The Rain Forest Page 26

  ‘What does he do there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hugh remained with Kristy till the sun touched the horizon then he had to set out for the office. As he walked down the road, the first flame streaks of the sunset reached out overhead. He was late but refused to hurry. The evening show of scarlet and aurum filled the sky then in an instant, like a conjuring trick, the colours were gathered into the black of night. He quickened his steps. The stars, appearing almost at once, looked to Hugh unusually clear and brilliant. He saw the reason for this when he reached the square. The upper road was unlit. The Government Offices were in darkness. He could see the flash of torches as men moved about inside, probably trying to trace the fault. He found the porter standing in the doorway and decided to wait there with him till the lights came on.

  ‘In one, two minutes, all good,’ the porter said. The lights had failed to come on after sunset but, luckily, the engineers had been on the spot and were putting things right.

  Standing in the darkness, Hugh could hear the rustle of the land-crabs as they made their nightly journey down to the stream. He breathed in the scents of the lemon vine, the white cleodendrum, the fabled cereus, the gardenia trees and felt their luxury was overpowering. This world was not for Kristy and him. Could he, he wondered, break his contract and return home with her?

  A van drew up in the square and two men jumped out of it. As they approached, Hugh saw they were carrying a large laundry-basket. One of them shouted: ‘Manashef nadtheefa’ and the porter, cheerfully standing aside for them, said jokingly: ‘You work late tonight.’

  Laughing good-humouredly, the men went into the dark building and the porter, full of a sense of his important position, told Hugh a long story about rivalry among the supplicants who were still sitting on the white seat, not caring whether the lights were on or off.

  The story was in mid-flow when a group of men, six or eight of them, came pelting across the hall and flung themselves out of the door with a vigour that was like panic. Each was holding an electric torch and as a light lit on Hugh’s face, one of the men caught his arm.

  ‘I am Mohammed. Musa’s man. Run. Run quickly.’

  ‘But why?’

  Mohammed made no reply but gripping Hugh fiercely by the wrist, he propelled him across the square and up the road past the church. Looking back and seeing no one was following, Hugh could make nothing of this treatment. If there was cause for urgency, the fact was known only to those who ran with him. He shouted: ‘Haven’t you warned the others?’ but as he spoke, it was too late for warning. The explosion came in a chain of noise, one detonation rising from the other, and as the blast rushed between Hugh and his captor, Mohammed let go his hold and Hugh was blown against the Residency wall. The adobe surface gave as he struck it and he was no more than half-stunned as he went to the ground. Mohammed, bending over him, said: ‘I go now. I go.’

  Hugh dropped his head, unwilling to move, and feeling the earth sinking beneath him, he clung to it and let it carry him down.

  PART THREE

  The Rain Forest

  1

  Kristy, still on the balcony, was shaken out of her indifference by the explosion. She roused herself and watched in amazement as blocks of white coral, rising into the distant darkness, were caught in the yellow glimmer from the hospital windows. They rose in an unhurried way, like bubbles rising in water, then, turning as in some elaborate juggling act, they fell back and others took their place. Landing somewhere, they made a slapping noise as though they were striking water.

  There had been an earlier alarm when the lights failed. The Indian nurse had been on her way to Kristy but turned, calling: ‘I come back’ and went to see what the trouble was. There had been darkness filled with the cries and chatter of the patients, then the hospital dynamo was started up. Emergency lights came on and the patients laughed though the lights were so weak that some were red and some yellowish-brown. The Indian nurse had just returned to the balcony when the uproar started below.

  ‘What is it, you think?’ She leant over the balcony rail then, as though time were running swiftly backwards, she was swept into the corridor and flung against the table.

  Kristy, alone on her precarious eyrie, heard the explosions gathering force, swelling and breaking into reverberations and counter-reverberations, striking the cliff behind the hospital and making the whole building rattle. The windows broke, glass crashed to the ground outside and the patients wailed in terror.

  The noise died out at last and Kristy found herself unhurt.

