Dangerous Inheritance (41 page)

On the last hour of their trudge they fell silent, as both Fleur and Douglas were unused to the strain of such continued exertion; although she stood up to it better than he did, because frequent swimming and tennis had kept her muscles in better trim.

It was about half past four when they came to the first scattered houses of Dambulla. Although it was by then fairly light their occupants were not yet stirring, and as they passed the third house Douglas came to a sudden halt.

‘I've had an idea,' he said. ‘We have already stolen a car——'

‘I know,' Truss interrupted, ‘and I'm keeping a look-out. With luck we'll come on another, parked by some bungalow, and be able to make off in it before its owner is about.'

‘No, no. Not a car.' Douglas pointed to a thatched lean-to that stood near the house. ‘Why not a cart? And there's one over there. I'll drive and you two could travel inside it.'

‘It would be terribly slow,' Truss demurred. ‘Unless there's some hitch the aircraft will be coming to pick us up this afternoon. We'd never make it to Elephant Point with a horse and cart.'

‘We must chance that,' said Fleur quickly. ‘What matters at the moment is to get past the police in Dambulla. Douglas is
right. In a cart we'd stand a much better chance than in a car or on our flat feet.'

‘That's true,' Truss agreed, ‘and maybe we'll be able to pick up a car later. Come on, then.'

Moving quickly to the side of the road, Fleur kept watch on the house while Truss and Douglas got out the cart and harnessed to it a small shaggy horse from an adjacent stall. The cart was a small one on two high wheels with a tattered canvas cover supported by hoops. When sitting on its floor, Fleur and Truss were concealed from view, and as Douglas was wearing the outer garment and old hat that Banda had brought into the cell he did not look conspicuously unlike a Sinhalese peasant. Within six minutes of their decision to take the cart they were jolting off down the road.

When they entered the town proper it was still deserted, except for a few market people beginning to arrange their stalls for the day; but as they neared its centre Douglas saw that preparations had been made for their reception. Ahead lay a road block composed of poles and trestles. Between them was sufficient space only to allow a single vehicle to pass and that could have been closed swiftly with another pole by the group of police who were lounging nearby.

Now, Douglas had good reason to thank his stars that he had thought of the cart for, otherwise, there would have been little chance of their escaping capture. Even as it was, if the police looked inside the cart their number would be up. But to have turned back at the sight of the barriers might have aroused suspicion. Endeavouring to suppress his fears, he hunched his shoulders, so that his chin nearly touched his chest, cracked his whip and drove on.

When he reached the barrier he had to hold the reins tightly to stop his hands from trembling, and perspiration was beginning to break out on his forehead as he thought of the wretched fate that was in store for all of them if they were arrested. But he managed to call a cheerful ‘good morning' to the policemen.

One of them stepped into the road and asked him what he had in his cart. With his heart in his mouth he replied, ‘My
poor wife. She's gone down with a typhoid and I'm taking her to hospital.'

As he did not know where the hospital was, and it might have been in the direction from which they had come, he had taken a desperate gamble; but he was hoping that from fear of infection the policeman would refrain from pulling aside the back curtain of the cart.

Inside it, crouching in the semi-darkness, Fleur and Truss knew only that the cart had come to a halt and that Douglas was being questioned. Clasping hands and holding their breath, they waited for a few minutes in awful suspense. Then the whip cracked and the cart moved on. Yet for some while they continued to fear that at any moment it might be halted again.

It was not until a quarter of an hour later that Douglas pulled aside one of the front flaps of the hood to tell them that they were safely out of the town. By then it had become very stuffy inside the cart so, greatly relieved, Truss was able to tie back the rear curtains, enabling Fleur and himself both to look out and to get more air.

