The Devil's Garden (22 page)

The light was strengthening. I reached both my arms above my head in order to grip the cross-spur. I expected more resistance but a single wrench and it dropped to one side. I prised away the
verticals above where it had collapsed – one, two, three, four came away easily. I twisted again. The job was almost done: I had a hole through which I could crawl.

I rolled onto my stomach. I wriggled and kicked myself forward. Soil packed beneath my fingernails. I pressed myself into the earth. My shoulders caught. I spat. The wood splintered. And
suddenly I was through and looking at the outside wall of the hut in the blue light of the waking forest.

VII

The termites are the enemies of the ants.

Their kings do not die moments after sex. They live in state with the queens. All the eggs are fertilized – male and female. There are no drone-clones. And yet their progeny cooperate
without any need for the sophistry of kin-selection defence. In this way, the termites mock the myrmecologists. They say, the reason you do not study us is because we live beneath mud and faeces
and cannot be easily watched in the lab; they say, the reason you do not study us is that the ants are related to wasps, but we are related to cockroaches; they say the reason you do not study us
is to do with human psychology; they say,
Homo sapiens
, you fools, do you not see your own reflection staring back at you in the lens of your microscopes and your telescopes, obscuring every
object on which you cast your gaze; they say, our society is more complex than you can imagine; they say, we are born altruists for we cooperate regardless; they say, our soldiers are made to
defend against our enemies the ants, which is why their heads are so big – so that they can block our tunnels against these intruders; they say, our soldiers stand behind one another –
and when one falls, the next takes its place; they say, when the intrusion is bigger than a soldier’s head, our soldiers range themselves like Roman infantry in tight formations and blindly
bite and squirt their toxins through their horns; they say that these sticky sprays kill or immobilize the stinging ants at a ratio of twenty ants lost to only one termite soldier; they say that
while their soldiers fight, the workers repair the breached tunnels behind them, leaving all the soldiers stranded beyond the repair with no retreat and so to die; they say blessed are the meek for
they might inherit the Earth after all.

VIII

I found the mound easily.
Nasutitermes costalis
. I scraped and sifted. Workers teemed about the damage. I watched the soldiers scramble. Then I scooped out handfuls
of alates – white, winged, plump as beans – and filled my pockets. Three times, I stripped wings and swallowed. I would not be consumed by hunger at least. I would ward off that madness
for as long as I could. I smeared the dirt from their mound on my skin against the mosquitoes.

I turned to face the little clearing.

A grey-necked wood rail was singing what remained of the dawn – its call like hysterical laughter. There were no other buildings. The hut looked feeble from the outside – small,
contingent. I circled the clearing seeking where the path came in and where it must surely leave. I breathed in the cool and filled my lungs as if it were some life-giving draught of resilience and
resolve.

I found two tracks, diverging, and was pleased that there were no more. I remembered that while they had been leading me by the hand, the ground had sloped down a little. On this remembrance and
nothing more, I chose the upward gradient and hurried away, smeared in filth, bruised and bitten and hobbling where I had damaged my toes.

But I had taken no more than two dozen steps before I faltered. Already, the hut looked like a place of great security. I stopped and the sounds of the forest seemed likewise
to pause as though to say: you have half an hour’s amnesty – be wise. Indecision held me. I considered the possibility of crouching in the forest, waiting for my captors to return. But
what then – if ever they did? Attack them? Besides, the march here had not been that long. No, my hope was surely that this path on which I had started remained distinct and clear and soon
intersected with that on which we had been carrying our equipment. If I was lucky, I would hit the river. If not, I could always come back to the clearing and walk out of the other side. I set off
again.

The light was no longer changing but had settled into its uniform green-brown and time soon became impossible to judge. The heat was itchy and close – and it felt like
the jungle was slowly being simmered, warmer and warmer, on the instruction of some malign spirit whose kingdom bustled beneath the thin topsoil. Whether I was following an old rubber trail or one
of the Indian paths, I had no idea. Perversely, the places where the jungle thinned were the most treacherous – since the way was clearer where it had been hacked through dense
undergrowth.

I became lost only when I turned around and saw that behind me the path forked and I did not know which of the two I had just emerged from. Instantly, the anxiety surged and I felt my fragile
composure drowning in the onrushing tide. I retraced my steps. I was still holding to the idea that I might return to the hut if I did not come upon the river this way.

At a low thorn-spiked loop I did not recognize, I turned back on myself again – in the original direction of my flight as I thought – but now the path forked
ahead
of me. I
ran on. Ten paces, twenty.

Here, inexplicably, the forest had almost no understorey; the ferocious impenetrability of vine and thorn and frond and bush had mysteriously disappeared. I had the sense of being in a
cathedral. There were mighty trees all around me, their trunks soaring like columns towards the distant canopy. I swayed. Creation was singing all about my ears.

Tricks, I thought. Tricks of light and space and time. Everything looked the same. Everything looked different. I felt dizzy. My tongue felt alien in my mouth. I imagined that my sweat was
thickening. Fear swamped me again. I dug in my pocket. My hands were cut and smarting and caked in every shade of dirt. I held up the termites in my palms, licking them up, swallowing them alive,
greedily, without stripping their wings.

There was wildness in admitting that I was lost – exhilaration in the despair, in the abandonment of even the possibility of caution. Instead, I could now plunge on, fast, wherever the
path led, without the anxiety of becoming lost, sure instead that the only new eventuality was that I would
find
my way again.

