by Peter Tonkin
And so the day passed. Apart from the occasional crocodile, they saw nothing alive on the desolate shores. On their right, the cliff continued interminably. Only occasionally, as the river made a desultory attempt to meander, was there any shoreline on that side, but it was never more than a bulge of red silt like the flank of some buried giant or the shard of some huge terracotta jar baked hard. And the only sounds which came from that side over the insistent rustling chuckle of the river was the thunder of trains rushing ahead of them to the coast.
On the left, however, lay a dying desolation whose atmosphere hung like a miasma across the water. From the green edge of the shrunken river, red mud rose seemingly interminably up a long, weary slope to a low cliff of ancient bank. The mud alone rose ten metres above the water level in three-quarters of a kilometre, and the long-dry cliff rose another ten above that. Above the red, overhanging cliff, the better part of eight hundred metres from the thick water, stood the tall jungle. It was grey and sere even against the hard blue sky, and the sun in the southern quadrant struck through the upper canopy as though it was a mist. Ann was American. She was more used to autumn in Vermont that to this hopeless surrender of lush leaves to grey death. She found the sight of the jungle distasteful; ultimately disturbing. Great trees stood as though wrapped in restless shrouds of dirty paper. Their massive limbs writhed in a mute agony of drought, as though begging the water for succour. But only the hot wind answered, and when it gusted it brought with it red dust from the naked grassland far beyond. So that beneath the ghostly grey giants, the dead scrub, as ghastly as the hopeless mess of limbs in the bauxite store which had been home to the crippled chimpanzee, was tinged with wind-channelled runnels of red.
And the jungle was silent. Dead. It seemed like one great creature to her, one massive entity which should have been composed of verdant leaf and burgeoning branch, pullulating with teeming insects and whirring flies; dappled and dazzling with the gleam of quicksilver wing and exquisite singing of birds, and heaving with the pulsating explosion of roaring, howling, trumpeting and calling animals.
But there was nothing. The whole thing was dead. They were sailing through the still heart of a corpse.
As the afternoon gathered around them and the sun came blazingly over their heads to glare down upon them, its terrible light and heat multiplied beyond bearing by the reflective quality of the black cliff just beside them, so the river, too, began to die.
The first sign of the onset of death seemed to be positive. The depressing spectacle of the dead jungle fell back silently, unobserved, and the far bank slowly withdrew to more than a kilometre distant. Dozing, stunned by the lethal afternoon sun, hardly more than braising bundles of mud and clothing, Ann and Robert did not notice that the black cliff, too, was effectively withdrawing as the river itself spread out into a shallow lake and the flow which held the tree trunk began to meander and their steady progress began to slow. The branches under water began to scrape along the river bed, and the tree drifted to a dead stop.
It was the helicopter which woke them, swooping low like an inquisitive fly, monstrous not only in its size but by its vivid movement in this place of sluggish death. The clattering roar of its approaching rotor jerked Ann awake first and she peered out from under the sun shield of shirt and camera bag which was perched precariously upon her head. It was shockingly close, skimming in over the distant jungle, kicking up leaves in its wake like an autumn gale. ‘Robert!’ she screamed, feeling unutterably exposed at once. She had no idea whether the tree trunk they were on was a unique feature or one among many, effectively invisible. And she had no idea whether the two of them were visible upon it. She felt an overpowering need to run at once. She froze, fighting the panic, watching the hawk-swoop of the helicopter as it sped unerringly towards them. She could feel the weight of the pilot’s eyes like sunburn on her skin. With a whimper she rolled off the log and into the water. The rope held her and she rose back above the surface, clutching a handful of roots and hiding as best she could behind the swell of the wood. A slithering splash and the gentle stirring of the wood informed her that Robert had followed suit. Terrified, she hung there as the helicopter clattered by, seemingly only a couple of metres above her head. The down-draught stirred against her scalp like a cold shower and she realised that, warm though it was, the water, too, felt cool against her parched skin. As the silence returned to the heat-weighted air around them, she felt her body beginning to relax, as though she was in a warm bath.
Then something brushed sluggishly beneath her dangling toe.
She actually screamed with terror. Gripped by a fear which was far more powerful even than her exceptional self-control, she went scrambling up out of the water, whimpering as she went, until she was crouching on the trunk again, looking around herself at the still, impenetrable water, sobbing with incipient hysteria. Only when she was safely out of the reach of whatever had touched her did she think of Robert. ‘Robert,’ she called, and only when she had said the word and it was echoing back from jungle and cliff alike did she realise that she had screamed it. There was no reply. ‘Robert!’ This time she knew she screamed. The thought that he might be gone was more than she could bear. She hurled herself wildly across die wood and hung over his side, barely restrained by her section of the rope. The thick dark water was still. His rope trailed into it, apparently attached to nothing. Making a kind of keening noise, far beyond sensible control, she reached a trembling hand down towards it.
