The Land of Foam

by Ivan Yefremov

  The travellers checked up the direction of their journey by the sun and again plunged into the twilight of the forest, finding their way along hollows, washed out by the rain, and along river-beds and getting a fresh orientation from the sun’s rays that occasionally slanted down through the dense foliage. The guides tried to steer clear of the glades for yet another reason: the trees near them gave shelter to terribly dangerous insects, deadly black wasps and huge ants. Big lichens, leathery grey excrescences and other growths covered the tree-trunks while the high ridges of their roots were covered in a green coat of moss. These flat roots, often as much as five or six cubits high, branched out from the ribs of the gigantic tree-trunks like buttresses. The whole party of nineteen men could easily have bivouacked in the deep pits between roots that crossed over each other, making all movement in the forest difficult; the travellers either had to climb over them or go round them, making their way through narrow corridors. Their feet sank into the thick carpet of half-rotten branches, leaves and dried shoots that covered the ground. Bunches of whitish toadstools gave off heavy odour, like that of a corpse. Their weary legs knew rest only in places where the trees were not so high and the roots did not bar the way and the ground was covered with soft moss. These places, however, were densely overgrown with thorn-bushes that had to be avoided or a path had to be cut through them, which again caused loss of time and effort. A kind of spotted slug fell from the branches on to the bare shoulders of the travellers and burned their skin with its poisonous slime. On rare occasions the shadow of some animal could be discerned in the gloom of the forest; but it disappeared so quickly and silently that the travellers were often unable to say what kind of animal it was. At night the same profound silence reigned to be broken only by the plaintive howl of some unknown animal and by the raucous cries of some unknown bird.

  The travellers crossed a large number of low ridges of hills but never once reached open country devoid of trees. The forest between the ridges was thicker than ever; the humid, heavy air of the valleys, rank with rotting vegetation, made it difficult for the men to breathe.

  When the party reached a valley in the bed of which a rapid stream of cold water flowed between big boulders, they sat down to rest.

  After that the long uphill climb began again.

  For two days they continued their uphill march, the forest all the time growing denser and darker. There were no longer any glades where food was to be found and wind-felled trees barred their way. In order to avoid the thorny curtain of thin resilient stems that hung down from above and the impenetrable undergrowth of shrubs and small trees, they were forced to crawl on all fours along the rain gullies covering the hillsides.

  The hard earth crumbled under their hands and feet, but they crawled on through this labyrinth taking their direction only from the dry gullies.

  Gradually the air grew colder as though the party had penetrated into deep and damp catacombs.

  It was pitch dark by the time they reached the top of the slope and were apparently on the edge of a plateau. There were no more rain-water gullies, and the travellers halted for the night in order not to lose direction. Not a star was to be seen through the dense vault of leaves. Somewhere far above them a wind was raging. Pandion lay sleepless for a long time, listening to the roar of the forest that reminded him of the noise of a nearby sea. The rumble, rustle and clatter of the branches in the strong gusts of wind merged into one mighty sound resembling the regular beating of the surf on the shore.

  Dawn came very late, the sun’s rays struggling to pierce the thick mist. At long last the invisible sun overcame the twilight of the forest, and before the men’s eyes a gloomy, oppressive scene opened up.

  The black and white trunks of enormous trees, a hundred and fifty cubits high, disappeared in a thick milky mist that completely hid their mossy branches. Moss and lichens, sodden with water, hung down from the trees in long dark braids and grey beards, at times waving to and fro at a terrific height above the ground. Water that exuded from the spongy network of twisted roots, grass and moss slopped underfoot. Dense thickets of broad-leafed bushes hindered all progress. Big pale flowers, like honeycombed balls, swayed gently on their long stems in the mist.,

  Black and white columns, four cubits in diameter, stood like an army in serried ranks; the grey mist rolled round them and thin streams of water trickled down their bark. Some of the trunks were coated with a thick growth of sodden moss.

