Her hand shook as she reached for it. The rusty latch was difficult to open and perspiration pricked her body as she fought with it. At last the flap fell open, and there among the envelopes and writing-paper was her passport, her visitor's visa and her vaccination certificate, all of them stained with the brown dye from the leather.
Her fingers riffled through them, but there was no sign of the treasure map which her father had sent her. It was gone. Nuno had taken it.
She stood in unbelieving silence, staring at the stained contents of the writing case. Nuno must have found it the morning she had refused to go fishing with him, and without telling her, or the patrao, he had gone off on a treasure hunt of his own. She swallowed dryly, and gave a jump as with a flutter of bright feathers the macaw flew to the bracket that held Nuno's books. "Ate a vista!" he croaked.
Morvenna stared at the bird, who stared back at her. Good-bye for now ! Good-bye for now ! Suddenly she knew that with crazy Latin gallantry Nuno had gone off alone to find out what had become of her father.
She relatched the writing-case and thrust it into the waistband of her matador trousers. Then she descended the swaying rope-ladder without giving a thought to the dizzying drop to the ground and the bad fall she would suffer if she lost her balance. All she could think of was to find the senhor as quickly as possible. He alone
would know how to deal with the problem of finding Nuno.
The trouble was, the senhor could be anywhere. The various plantations were under his supervision and he was always busy at one or the other of them. As she stood regaining her breath she decided to continue to the village. Someone there was more likely to know his whereabouts than anyone at the fazenda.
Her breath regained, and her grass hat tilted back to allow what breeze there was to cool her hot young face, she made for the path opposite to the one that led back to the fazenda. A calabash-tree stood beside the path, hung with pumpkin-like fruits, and in her anxiety Morvenna failed to remember that there was no calabash-tree beside the path which led to the village.
Not having been used by Nuno in almost a week, the village path had become overgrown with elephant-ear plants and so Morvenna failed to notice it.
Instead she followed a hunting track, which led away from the village ... into the forest.
CHAPTER TEN
THE game trail twisted and turned, and Morvenna followed where it led, unaware for some time that it led away from the friendly Indian village into the heart of the bush.
She was lost in her thoughts and automatically she brushed aside the immense ferns and big-leafed plants
that grew half-way across the track. Insects buzzed in the humid air and she was glad of the repellent she had applied to her face, neck and arms earlier that morning. Wild and roving vines tripped her out of her abstraction now and again, but since she was a novice to the jungle it all looked alike to her and she didn't really notice that she was penetrating the wilder regions, where palms sprouted other trunks, and tiger-gold bamboos interlaced with dark-foliaged trees hung with creepers.
In a while she brushed a hand across her eyes, which were smarting with sweat. The atmosphere was plastering her cotton shirt to her body, and when she glanced up she saw the density of the vegetation all around her, the overhead mass of vine-locked branches, and through them the flick of tiny monkey eyes.
A shadow of dismay crossed her face. The cry of a bell-bird echoed through the forest, and she could taste the salt on her upper lip.
No wonder everything was steamy and eerie ! For over an hour she had been chasing along the wrong trail, into the bush ! Her heart gave a thump. She would have to retrace every single step, and crossly she snapped off a big leaf and fanned herself, her hot and tired body slumped against the trunk of a bamboo.
Imperceptibly, as she gathered the will to start trekking back the way she had come, the cool, enticing sound of running water came to her through the forest. For a minute or two she was sure she imagined it, so intense was her longing to dip her lips in water and feel it cooling her hot, dry throat. But as certain as her heartbeats it continued, and wasting not another second she tossed aside her makeshift fan and hastened along the game trail until, suddenly, it stopped at a
tangle of fiery red flowers and dense green creepers.
She thrust her way through them, and caught her breath as she found herself almost on the edge of a jungle gorge. A cascade of water roared down the other side of it, misted by a spray that was fired into a rainbow by the sun's rays.
