Flames Coming out of the Top (26 page)

The track continued for about three-quarters of a mile through the forest. And it was no longer easy going. Branches and dead lianas had fallen across it; there was one place where a whole dead tree, a corpse that had been standing propped up by its fellows, had suddenly collapsed, completely
blocking the way. The trunk was so thick that it formed a barrier waist high. They climbed over it like children clambering over a breakwater. On the other side they paused, winded, looking at each other. Then they started running again; not sprinting this time, but running with head down and arms hanging, their hearts beating high up in their throats.

They both caught sight of their goal at the same moment. It was a little landing stage with three native boats pulled up there. It lay peaceful and deserted in a circle of dancing sunlight. “We'll get into one and smash the others,” thought Dunnett. “Then they won't be able to follow.” He pulled at Carmel's arm—she was lagging behind by now—and tugged her in the direction of the boats. At first the sunlight in the clearing hurt when they came to it: it was so brilliant and so sudden. They shaded their eyes with their hands but still it burnt. It was like blundering into a small furnace lit by arc lamps.

There was one last tree thirty yards from the landing stage. It stood there in a vivid circle of purple shadow. They had just reached it when Dunnett saw something move by one of the boats. He stopped abruptly and looked at it. There was another movement and he could see clearly enough what it was. Someone was sitting there under a broad hat, a rifle resting across his knees. Dunnett motioned Carmel behind him and hailed the man. It wasn't going to be too easy, this business of stealing a boat from under the nose of a man with a rifle.

At the sound of the shout the man jumped up. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and stood there threatening them. It was then that Dunnett realised that so far as that tattered suit of rags could be called a uniform it was a Paraguayan uniform that he was wearing. This solitary sentry was another tribute to Major Schultz's omniscience. They got into cover behind the tree just as the man fired.

“So this is the end,” Carmel said. “No military river for us.”

Dunnett did not reply. He removed Mr. Verking's revolver from his pocket and began weighing it in his hand. He was aware of only two sensations. One was hatred of that solitary figure in front, a deep, blinding hatred that he had never felt towards any man before; and the other of resentment of the fact that Carmel Muras pronounced the word “military” with the accent on the wrong syllable. As he stood there flattened up against the tree trunk, both sensations seemed about equally important.

The guard, however, had moved round until the two figures were in view again and had begun firing on them again. A long shaving of living wood was whisked off the tree and fell at their feet. Dunnett and Carmel retired to the further side and waited. It was like playing peek-a-bo with a madman. The guard came nearer still. He began another flanking movement with all the patience of a sportsman at a squirrel shoot, and got ready to fire once more. The bullet went humming into the distance behind them. Dunnett put his face cautiously round the trunk in time to see what was happening.

When he saw, he pushed Carmel into safety and hurriedly withdrew himself. A moment later a bullet came whistling through the air where his head had been. By now the guard was annoyed. He came ten paces nearer and got ready to fire again. Dunnett took a second hasty look and got the thickness of the tree between them. Another bullet came whizzing in their direction. This one did not go wide. It hit the trunk with a noise like a face being slapped. Then there was silence again while the guard began another flanking manoeuvre. It was this period of brief armistice that was hardest to bear. To stand still was simply to wait to be shot down. And to move was to risk shifting directly into his line of fire.

But now that it was evident that the guard was determined not merely to keep them off but actually to kill them, Dunnett found his earlier calmness returning. It was such a simple equation. Either the guard would get him or Dunnett would
get the guard with Mr. Verking's revolver. He wondered how far a revolver bullet would carry and how steady you had to hold a revolver when you fired it. He wondered also how long it would be before they were caught from behind. He was still wondering, when the river guard got in his best shot. It came so close to Dunnett's head that for a moment he almost thought he had been hit. The bullet seemed to make a separate little report in the air as it passed him, almost as though someone had snapped his fingers in his ear. He sprang back, a cold sweat breaking out on him. But he had seen what he wanted to see. The guard was within a stone's throw of the tree, bending over refilling his magazine. They could hear the
ping
as the old cartridge clips were expelled from the magazine.