  Nothing could be seen at a distance of more than thirty or forty cubits in that awful forest; to make any progress the travellers had to cut a path for themselves at the foot of those forest giants.

  The piled-up barriers of fallen giants disheartened even the most hardened travellers. The worst thing of all was the impossibility of judging direction since there was no means of checking up.

  The Negroes shivered in the cold mist, frightened by the unbelievable might of the forest; the Libyans were completely discouraged. They all had the feeling that they had entered the domain of the forest gods, a place forbidden to man, from which there was no way out.

  Cavius made a sign to Pandion; they armed themselves with heavy knives and began frantically to carve a way through the wet branches. Gradually the others began to take heart and they worked in shifts, relieving each other; climbing over gigantic barricades of fallen trees; losing their way in their efforts to find a path through the enormous roots and again plunging into green thickets. The hours passed; overhead there was the same white gloom; the water continued to drip slowly and heavily from the trees; the air did not grow any warmer and it was only by the greyish-red hue of the mist that they realized that evening was drawing nigh…

  “There’s no way out in any direction!” With these words Kidogo sat down on a root, pressing his head between his hands in despair. Two other guides had returned earlier with similar information.

  For a distance of about a thousand cubits a narrow glade stretched across the path they had cut. Behind them stood the gloomy giant forest through which they had been hacking their way by superhuman efforts for the past three days. Before them stood an impenetrable growth of bamboo. The polished, jointed stems rose to a height of twenty cubits, gracefully bowing their thin feathery heads. The bamboo grew so thick that there was no possibility of penetrating that dense throng of jointed stalks as straight as spear-shafts, that stood like a solid wall before the travellers. The polished surface of the bamboo was so hard that the travellers’ bronze knives were blunted by the first strokes. Axes or heavy swords would be needed to attack that wall. It seemed that there was no way round the bamboo; the glade was bounded by dense forest thickets and the stand of bamboo stretched in both directions far into the misty distance of the plateau.

  The customary energy of the travellers had been sapped by the cold, by insufficient food and the struggle against the awful forest; the latter part of their journey had been too much for them. Nevertheless they could not contemplate the possibility of having to turn back.

  To get through those awful forests it was not sufficient to keep their former general direction of south-west; it was not enough to hack and carve their way through the dense vegetation; they also had to know where the path could be cut. The right way could only be indicated by those who lived in the forest. So far they had not met any people in the jungles and a search for them might well end up on the gridirons of a cannibal barbecue.

  We haven’t made it! was the thought that was reflected in the faces of all nineteen men, in their knitted brows, in their grimaces of despair and in the mask of mute submission.

  When Kidogo recovered from his first attack of despair, he threw back his head to look up at the giant branches that stretched over the glade at a height of a hundred cubits. Pandion went quickly over to his friend, guessing at what was in his mind.

  “Do you think it’s possible to climb them?” he asked, looking at tree-trunks that were perfectly smooth to a tremendous height above the ground.

  “We must, ev
en if it takes us a whole day,” answered Kidogo, despondently. “We must go either forward or back, but there must be no more guesswork, there’s nothing left to eat.”

  “That one,” said Pandion, pointing to a white-barked giant that rose high above the glade, its crooked branches spreading like a star against the background of the sky. “You can see a long way from that tree.”

  Kidogo shook his head.

  “No, the trees with white or with black bark* are no good. (Any of the many African hardwood trees such as ebony, ironwood, Macaranga or polyscias, all of which have either black or white bark.)

  The wood is as hard as iron, you can’t drive a knife into them let alone a wooden peg. If we can find a tree with red bark and big leaves we’ll climb it.”