Deep down into the gorge flowed that silver coil, bursting into a river that glinted far below, between green banks of teeming vegetation.
Morvenna knelt on a bank of bush ferns and creepers and peered downwards, drinking in all that water with longing eyes. It gurgled, beckoned and mocked her thirst, and with a sigh of sheer, frustration she rested her hot face on her forearm and in so doing dislodged her grass hat from her head. The next instant it was tumbling over the edge of the gorge and she was making a grab for it when the tangle of creepers on which she lay gave a frightening shift. She grabbed wildly at a handful as they unwound like a curtain and carried her with them over the edge of the gorge.
She cried out in fright, clung on for dear life, and felt her arms nearly wrenched from their sockets as the slithering curtain of vines stopped shifting and she found herself dangling among them like a fruit on a branch.
She hung there, catching the breath that had been knocked out of her by the shock of being carried into mid-air on the back of a moving plant, woody-stemmed, thick with leaves, its dank green smell strong in her dilated nostrils.
What a situation ! If it wasn't so alarming it would be laughable, for she hung here, gripping the vines, like a heroine in one of those silent-movie serials of long
ago. Cliff-hangers, they called them. A very apt description !
In a while, when her nerves were a little steadier, she peered upwards and saw that she had fallen some yards from the edge of the gorge. Could she pull herself up to that edge ? She unlocked the fingers of her right hand and carefully shifted them upwards until she found another woody handhold. She gripped and swayed alarmingly on the curtain of vines as she pulled herself an inch or two up the gorge-face.
Her dry throat was rasping, and her teeth were clamping her lower lip as at each slow, upward pull the pain in her arms grew more intense and cramping.
She paused for breath, her body drenched in sweat as she laid her face for some vestige of coolness against the green leaves of the vine. She wasn't really making much progress, for each painful inch she gained was followed by a slight downward movement of the curtain itself. Her weight, though slight, was pulling on it, and she was desperately afraid that it would suddenly break and send her crashing down the gorge into that roaring river below.
She groaned at the pain in her strained wrists. The will to think and act seemed to be leaving her. "Roque . . . " Why she said his name she hardly knew, except that he seemed the one person capable of getting her out of the predicament which had befallen her. Roque. She never called him that to his face. It was always senhor.
She listened to the roar of the cascade, and the pounding of her heart. In a moment she must make the effort to continue her climb. She shivered, hot and cold at the same time, and listened as the cry of a bell
bird rang like a clarion call through the forest. What a good idea ! Perhaps she should call out herself and see if some friendly Indian was within hearing.
"Hallo ! Hallo !"
It was a poor effort, for her throat was parched, but after a minute she tried again.
"Help ! Please, someone, help me !"
She listened, her heart in her throat as the curtain of creepers gave another little shift downwards. "Help !" This time panic lent strength to her voice and her cry echoed in the gorge.
"Hallo !" A voice answered clearly, and it wasn't the echo of the cry she had just made. "Hallo, where are you ?"
Not an echo, not a bell-bird,
but the voice of a man !
"I'm here !" She struggled to make herself heard. "I'm hanging on to some vines, j-just below a bank of red flowers n-near the edge of the gorge."
She didn't give it a thought that an Indian would not have answered her plea for help in fluent English. All she could think of was getting out of this gorge and feeling the ground under her feet once more. "Hurry ! Please, hurry !" It was a mere sob, though it sounded like a shout in her aching head.
"I am coming — hang on !"
She could hear the man plainly now, thrusting his way through the bushes and creepers above her on the bank of the gorge.
"Be careful," she cried out hoarsely. "Th-these creepers move — they move!"
She was gazing upwards, a small, dangling figure, her hair in silvery spikes along her damp forehead, her eyes like great lilac bruises in her pale face, when her
rescuer thrust his head over the edge of the gorge.
"Oh—" She went so dangerously weak for a moment that she almost let go of the vines to which she was clinging. The face above hers could belong to only one man in the world; only his eyes could blaze that blue and consuming light.