Robert exploded out of the water immediately beside her, his face thrusting immediately up beside hers. ‘I touched bottom!’ he yelled, making her jump out of her skin. ‘This tree’s not going anywhere now. It’s wedged in place. If we want to get on, we’ll have to get off. We’ll have to swim a bit and wade the rest, but we can get to the shore, I think.’
‘Is it safe?’ She asked the fearful question before she realised that the thing that had brushed her foot must have been the bottom of this shallow lake.
But it was a serious question. They would have to swim for quite a way and then wade for the better part of five hundred metres to gain the first slope of mud. The slope itself stretched for nearly a kilometre up to a cliff dead ahead and away to the west into a seemingly limitless field of dead reeds. And until they were actually out of the water altogether, they would be in very real danger of attack by crocodiles and whatever other monsters lurked here.
‘No choice. We can’t just sit on the log and wait for the next rains to wash us free. We could be here for years. Come on, untie us and let’s get it done. And remember, that helicopter might well have spotted us.’
That, carefully calculated, spurred her into action. Within minutes she was floundering down beside him and the pair of them were moving as quietly as possible through the sluggish westward tug of the water. In her mind, Ann was reciting the names of all the demons which most terrified her, working on the superstitious assumption that if she named something it would be less likely to attack her. It was always, as Nico Niccolo never tired of telling her, the unexpected which got you in the end. And her Neapolitan lover’s magic seemed to work, for no crocodile caught her, no snake bit her, no raft of floating insects, soldier ants, spiders or scorpions drifted down to explode against her unprotected head. No ravening fish - the African equivalent of piranhas, if such things existed -latched hungrily onto her legs. No electric eels came writhing to shock her to death. No swimming python came to emulate his cousin the anaconda.
This time she did not scream when her feet touched the bottom and as she waded out of the water onto the clear expanse of hard-baked, blood-red riverine beach, everything seemed to have passed off perfectly. They staggered across the rock-hard mud towards the distant earthen cliff. A wind, the evening breeze, rustled sinisterly through the hollow skeletons of the reeds away to their right. It brought dead leaves and a fetid stench from the jungle ahead of them and, had they not been so desperate, they would have stopped then or gone back. But if they stopped now, the
next helicopter would definitely spot them; and there was nowhere to go back to.
Their shadows were long across the red ribbed mud by the time they reached the concave cliff of crumbling earth which had once been the shore. It had looked like the merest mud dune from the water’s edge, but now it revealed itself to be a wall the better part of four metres high, concave and overhanging. Wearily, they turned until the westering sun was in their eyes and began to plod along it, hoping for a tributary opening before the vast, threatening forest of the dead reed bed overwhelmed them.
What they found was not a stream bed but an animal track which had broken down the high bank and churned up the red earth down to the distant water. It was still going to be quite a scramble up to the top of the bank but it would be possible to do it if they organised themselves. They would have to do this at once, for it was coming disturbingly close to sunset - and whatever had made the track would soon be using it again. In spite of the drained weariness they both felt, they prepared to scale the two-metre mountain in front of them. A very few half-coherent words sufficed for a plan: Robert would go first, with Ann pushing him upwards from behind; then he would pull her up. Simple.
For the first time since they had come out of the water he went ahead of her. He reached upwards towards the crumbling crest and she closed in to push him upwards. His shirt tail had pulled out of his trouser waist and as she bent to shove her shoulder under the swell of his buttocks, she saw the broad expanse of gleaming skin over his kidneys. And, beneath her dazzled eyes, the skin writhed and rippled with an obscene life of its own. Great blisters and welts raised upon it, black and glistening, alive. She froze and he turned, sensing at once that something was wrong. He found her pulling her own shirt out of her shorts with manic concentration and saw at once that the same obscene black welts, the size of his thumb to the wrist and bigger, were gathered vividly against the pallor of her skin.
‘They’re leeches,’ he bellowed, his voice trembling with disgust. ‘God! Oh God!’
She was shaking as though several thousand volts were coursing through her body and he, too, very nearly went out of control. Had they not been in such desperate straits, he would almost certainly have done so. But he knew with inescapable certainty that if he let slip then they were dead. He caught her by the shoulders and shook her with far too much savagery. ‘We don’t have time for this!’ he snarled. ‘We have to get up before the evening wallow or we’ll be killed. Trampled to death. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ The word released a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth, but when he let go of her the shaking had stopped.
‘We’ll get up and get clear,’ he said, his eyes fastened on her as though he could mesmerise more strength into her. ‘We’ll get clear and we’ll build a fire then we’ll get rid of these things. We’ll be all right. All right?’
‘Sure.’ Her eyes slid away from his. She did not believe they would be all right at all. But then, even if they did build a fire, he couldn’t see how they were going to light it anyway.