As had been the case on their trip up to the ancient cities, at Dambulla they had left the main highway for the road east to Polonnaruwa, and were now entering a sparsely populated area of jungle. When they had been in the ‘dry' zone before, the annual rains had only recently started; so many of the trees still had bare branches or were clothed in grey beards of lichen and such leaves as remained had been baked an apricot colour. But that had been a fortnight back. Now their life had been renewed, they were sprouting with every shade of tender green, the creepers were sending out new tendrils and the young fronds of giant ferns were unfolding.

Through occasional breaks in the forest, away to the southeast of Dambulla they could see range after range of mountains rising to six thousand feet, a lovely misty blue against the brighter blue of the sky. But, fortunately, the country through which they were passing was the beginning of the great eastern plain; for the little horse, although he seemed game enough, had quite a load to pull and even here on the flat could manage only about five miles an hour.

To while away the tedium of the journey Truss and Fleur began a competition to see which of them could first spot the greater number of wild animals, giving extra points for rarity. Monkeys were two a penny as there were colonies of them every half mile or so. The deep-voiced wanderoos barked at them as they passed, small mischievous ones chattered excitedly and threw nuts. Some swung rapidly from tested branch to tested branch along roads among the tree tops that they knew well, the females often carrying their young slung below their bodies; others would remain perched aloft absorbed in the friendly task of picking the fleas from a companion. There were many squirrels, jackals and now and then a mongoose; also herds of the little spotted Mouse deer and the common Moutjac. Fleur won good points by sighting a big cow elephant with her cherubic little calf hanging on to her tail, but Truss evened up with a twenty-foot python coiled in the fork of a tree.

There were, too, a great variety of birds: kites, falcons and serpent eagles sailing high overhead, green pigeons, jungle fowl and partridges rooting among the undergrowth for grubs, occasionally a strutting peacock and, dashing in and out among the branches, green bee-eaters, parakeets, Paradise fly-catchers, red-backed woodpeckers and brown-headed barbets; all lovely to watch, and, for a time, pointing out the beasts and birds to one another took the minds of Fleur and Truss off their anxieties.

But not for long. In spite of their ill luck in Douglas being recognised when escaping from the prison and their having had to abandon two cars, they had thrown off the pursuit, evaded the police net spread for them and, for all the police knew, they might now be anywhere in central Ceylon; so for the time being, they were in little danger of capture. Yet that meant only putting off the evil day unless they could leave the country; and from Dambulla they had still the worse half of the journey to do. Unless they could find a much swifter form of transport it was certain that they would not be able to reach the rendezvous on the coast that afternoon.

Occasionally a car passed them and, as they drove through each of the infrequent villages in the area, they looked eagerly
from side to side in the hope that they might see one in front of a bungalow or shop, temporarily unoccupied, with which they might make off. But now full day was come, the villagers were going about their business and very few of them were well-off enough to own even a rattle-trap car.

By half past seven, having been up all night, they were both tired and hungry, and mosquitoes had begun to trouble them. To pull up and sleep was out of the question, but they halted in a village while Douglas went into the general store to buy honey-cakes, chocolate, fruit and soft drinks.

While he was absent, a group of small boys, believing the cart to be empty attempted to raid it. They were naked and their protruding stomachs, due to enlarged spleens, showed that the poor little wretches were already the victims of malaria. Fleur and Truss would have liked to give them money, but to do so would have revealed themselves as whites; so Fleur drove them off by shouting at them in Sinhalese, and swiftly drew the back curtains of the cart that they had pulled apart before they could have had more than a glimpse of its dim interior.

In addition to a supply of food Douglas had bought a tin of quinine pills which, having seen the malaria-ridden children, they took eagerly as a precaution against the mosquitoes infecting them with the disease. He had also bought maize for the horse so, half a mile beyond the village, they pulled up again, beside a stream, where the little animal could be watered and fed and given half an hour's rest while they picnicked.

By a quarter past eight they were on their way again. From time to time, to ease the load, Truss and Fleur got out and walked, and during the morning they made two more half-hour halts to rest the horse. By midday they entered the great area of creeper-draped ruins and moribund waterworks that had once been Polonnaruwa.