  Simon Hobhouse, driving down from the Medina, picked out a body by the light of his headlamps. It was a male body in European dress and as people passed, excitedly running down to the square, they tripped over it or jumped over it. Simon stopped because it looked familiar. When he bent over it, he found it was Hugh Foster, the man he had been going to visit.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here? I nearly ran you down.’ Getting no reply, he dragged Hugh into the back seat of the Land-Rover, shone a torch on his face and finding he was alive, threw a blanket over him.

  By this time the road was packed with people, all eagerly making their way to the scene of the detonation. Driving slowly through them, Simon reached the church and decided to go no farther. He could just discern by the light from the stars the vast pyramid of coral that had once formed the Government Offices. Crowded round its perimeter were Arabs, Indians and Negroes, all in a state of admiration, gazing, shouting but doing nothing else. Simon was no more inclined than they to start rescue work. Backing the Land-Rover in beside the church, he turned and drove uphill against the flow of pedestrians and cyclists. All the way up to the plantations, they came rollicking down on either side, slapping the Land-Rover on the bonnet and bawling excitedly across it.

  Some distance along the plantation road, Simon met the cavalcade coming down from the police barracks. As the vehicles manoeuvred to pass him on the narrow track, Culbertson leant out from his armoured car and gazed into the Land-Rover: ‘Who’s that? Hobhouse? Where d’you think you’re going? Don’t you know the Offices have collapsed? Our chaps are under the rubble? Aren’t you going to give a hand?’

  Simon stared at Culbertson, considered the proposition, and said: ‘No.’

  ‘God damn it, Hobhouse, you’re a doctor. We’ll need all the help we can get.’

  ‘You’ll find plenty down there, if you can organize it. And you’d better hurry. They’re buried and pretty soon they’ll be smothered.’ Simon threw back his head and laughed, then, mounting the earth at the side of the road, accelerated and passed the procession while Culbertson bawled after him. He drove round the Medina wall and stopped in the car park. He looked for the owner of the petrol pump and finding the café empty, he took the pump key from the ledge where it was kept and filled his petrol tank. He did not stop again until he was through the orchards and had reached the Moslem cemetery on the edge of the grasslands. He shook Hugh and asked: ‘Are you all right?’

  Hugh mumbled and put an arm over his face.

  Simon went on, his headlights touching the gravestones that were all much alike: a narrow pillar capped with a stone turban for the males, a wave of hair for the women. Chameleons, disturbed, swivelled their eyes and scuffled out of sight. As the Land-Rover rocked over the grassland, Hugh sat up and wondered where they were going.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Simon asked him.

  ‘All right. My head hurts.’

  ‘We’ll clean that up when we get to the camp.’

  Hugh dropped down again, knowing, in his lower consciousness, that if he tried to discover his reason for being there, something would force him to return to whatever he had left behind. With Simon, he felt the contentment of a child in the hands of his father. They were going somewhere. He did not know where but the journey roused in him a creative expectation. Something remained to be discovered.

  He lay with his eyes open, watching the darkness pass. Near the top of the grassland they ca
me into a region of standing objects, large phallic shapes that could have been menhirs, showing more darkly than the dark. The headlight, touching them, revealed a broken surface. If they were stones, they were patterned stones. Their spaced presence seemed ominous to Hugh but Simon stopped among them and said they would stay there till daybreak.

  ‘The col’s no place for night driving. You keep the blanket. I’ve got a sleeping-bag.’ Simon went off with his sleeping-bag to lie down among the menhirs. Hugh, wrapping himself in the blanket, fell into a deep sleep and did not wake till the mountainside was lit by the dawn. He sat up and saw that the menhirs were not stones but plants. He asked Simon what they were.

  ‘Lobelia and tree daisy.’