"Good afternoon," he said. "I refuse to be surprised at finding you in yet another predicament that other people would be sensible enough to avoid."
"Please, save the lecture for another time," she gasped. "And do mind those creepers — they move !"
He examined them and muttered a Latin name. Then once again he was gazing down at her with that look of fierce exasperation. "Hold on with all your might," he ordered. "I am going to pull you up."
He withdrew from her sight and for a moment she wanted to call out to him in panic, then her heart came into her mouth as she felt a sudden movement that set her swaying on the vine. She held on grimly, knowing that the strong arms up there were hauling on the vine as though it were a net, with a fish inside ! Knowing, too, that if the "net" was suddenly to break she would plunge into the river below.
Up and up, inch by careful inch, the longest minutes of her life, then a sweet gush of relief as she was drawn over the edge and safely landed. "Jump clear !" he ordered. She did so clumsily, and fell among the fiery red flowers as he let go of the vine and it went slithering and tumbling back over the edge of the gorge, a dark green snake of leaves.
There was silence, then a sound of brush and blossoms being crushed as the senlior knelt beside Morvenna and drew her into those strong arms. He
pressed her head to his shoulder and held her to him until she stopped trembling with reaction. He stroked her hair while she clung to him, her face buried against his chest. She could feel a quick, hard beating near her cheek, and knew that the effort of hauling her to safety caused his heart to pound like that.
"Y-you seem fated to be my paladin." She drew away from him and managed a shaky smile. "Thank you for coming to my rescue. I couldn't have hung on much longer. Each time I tried to climb upwards, that thing slipped downwards."
He accepted her thanks with a frown, and turned her hands within his so that he could examine the palms of them. They were red and lacerated from clutching the vine, whose woody stems had gradually cut into the flesh as she had grown more tired and heavier. He ran his thumb over the lacerations and she winced.
"The skin is broken in one or two places," he grunted, "and it is a good thing for you that I don't travel about in the jungle as though it were an English spinney. Come !" He helped her to her feet and marched her out of the sultry sunshine into the shade of the trees. There, hanging on a branch, was a machete and a water-flask.
"May I have a drink of water ?" Morvenna asked eagerly.
Still frowning, his blue eyes fixed on her face, he unscrewed the cap and filled it with water. She drank thirstily, her eyes half-closed like a young cat lapping cream. "Mmm, I was dying for that — it was the sound of water that drew me to the gorge. I — I nearly died of fright when that vine pulled me over the edge."
"Hold out your hands." He had taken a pouch from
one of the pockets of his bush shirt and, floppy bush hat pushed to the back of his head, was ready to doctor her scratched palms with some ointment that looked as though it would sting. Her lip clamped between her teeth, she obeyed his injunction, her eyes fully open now and fixed on his dark, unsmiling face as he applied the antiseptic ointment.
"Ooh !" she said, and at that he did smile, grimly. "So you were looking for Nuno," he said, handing her another cap of water and a salt tablet.
She swallowed the tablet without demur, and chased it with the water. "No, I was looking for you — " she touched a hand to her waist. "Oh no! It's gone — my writing-case is gone !"
"What are you talking about ?" He took a drink of water himself. "When I returned to the fazenda after inspecting some infected coffee bushes, Senhora Tyson told me that you were upset about Nuno, and Mr. Challen thought you were at the tree-house . .."
"Yes," she broke in. "I climbed up to the tree-house, and I found my writing-case there. Nuno must have found it out on the reef. My passport and other papers were still in it, but the treasure map was gone. I — I think Nuno has gone off on his own to find out – senhor, I had the writing-case with me, and I was looking for you, but I took the wrong trail . . ."
"Calm down," he took her by the shoulders. "You say you found your writing-case at the tree-house ?"
She nodded. "When I saw that the map was missing, I wanted to tell you at once, so that you could send out trackers to look for Nuno. That map's unlucky. I — I don't want anything to happen to Nuno."
"Of course not." His tone was crisp. "So you decided
to look for me, eh ?"
"Yes, in the village, but I took the wrong trail."
"I know that. Your tracks were near the tree-house and I saw at once that you had taken a game trail that would lead you into the bush. I took a water-flask and a machete from the tree-house and followed your tracks."
"How could you tell they were my tracks ?" she asked. "I'm wearing Indian sandals."
"Quite." He quirked an eyebrow as he glanced down at her feet. "But you do not walk like an Indian. They are rather flat-footed, but your tracks are those of a lightly built girl with small, high-arched feet. You have also the novice's habit of plucking bits of grass and chewing them, and blundering into the wild vines that an Indian would automatically avoid."
"There's no need to sound so scornful." She bit her lip. "I can't help it if I do everything all wrong. If I'd known you were returning to the fazenda, I'd have gone back there instead of chasing off on a wild goose chase. Now I've lost my writing-case down the gorge, and all my papers."
"Don't worry about them." He was glancing at the sky, which seemed to reflect his frown. "We should be starting back at once from the look of that sky, but I think you need to rest for a short while. Are you hungry ?"
"A little," she admitted. "It's a sort of dry hunger that a juicy pineapple would satisfy."
"Well, sit down here and rest," he gave some bushy ferns a good shake, "and I will go and have a look for something resembling a pineapple. If you hear a few rumbles of thunder, don't worry. And for heaven's sake
don't wander away again. Stay just here and be a good child."
"Yes, senhor," she said, giving him a demure smile as she sat down on the springy ferns. They clustered around her slight young figure, and as he reached for his machete he glanced down at her and a smile flashed across his dark face.
"You look like a babe in the wood," he said. "Don't be nervous. I shall be within call if you want me."
"I'm going to have a cat-nap." She clasped her arms about her updrawn knees and rested her cheek on them. This was a wild and lonely place, and ominous clouds were gathering above the trees and thickening the shadows, but Morvenna felt too drowsy and spent, too drugged by the lush jungle scents all around, to care that a storm might be brewing.
She drowsed while bees buzzed in the tangle of red flowers, and the waters cascaded down the nearby gorge.
She awoke with one of those falling starts that make the heart beat fast, and saw a tall figure looming out of the shadows of the trees. As the senhor came towards her, she saw the outline of his muscles under the fawn drill of his shirt, the width of his shoulders tapering to lean hips, the knee-boots that added to his look of strong, assured, almost flagrant masculinity. She realized that she was alone with him in the heart of the forest !
"I found a thicket of mangoes." He showed her some round, hairy-looking fruits. "They are not as attractive-looking as pineapples, but full of juice—Did you have your cat-nap ?"
She nodded, and watched him slice open the mangoes with his machete — a handy weapon. With one of
those a man of the jungle need never go without food, shelter, or a bride !
He pared the mangoes and laid the quarters on a couple of big leaves which he plucked from a tree. Then he sat down beside Morvenna, relaxing his long body and nodding at her to eat her fruit. "We must be on our way as soon as we have eaten," he said.
"Is there going to be a storm ?" She nibbled the refreshing fruit and put out her tongue to catch some precious drops of juice.
"Are you afraid of storms ?" he asked.
"I've never seen a jungle storm." She took another piece of mango and bit into it, and watched him do the same. These glimpses of his humanity were oddly disturbing. He could, she realized, be as tender as he could be tough . . . a most shattering combination in a man.
"How mysterious everything begins to look." She avoided his eyes, which shone steel-blue through the shadows. "Those trees over there look like a meeting of dryads."
"It is the senses that make a mystery of the natural." He struck a match and lit a cheroot, and her nostrils tautened as the smoke stole from his lips and brushed her cheek. "Listen to the silence, senhorznha. The birds and animals sense that a storm is coming and they have crept into hiding."
The silence and the false twilight were uncanny. The sultriness was increasing, and through the silence there stole a growl of thunder like that of a leashed animal.
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