In recent years some of the ‘tanks' had been reclaimed by the Government; while the bottoms of others, since the rains had come, were now shallow lakes from which trees were protruding. On them the bird life was fantastic in its variety and abundance. Pelicans, egrets, spoonbills, herons and kingfishers were to be seen by the score. Flights of rose and white flamingoes
skimmed patches of giant red water lilies with bluish leaves. The upper branches of many of the trees about them were solid with the nests of weaver birds; sandpipers, bitterns and jacana pheasants picked for worms on the shores.

As they continued on their way they now had much more time than they had when covering the stretch of road by car in which to appreciate the nagnitude of Ceylon's second oldest capital. Weed-choked canals criss-crossed it in every direction, huge mounds of rubble were scattered among the tall trees. Peering through leafy screens or down occasional open vistas, they saw broken gateways, monolithic headless statues and fallen pillars covered with intricate carving: a vast paradise for future arachaeologists.

With the horse and cart it took them another half-hour to reach the squalid modern shanty town and there they halted only to buy more food and drink. Beyond it there was an equally long stretch of road through acre after acre where for seven hundred years trees and creepers had striven to obliterate the temples, monasteries and palaces that had been the glory of the ancient city.

Although it was November, as central Ceylon is only eight degrees north of the Equator, for the past two hours they had had no protection from the blazing midday sun except, at intervals, the protection of the covered cart. The clothes of all three of them were soaked through with sweat. Truss, less used to such exposure than the other two, knew that he was getting badly sunburnt, and the whole party had been for so many hours without sleep that it had become imperative that they should have a really long rest.

About five miles east of the outskirts of the new Polonnaruwa they chose a ruined culvert through which, centuries ago, the flow of water into a ‘tank' had been controlled. In the shade cast by one of its tall stone sides, they took off most of their clothes, and, taking their little horse with them, on a rein, went down to refresh themselves with a dip. But they dared not go much further out than knee-deep and, even then, had to keep a sharp look-out, for the ‘tank', as had been the case with all the others they had seen, was inhabited by many crocodiles.

Even in hollows that had so far accumulated only shallow pools several of these voracious beasts lay, apparently somnolent but watchful, in partially submerged, scaly heaps. Here, from the deeper water, every few minutes an ugly snout and great gaping jaws emerged, either holding a big fish or to seize an unwary teal that had landed on the surface intending to snap up smaller fry.

Douglas said that even elephants and buffaloes were frightened of crocodiles, so would come down to the ‘tanks' to bathe in the evenings only in herds; but if a crocodile attempted to snatch one of their young, as often happened, both breeds of animal would charge their foes and most terrible battles would ensue. He then pointed out a number of big pits along the foreshore as elephant hip baths, for the great beasts, and buffaloes too, love nothing better than almost to bury themselves in mud.

Not wishing to leave the shade of the culvert, but aware of the danger that a crocodile might come up out of the water and attack them while they slept, they tethered the horse between the water and themselves, knowing that he would remain alert enough to act as a sentry and give a loud neigh if he found himself threatened. Then they made themselves as comfortable as they could and fell into a sleep of exhaustion.

It was as well that they had taken precautions, for they were roused from their deep slumber by a terrified whinnying. Jumping up they saw that two big crocodiles and one small one had left the water thirty yards away and were already half-way up the foreshore.

Grabbing his Sten gun Truss fired a burst at them. The foremost lashed out wildly with its powerful tail for a moment then rolled over dead, exposing its white belly. The small one, evidently wounded, turned and slithered awkwardly back towards the water. The third gave a furious hiss and, with surprising speed, continued to thrust its way forward. Fleur screamed. Douglas seized her arm and began to drag her up the bank. But Truss stood his ground and fired a second burst. The brute's great jaws with their saw-like teeth had opened wide to seize him. From its mouth there came a sickening stench that
almost caused him to vomit. Then, as the bullets ripped through its upper jaw and down its throat, it halted, threshed furiously for a moment, curled up and died.