  Hugh laughed and let it pass. Through the back window of the Land-Rover, he could see the barracks, the island’s northern outpost, a long way below them. He had not realized that the grassland, usually hidden by mist, was so extensive. Now, in the cool, clear light, he saw it rolling down to the Medina, a pasturage for sheep, goats and camels. He had not even known that there were camels on the island. An Arab shepherd was riding among his flocks. Other horsemen were coming through the north gate of the city, cantering and cavorting their horses as though in pleasure of the morning. Looking down from this height, he was surprised to see patches of green among the pink and cream roofs of the city. There were gardens, vegetable plots, small pieces of tillage inside the Medina. The whole of its north-west corner was a park surrounding a residence of considerable size. The whole brilliant and soundless scene looked to him like a mirage of the world the Arabs had left centuries before: a world in little, that belonged elsewhere, incongruously transported to the southern seas.

  As they drove on, the Medina slipped down out of sight. Hugh, with no distractions, had to face his own doubts. He said: ‘There was an explosion last night. I’ve just remembered it.’

  ‘It knocked you out. I found you lying beside the road. Something blew up.’

  ‘But shouldn’t we be down there? We might be needed.’

  ‘It was nothing much. The police were there in force. They can manage without us. But I hope Easterbrook’s all right. I’m composing another riposte for him and I don’t want it wasted.’

  Simon’s face was gleeful and Hugh thought of that other man – was it Samuel Butler – who spent his intellectual fortune on squibs to put under the statues of the great. He said: ‘You may be above social restriction but you’re not above social combat. You enjoy quarrelling with people.’

  Simon laughed: ‘I know I’ve made enemies. One day I’ll show you my more maleficent letters. I think you’ll be entertained.’

  ‘But what exactly happened down at the offices?’

  ‘A wall blew out. It’ll disrupt the routine, I imagine, and that gives you an excuse for taking a week-end trip.’

  ‘Is that what we’re doing? – taking a week-end trip?’

  ‘We’ll be back on Sunday.’

  Hugh felt both disappointed and reassured by the briefness of the excursion. It had seemed to him, on waking, that he had deserted someone or something but while lying half-stunned on the back seat he had had, in the darkness, a dreamlike belief that he was being carried away from the limitations of the known world.

  They were going steadily uphill. The grass was becoming coarse and sparse. The fingers of rock that stretched down into it, gradually broadened until there was no grass, only rock. There was no life of any kind and no track. The Land-Rover glanced off the uneven rock and skidded in small moraines of shale and swayed like a ship in a heavy sea, but it kept going. Conditioned to the steamy heat of the lower areas, Hugh felt the mountain cold and wrapped the blanket about him. Simon had an anorak on the seat beside him, but he did not stop to put it on.

  The peaks, already misted over, became visible as they approached and for all their impressive immensity, were revealed as merely stone. The col between them was the valley of a little stream that gently, through the millennia, had cut the mountain in half. The floor of the col, just wide enough to take the Land-Rover, was strewn with rock pieces and dank with the water that trickled between them. The mountainsides permitted no sunlight but a luminosity, reflected down from the top, lit the crevice with a ghastly twilight. On previous trips, Simon had cleared a way through the rocks but there had been fresh falls and it was Hugh’s job to get down and move obstructions as they met them.

  Hugh wanted to know when had Simon come first through the pass?

  ‘Two years ago. I came with an expedition that was financed partly by government funds and partly by a firm prospecting for metals. The agents for the firm found nothing and the rest of us didn’t find much. For some time there’d been an idea that the north of the island might lend itself for industrial development, but it’s what used to be called an “inhospitable shore”. There’s no natural harbour, no ground suitable for an air-strip and the cost of clearing the forest would be prohibitive. Also, as you’ll see for yourself, the place has a discouraging atmosphere. It’s no tourists’ trap, I can assure you. The team, what was left of it, soon felt they’d had enough. I was the only one with any ambition to return.’

  ‘What brought you back?’