“Aren't you going to do anything?” Carmel asked contemptuously. “You're armed.”

“Shut up,” Dunnett answered.

He went down on all fours and began crawling round the tree. It was as Dunnett began crawling that his leg started to hurt. Until that moment it had been merely a gory and unsightly mess. But now it began throbbing in long jumping spasms like tooth-ache. It seemed to be right open to the bone across the knee-cap, and it was on the knee-cap he was kneeling: the earth was being ground into it. But he did not pause. He crawled with the wild haste of a man who, in the face of sudden death, wants to go on living. Carmel looked down on him with a disgusted contempt as he wriggled past her; a real man, she tried to tell him, would have jumped out and killed the guard by now instead of getting carefully out of harm's way. But he went on crawling. Soon the guard came into view. Only it was his back this time. He showed almost the full width of his shoulders. Dunnett raised Mr. Verking's revolver, closed his eyes and fired.

It was a large revolver and the noise was like that of a mine going off. The river guard went to pieces in the middle where the bullet hit him—Dunnett could see the old-fashioned, slow-velocity bullet knock bits off him as he stood there— and fell forward on to his face. Dunnett clapped his hand
to his shoulder which felt dislocated from the recoil, and shouted, “Come on, now is our chance,” and they were running again.

They had the choice of three boats. Two were flimsy native canoes. They went straight for the third. It was a twenty foot punt with a rough awning over it. Its name was
Conchita
. There was nothing about it to commend it: it was dirty, awkward to handle, almost unsteerable and not particularly river worthy. There were paddles in the bottom and some old cartridge cases. It was General Orero's private duck-shooting punt that they were stealing.

As soon as they had cast loose, the current got hold of them. It twirled the boat round and sent it moving smartly down the stream towards Subrico. Dunnett began to paddle. But it was no use: the river was stronger. With a firm and gentle certainty it took charge of them. Then Dunnett grew desperate: he used the blade as though making a racing spurt. The punt shuddered as if surprised and the sedgy banks ceased gliding by them. Another spurt, and they were actually moving up-stream. They were fleeing from the enemy at nearly three miles an hour.

Carmel was lying stretched out on the floor of the boat. She lay there unmoving, almost as though she had fallen. He looked at her, pityingly, wondering what he could ever say to comfort her. But somehow it was not only of her that he was thinking. It was of himself and of the man whom he had killed. At the time it had seemed the only thing to do, it was the last desperate endeavour of an escaping man. But now, looking back on it, he saw that it was murder. He, Harold Dunnett, was a murderer. They'd hang him if they got hold of him. But not the Bolivians. It wasn't murder to them; it was warfare. He'd only be hanged if the perfect strangers up the river caught up with him. Curious how everything got mixed up in war. But the thought of murder began to eat into his brain. “I've killed a man,” he kept saying in rhythm with the strokes he was making. “I've killed a man. I've killed a man.” He went on repeating it, long after he had
ceased to be an individual at all and had become simply an insanely straining piece of mechanism attached to the boat, something that sweated and bled and propelled it forward.

“I guess you saved my life.”

The words came to him out of the air, attached to nothing. He stopped paddling for a moment and stared in Carmel's direction. “What did you say?” he asked.

“I said you had saved my life,” Carmel answered. She had turned and was sitting in the bows looking at him.

But he could not understand. He had reached that point of fatigue where his body was able to keep on only because his mind had already given out. There was room for only two thoughts in his brain: that he had killed a man and that he must keep on paddling. All the rest was a vague, indefinite blur into which odd, disconnected images came drifting. The only physical thing that he was conscious of was pain.

“Must go on paddling,” he said vacantly. “I've killed a man.” He put his head down and did not speak again. The only time he paused was when he straightened his back long enough to strike at the flies that now covered him. They were everywhere. On his neck, in his ears, on the red expanse of his leg. They were feasting on him, their small, unclean feet sucking down on to the tired skin. And they were all sizes —tiny midges like brown dust, great mud-coloured clegs with red wings and armour-plated bodies that went on feeding long after they had been bitten, and filigree inventions with gossamer wings and waving antennae and transparent bodies. The worst were the mosquitoes. The air was grey with them: they followed the boat like a festoon of smoke. Wherever they bit, a large purple weal appeared. Dunnett's back began to look as though he had been beaten.

He stopped paddling only when his heart began jumping about inside his breast and a curtain of blackness descended in front of his eyes. Then he lifted in his blade and sat back, his lungs heaving, while the river dragged the boat into the side and left it held fast by a tangle of overhanging branches and green, drooping creepers. He looked stupidly at his leg
for a while as though it were someone else's and then, with Carmel holding his arm to steady him, crossed over to the gunwale and cautiously thrust his whole leg into the river.

At first it felt cool, like balm. Then the water worked through to the wound and it felt as though acid had been poured on it. But something was happening within the water itself. Where the blood had stained it was now a swirling, fighting mass of fish. From nowhere, the piranhas had darted up river for a meal. As he snatched his leg back again one or two of them jumped out of the water after it. He caught up his paddle and began striking at them. The paddle cut through one of them. The fish rose belly upwards and came to the surface. But only for an instant; a moment later it had disappeared. Only a little fleet of teeth in the water showed where it had been.

After that, the river took on a different complexion: it became actively hostile. They looked down at the green, whispering corridor and realised that death was waiting there; waiting with the superb indifference of something that knows beyond the tremor of a doubt that it is going to get its own way in the end. The realisation heightened all their senses. They remembered they were soft-fleshed, warm-blooded animals, badly out of their element, and began fingering the thin boards to see how little there was that separated them from the nastiness below. When an alligator that had been resting on the bank, pawed ponderously at the mud and dragged himself into the water like a sack of grain sliding down a shoot, Carmel drew back to the further side of the boat, even though the creature was thirty yards off.

“What would happen if one of those things came up underneath us?” she asked.

“It'd be the end of us,” Dunnett answered slowly. “That's what'd happen.” He gave a little laugh as he said it; but as soon as he heard himself laughing he stopped. It must be that he was a trifle light-headed, he realised. But somehow it still seemed funny. Just the two of them in a twenty foot punt on a summer's afternoon. They ought to get out the spirit
stove and start a picnic. But there wasn't any picnic, at least not their picnic. They were intruders. This river belonged to another sort of life. Down there under the mangrove roots lived the real residents; and up among the lianas where the hanging gardens of the jungle were suspended. There was no room anywhere for a boy and a girl in a punt. A boy and a girl; that was the crux of the thing. It was Eden all over again; only in a-rowing boat this time. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and took up the paddle again; the scales of the dead piranha were still adhering to it.

“We've got to get out of this,” he muttered. “I've killed a man.”

When they stopped it was noon. The midday hush had arrived. The whole steaming jungle was asleep. It lay there sweltering; the air was as close as a sick room. A spray of red and yellow orchids hanging down from a dead branch dangled over the end of the boat as gaudy as a tassel at the circus, and exhaled their own peculiar reek, like antiquated musk. When he looked closely he saw that every fold of the petals was a sticky cemetery: the plant was feeding on all the numerous small fry that had alighted there. They weren't flowers at all; they were gaudy little animals on a stalk, a score of greedy moist-lipped mouths set on one narrow tortuous neck. He turned away in distaste. Beside those voracious blooms, the dead wood of the supporting branch seemed wholesome and cleanly.

And now that he looked he saw how much of the jungle was dead already. He had imagined a vigorous jungle, a dense sea-green mass of vegetation; life pouring up upon the ground and flourishing in its most fantastic forms. But it was death, not life, that was around him. Half the trees had died, garrotted by the creepers that enfolded them. They lay, their top leaves submerged in the water, slowly and ingloriously rotting into slime, or charred by fire and now, stark like antlers, standing gaunt in the midst of profusion.