At every fork in the path, I chose the left and then the right, the left and then the right. My only rule was to alternate. Many times, I reached a wall of tangle and turned
around. Panic raced in, overwhelmed me, abated a little, left me alone. My clothes were as a second rancid skin. But I knew that as long as the sweat continued my dehydration was not acute. There
was water in the vines but I had no knife, nor could I trust myself to know which was fresh and which poisoned. No senseless running, Lothar had said. No panic. Time does not matter in the forest,
only staying alive. Already, I had only the most primitive plan: to find the water and to follow it.

I fell into a trance. My forward stumble was broken only by a new sound or a gap where a tree had fallen and the sun could be glimpsed. Then I would come to my senses and
rally. Anger permeated my limbs and I made faster progress and I called it progress. I told myself that I had been deprived for less than forty hours . . . that it was as nothing; a faddish diet; a
minor illness; a busy day.

A bird was singing a song that sounded like a sparrow’s. I saw my city and my former life and a spirit of great clarity overtook me. And I understood that the old
relationship had been reversed; that I had been growing more sane with every step; that I was insane before I came here; that the jungle had not made me mad but that it had returned me to my right
senses; that I would survive and come to know and see the world as it truly was; that I would no longer be uncertain, guilty, agitated, distracted, enraged, maddened, preyed upon against my will,
isolated, isolating. Then my mind flew up and I saw my own human existence as a flashing moment in the endless expansion of the universe. And I saw, too, that it must always be our compulsion to
fashion meaning – from soul to the stars and back again. What else could we do? We must throng the empty heavens with our imaginations. And our imaginations must forever outshine our reason
– for how else could we redeem our solitude?

I saw that we are indeed the authors of our own story and that it is ours to write.

And laughing, I walked on.

I ate termites. I invented rituals. I counted steps. At forks, I broke branches and twisted them so that I would know if I came to the same place. I saw a snake and marked the
place as evil with a cleft stick. And when I came on them again, I found that these signs made to myself had swollen into a great significance. The news that they conveyed – of intelligence,
of concern – this news seemed transcendent to me; though I knew well, with another part of my mind, that the intelligence was only mine and the concern but a genus of my own desperation. And
all the while the animal was there – thirstier and thirstier, sickening.

I stopped and stood by a tree bearing berried fruit. Everything was nourishment. Everything was poisonous. I squeezed a berry and the juice ran. I dared not eat. I had not seen
even a stream.

The gloom was deepening when I heard a faint buzzing. I was shocked out of my shambling stupor. I stood still. Then I walked on. The noise rose a little. I walked faster. I
thought that it might be a chainsaw somewhere. I thought that there must be people ahead – loggers, happy loggers. I tore on through the undergrowth of the vanishing path in the direction of
the noise, my hopes surging uncontrollably. But the buzz had become a whine and I grew more and more confused and could not tell where the sound was coming from. I stopped and tried to listen.

Ahead, I thought.

I stepped forward and caught my foot and the noise disappeared and there was a great swishing sound and something dropped from above and swung and slapped heavy and wet and soft on the side of
my face.

I fell and twisted around in the leaf litter. A glinting black mass of flies swarmed above my head – seething, shining, oily. Broken-necked and swinging from the vine-rope, in the midst of
their fury, was a dead monkey – its mouth forced open into a silent scream by an upright stake through the tongue. Beneath, hanging from its slit belly by the congealed rope of an umbilical
cord, dangled a blood-stained foetus, curled up, pink and lipless, empty-eyed.

IX

I did not believe in the light until it revealed my legs to me: lifeless, rigid, twin cylinders of mud. I was the first man on Earth. I was numb. I raised my head from my
forearm pillow and looked up, following the trunk of my tree far into the indefinite light of the canopy. My mouth was an open sore. I rocked slowly from side to side. My blood was surely
thickening; I hauled my arms around my shoulders and so began a shooting agony as it pushed its sticky way into forgotten limbs. For a long time, I dared not climb down.

I lumbered and breathed in the grey-blue brume. I would choose a vine and split it open with my bare hands and I would drink whatever ran there. All my rules were broken.

I could smell the earth caked about my nostrils. Clay. Small pieces of grit had entered my mouth. I could taste the soil.

I could not see. There was a snowstorm in my eyes. My bowels were squirting and I dared not stand but must crouch, holding myself against a tree. My head grew lighter. The
stench of my own faeces caused me to retch.

There was a buzzing all about my ears again. The Meliponinae, stingless bees. Necrophagous, filth-gatherers, collectors of carrion and excrement, consumers of liquid salt; dead
flesh not pollen their protein. They crawled across the skin of my legs seeking the sweat of my groin as I tried to run.

A terrible lethargy overcame me. My mind fell silent. I swayed as I walked. I was a dying animal.

When I came into the Devil’s Garden, I fell to my knees amidst the wizened plants. One by one, greedily, I ate my ants. They tasted of lemon.

I

I do not know how long I knelt. But slowly I began to realize that I had all along been contriving a certain kind of madness so as not to allow the real thing; that I had
been pretending the end of my endurance so as to garner covert comfort in knowing that it was not yet quite reached. Everything was my own creation: the signs I had made, the ceremonies of my
path-taking. The sudden understandings were of no consequence and all that I had told myself to be true I had known in my heart to be false. The self that scrutinized was as unreliable as the self
that hid. Everything was delusion except for my body and the forest itself. And my body, which did not lie or imagine or contrive a story where there was none, wanted only to convulse. I tasted
acid and bile. Yet there was neither dignity nor cowardice in my dry weeping, only physical relief. The jungle had showed to me the meaning of my humanity: that I must eat and drink and void
myself, that I must sweat and sleep; that I lived only as an organism, a body, a creature of the earth. I was at site fourteen – the largest of the Devil’s Gardens. The walk to the
river was no more than seven minutes. I would not lose my way.