  The men spread along the glade in search of a suitable tree. Soon somebody shouted that he had found one. The tree was lower than the iron giants, but it stood close against the bamboo wall, rising a goad fifty cubits above it. The travellers with the greatest difficulty cut two bamboo stalks, split them into pegs a cubit long and made a point at one end of each of them. Kidogo and Mpafu took heavy clubs and began driving the pegs into the soft wood of the tree-trunk, climbing higher and higher until they reached a liana twining round the tree in a spiral. Kidogo and his companion belted themselves around with thin lianas, pressed their feet firmly against the tree-trunk and, leaning far back from the tree, began climbing to a prodigious height. Soon their bodies became tiny dark figures against the background of heavy clouds that covered the sky. Pandion grew jealous of his companions; they were high up above him, they could see the wide world, while he remained below in the shadow like a reddish-blue worm such as they met in the rain-water gullies in the forest.

  He made a sudden decision and seized hold of the bamboo pegs hammered into the tree. He merely waved his hand at Cavius’ shout of warning, scrambled quickly up the tree and reached the twining liana; he out off the end of a thinner liana that ‘hung over his head, belted it round himself and followed Kidogo’s example. He soon found that this method of climbing was far from easy.

  The liana cut into his back and the moment he relaxed the tension in his legs, his feet slipped and he banged his knees against the coarse bark. With the greatest difficulty Pandion climbed halfway up the tree. The tops of the bamboos swayed beneath him in an irregular yellow sea, but it was still a long way to climb to the first huge branches of the tree. He heard Kidogo call from above and a strong liana with a noose at the end fell on to his shoulder. Pandion passed the noose under his arms and those above pulled gently on the liana, rendering him the greatest possible help. With his legs all lacerated, tired but joyful, Pandion soon reached the bigger lower branches. Here Kidogo and his companion had seated themselves comfortably between two big boughs.

  Pandion, from a height of eighty cubits, looked out towards the distant horizon for the first time in many days. Bamboo thickets formed — a belt encircling the forest on the high plateau; it stretched to the left and right as far as the eye could see, although in width it was no more than four or five thousand cubits. Behind the bamboo rose a low ridge of black rocks stretching due west in a chain of sloping crags some distance from each other. Beyond them, again, the ground began to fall gently. An endless chain of densely wooded hills looked like solid green clouds separated by the narrow slits of ravines filled with curling, dark mists. In these ravines lay endless days of hungry, arduous marching through gloomy twilight, for that was the direction in which the party had to travel. Nowhere could they see any gap in the solid green wall over which floated huge ragged clouds of white mist, no glade and no wide valley. It was doubtful whether the travellers had sufficient strength left to fight their way forward even to that visible distance. Farther, beyond the twilight gloom of the horizon, they might be faced with the same all over again, and, if so, it spelt certain death Kidogo turned away from the countryside that rolled away beneath him, catching Pandion’s glance as he did so. The Hellene saw alarm and great weariness in the dilated eyes of his friend; Kidogo’s inexhaustible vitality had gone, his face was wrinkled in a bitter grimace.

  “We must look back,” said Kidogo in a dismal voice; he suddenly straightened up and walked along a branch that stretched horizontally high above the bamboo.

  With difficulty Pandion restrained a cry of fear, but the Negro walked on swaying slightly, as though it were nothing at all, until he reached the end of the branch, making the leaves tremble and the bough bend downwards under his weight. Pandion sat dead still with fright as-Kidogo sat down with his legs astride the branch, held himself firmly by grasping thinner branches and began to study the country beyond the right-hand corner of the glade. Pandion did not dare follow ‘his friend. Holding their breath he and Mpafu awaited Kidogo’s report. The other sixteen men of the party, almost invisible to those on the tree, were eagerly following all their movements.

  For a long time Kidogo sat swaying on the springy branch and then, without a word, returned to the tree-trunk.

  “It’s a bad thing not to know the way,” he said sorrowfully. “We could have got here much more easily. Over there,” the Negro waved his hand to the north-west, “the grassy plain isn’t far from us. We should have gone farther to the right instead of entering the forest… We must go back to the grasslands. Perhaps there are people there; there are usually more people near the forest edge than there are in the forest itself or out in the plains.”