  ‘Curiosity. Something interesting occurred on the survey. Unusually interesting. There were seven of us: five mineralogists and an engineer. I went as medico and general factotum. Three of the mineralogists fell ill. They had temperatures between 103° and 105° and were too sick to crawl out of the tent. I gave them camoquin but it had no effect. That evening, when I went in to look at them, I found them dead.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘What indeed? I have no idea. There had always been a rumour among the Arabs that the slaves who escaped here, did not last long. It was put down to propaganda. No one was much interested. The north of the island has always been seen as a waste-land, not worth the cost of clearing. But now the world has grown small and people are hungry for land. I suppose, sooner or later, even this bit of forest will be destroyed.’

  ‘So that’s why the forest is out of bounds? – because the men died?’

  ‘Yes.’ Simon slid his eyes round to look at Hugh and asked with an amused irony: ‘You aren’t nervous, are you?’

  ‘No, but I’m not suicidal, either.’ Hugh spoke rather sharply, but, remembering the story of Ambrose and the smallpox patient said nothing more.

  Simon stopped the Land-Rover and pointed to a rivulet that came out of the rock: ‘There is the begetter of the twin peaks. Without that little fountain there would have been no pass and the slaves would have had no escape route. Look, you see that point of rock! It divides the stream so that one half goes south and the other north. There are, in effect, two streams. The one flowing north will provide us with our drinking water.’

  Driving on, Simon talked, taking it for granted that Hugh’s desire for knowledge was as dispassionate as his own. He said: ‘I am particularly interested in the possibility of a new virus; or, rather an undiscovered virus. Some scientists believe we are due for another viral assault. When one species has over-bred itself, as we have, nature strikes back with a decimating force. We keep parrying the blows but one day a blow will come from an unexpected quarter. It could come from this little area of forest.’

  Hugh moved uneasily: ‘You might have warned me that coming here, I’d be at risk.’

  ‘One’s at risk everywhere. You could go down any day with a dose of flu.’

  ‘Flu,’ Hugh said with contempt.

  ‘Flu killed fifteen million people after the first war. That was a viral assault all right.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Who knows!’

  The col ended. Bumping down a flight of stone, the Land-Rover came to rest on a flat rock and Simon paused to let Hugh survey the forbidden territory.

  It was, as Simon had said, discouraging and the most discouraging factor was the light. It was mid-morning, the time when on the southern side the light was like honey, containing within
its gold a spangle that was more gold. Here the light was sickly, thrown from a sky that was white with the exhalations from the forest. The grassland, spacious on the other side, here dropped abruptly for not more than half a mile. So Hugh had the impression that the forest was only just below them. The front ranks of trees stretched from shore to shore and behind them the forest was a neat map of darkness. There was no break of any kind. Nowhere, it seemed to him, where an entry could be made.

  ‘Yet you’re managed to get into it?’

  ‘But not through here. I did try to cut my way in but even a band of machetes could not get you far. The vegetation grows behind you. It encloses you. You feel it stifling you.’

  Hugh’s uneasiness became acute: ‘Don’t you think we’ve come far enough?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. I didn’t bring you here to show you the view. I’ve discovered something. I want you to see it.’

  They bumped slowly down the grassland towards the two tents that Simon had set up. The tents, that offered refuge of a sort, were to Hugh the only congenial objects in the whole distasteful scene. The vapour veils were thickening over the forest and forming into clouds that drifted and dispersed and gave way to new formations that dispersed in their turn. As the mist grew heavy, the white disc of the sun, appearing and disappearing through the vapour, gave out a glare that fretted the nerves. Hugh felt himself abducted indeed, and he was no longer complacent and suddenly he remembered Kristy. This was the day he was supposed to pick her up and take her back to the Daisy.

  As they drew near the forest line, it broke into detail and he saw that the trees were joined by a matting of creeper. Some of the tree daisies stood like monuments about Simon’s tents and pointing to the sunbirds that fluttered about them, he said: ‘These are my companions. I feed them and two or three are so tame now, they come into my tent. Here, you see, I have not only a house but a garden. I sleep in the small tent and work in the larger one. This is my living-room.’