~ * ~
In the end they lit it with the gun.
They scrambled as planned up the incline onto the animal track then struck west into the last of the setting sun at once, driven by the certain knowledge that something big enough to step up and down two metres of bank was coming to have its evening drink with several of its family and friends. In the last of the sunlight, from the eastern edge of the reed bed they looked back across a kilometre of empty bank to see a small herd of elephants move like the silent spirits of the dead jungle out of the grey trees onto the red mud. As the huge animals stepped down, the tallest one stopped and spread its ears, raised its trunk and looked at them. Red light glinted off long, curving tusks. A challenging scream came echoing on the evening air. Suddenly a kilometre seemed hardly enough.
By the time they found a place to stop, the sunlight was gone and the darkness was closing down like a door swinging shut. The warmth was draining out of the day as rapidly as the blood was draining out of their systems, and they had reached the time for decisive action. They were on a tongue of dry mud exposed to the sky between the outer scrub of the dead forest and the whispering field of dead reeds. The forest seemed marginally more welcoming, so they struck south until they reached the edge of it. Here they pulled together a pile of sere leaves and broke dry branches on the top. Robert had used the walk from the elephant track to rack his brains about lighting the thing, but had come up with no ideas at all. It was Ann, her memory of the muzzle flash as the bullets destroyed the chimpanzee twenty-four hours earlier still fresh in her mind, who suggested using the pistol.
Only their desperation to be rid of the clammy, unutterably disgusting creatures on their skin and the overpowering need for some comfort and reassurance could have made them risk doing it. But their world had closed down to such an urgent intimacy that worries about Nimrod Chala’s scouts or the ease with which a passing helicopter would spot a fire in this shadowy desolation shrank to insignificance. Crouching, trembling, beneath the overarching branches of the first broad tree on the edge of the forest, they thrust the gun into the pile of dry kindling they had assembled and pulled the trigger. The bullet exploded out of the other side, scattering twigs. A tantalizing smell of burning lingered on the air. Robert crouched and blew with increasing desperation. Nothing else happened.
After the third shot, he said, ‘It’s not going to work. They won’t catch. We need something which will burn at once.’
The thought of spending a cold night defenceless on the dark edge of this terrible place with no alternative but to pull the leeches off by hand was enough to inspire Ann even further. ‘Film stock,’ she said, reaching into the open camera bag.
‘What?’
She pulled out the last of her unexposed films. ‘This stuff. Film acetate. Burns like fire lighters,’ she said, and jerked the ribbon of glistening brown out of the little tube. It was only a matter of moments before it was crushed into a loose ball and the pile of kindling was reassembled on top of it. This time, the explosion of the shot was followed almost at once by a crisp crackling and the smell of powder was subsumed below the acridity of blazing acetate and smouldering leaves.
Even now they had to keep themselves under rigid control, for the fire had to be nurtured, raised to a blaze, given at least the promise of some permanence and then corralled, restrained, stopped from running out of control. Only then could they turn to the almost overpowering urgency of the other matter in hand. And once they began, it did become overpowering. More important than hunger, thirst, dignity, modesty; more important than anything except, perhaps, death was the need to rid themselves of the creatures clinging to their skin. They stripped each other, all too aware that the loathsome things would be clustering in places where they could not be seen by their reluctant hosts. Then, with their clothing in steaming piles by the fire, first Ann then Robert stood with eyes closed and all their concentration focused on remaining still, while the other, with the glowing end of a smouldering stick, worried at the glistening, slug-like bodies until they reluctantly dropped free. Each time one fell, it was caught up and thrown immediately into the flames where it hissed and crackled like a toasting sausage.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight,’ Robert said as he worked on her cool, pale body.
She said nothing, preferring to remove her mind as far from the humiliating present as possible.
‘Those mosquitoes have surely made a mess of you,’ he continued, more to himself than to her. The firelight showed every intimate detail of her and none of it was unscathed. But her face had suffered worst of all; her eyes and lips were puffy with bites and the first of tonight’s mosquitoes were just beginning to arrive as he finished work on her. Compared to the leeches, the little insects hardly seemed worth a second thought.
At last, like Aborigines, they crouched side by side, naked and sluggishly bleeding from the myriad bites on their bodies, disregarding the thickening cloud of river mosquit
oes hovering hungrily over their heads, holding their underwear as close to the flames as they dared until they at least were dry. As soon as some sort of dignity was restored to them, they began to arrange things around a circular blaze to give them some comfort. Ann set up makeshift racks upon which to hang the rest of their clothing until it was dry. Robert collected more wood to burn. Then they both pulled a log to sit on close enough to the flames to toast their toes, fingers and faces. They sat in silence, swatting desultorily until shirts, shorts and trousers began to darken in colour and to smell a little like toast.