropic remains of what had once been an elegant cheval glass. He stood still in amazement. What he saw looking out at him was a sagging, unkempt creature in a sweaty cotton vest, with shaggy hair falling forward over his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks seemed to have fallen in a little. He wondered what Kay would have said if she could have seen him then; and idiotically enough, he wished that someone could have taken his photograph at that moment so that when he got back he could have
shown them all the sort of thing that he had been through for the firm.

  He cheerfully raised the tin jug and poured out a little opaque water. The first thing that came was a large drowned something, its insect legs knotted above its head in a barbed and tangled embrace. Dunnett removed it and began to prepare himself for the forthcoming dinner party under Capricorn.

  Carmel Muras left them early. Even her vivacity was not proof against that climate. As the evening progressed the heat abated a little. But the damp increased. A blue, feverish mist rose out of the ground and found its way upwards through the floor boards of the saloon in which they were sitting. It condensed on the knives and forks, leaving them wet and sticky to the touch. Señor Muras had asked for a screen to be placed round the table—the presence of Carmel Muras at Subrico attracted all the officers from the garrison—and behind this temporary barricade Dunnett and Señor Muras sat smoking, the sweat rolling steadily off them.

  A bugle had sounded somewhere in the darkness outside— it had about it the melancholy note of all distant noises heard at night—and the room had emptied. Dunnett turned to Señor Muras.

  “Now, Señor Muras,” he said. “Perhaps we could discuss what I came about.”

  Señor Muras did not reply, and Dunnett repeated his remark. This time Señor Muras roused himself. His rattan chair creaked under him.

  “If I gave you a cheque for the whole amount, would you stop worrying me?” he asked.

  “Yes; after I had cashed the cheque,” Dunnett answered cautiously.

  “How much is it for?” Señor Muras enquired.

  “The last statement was for eleven thousand eight hundred and eleven pounds,” Dunnett told him. “It’s more than that altogether.”

  “Say twelve thousand?”

  “About that.”

  Señor Muras rolled over in his chair so that the broad arm became a writing table. Then he began unbuttoning an inner pocket. He removed a highly-decorated cheque book of the United Argentine Bank and began feeling about for a pen. Dunnett crossed the room and gave him one from a neighbouring table. Señor Muras breathed heavily as he wrote. Then he tore the cheque off and handed it to Dunnett. “It’s drawn on a Buenos Aires bank,” he said. “That account is quite safe: I only use it in emergencies. I’ve made it out to you personally. You can do just whatever you like with it.”