  The descent from the tree proved much more difficult and dangerous than the ascent. If it had not been for the help of his companions, Pandion would never have been able to descend so quickly, or, far more likely, he would have fallen and been killed. He had no sooner put his feet on solid ground than his knees gave way under him and he lay spread-eagled on the ground amidst the shouts and laughter of his companions. Kidogo told the others what he had seen from the treetop and proposed setting off at right angles to the path they had mapped out. To Pandion’s great surprise not a single word of protest was raised, although everybody realized that they had suffered defeat in their battle with the forest and that they would probably be detained a long time. Even the stubborn Etruscan, Cavius, was silent, apparently because he realized how the men had suffered in that hard but futile struggle.

  Pandion remembered that at the beginning of their journey Kidogo had said that the way round the forest was a long and dangerous one. Strong savage tribes, for whom the nineteen travellers did not constitute a serious force, lived along the rivers and on the verge of the forest…

  Grassland, with low trees growing at regular intervals like a planted orchard, sloped down to a fast river, with black rocks huddled together on its far bank. The river had piled up a long barrier of drift-wood against the rocks — tree-trunks, branches and reeds, dried and whitened in the sun.

  The party of former slaves skirted a palm grove that had been smashed by elephants and made camp under a low tree. The aroma of the resin that seeped out of its trunk and monotonous rustling of the rags of silky bark, brought drowsiness to the weary travellers.

  Kidogo suddenly rose to his knees; his companions, too, were immediately on the alert. A huge elephant was approaching the river. Its appearance might bode no good for them. They watched the loose, sweeping gait of the animal that seemed to be waddling unhurriedly along inside its own thick skin. The elephant drew nearer, carelessly waving its trunk, and there was something in its behaviour that differed greatly from the usual caution of those sensitive beasts. Suddenly human voices rang out, but the elephant did not even raise its huge ears that lay back on its head. The bewildered travellers looked at each other and stood up only to fall down to the ground immediately, as though they had been ordered to do so; alongside the elephant they noticed a number of human figures. Only then did Pandion’s companions notice a man lying on the elephant’s broad neck, his head rested on his crossed arms on top of the animal’s head. The elephant went straight to the river and entered the water, stirring up the mud with its huge tr
ee-trunks of legs. It suddenly spread out its ears which made its head seem three times the normal size. Its tiny brown eyes stared into the depths of the river. The man lying on the elephant’s back sat up and slapped the animal sharply on its sloping skull. A loud shout “Heya!” resounded up and down the river. The elephant waved its trunk, seized with it a big log from amongst the drift-wood, lifted it high over its head and hurled it into the water. The heavy log made a big splash and disappeared under the water to reappear farther downstream a few moments later. The elephant threw a few more logs into the water and then, stepping cautiously, walked out to the middle of the river, turned round with its head against the current and stood still.

  The people who had come with the elephant — there were eight of them, brown-skinned youths and girls — with loud shouts and roars of laughter plunged into the cold river. They played in the water ducking each other, and their laughter and loud slaps delivered on wet bodies resounded clearly on all sides.

  The man on the elephant shouted merrily but watched the river unceasingly, from time to time making the elephant throw heavy logs into the water.

  The travellers watched what was happening in the greatest astonishment. The friendship between people and the enormous elephant was something unbelievable, an unheard of miracle; still, at a distance of no more than three hundred cubits from them, stood the huge, grey monster, submitting to the will of man. How could it have happened that an animal without equal in size and strength, the undisputed ruler of field and forest, had become subservient to weak and fragile man, an insignificant creature compared with the mass of the elephant, six cubits high at the shoulders? Who were these people who had tamed the lord of the African plains?

  Cavius’ eyes were gleaming as he nudged Kidogo. The latter turned from watching the merry play of the young people and whispered in Cavius’ ear: