Turning Back the Sun(58)

CHAPTER

25

The patrol crossed a treeless savannah where nothing moved. The grass whispered under the wheels, and the cracked earth carried them forward as if over a parquet floor. But they travelled blindly, by compass point, because no landmark—not the faintest ridge or knoll—broke the haze on the horizon.

They had set off in four jeeps and a hush of secrecy before dawn, as if the natives might hear of their departure and somehow send news ahead. This feeling of being observed, which infected all the town, had spread even to the officers—Ivar and a surly lieutenant—who restrained the soldiers from singing or cheering as they left. Their objective, too, was secret.

All morning they rustled across the plain over grasses which thrashed and whined against the truck sides. Then eucalyptus trees and acacia appeared, and airy shrubs which splattered the windscreens with pollen and burned-out seedpods. The ground turned noiseless under them. The jeeps spewed up a trail of red dust which penetrated even the men”s cartridge-magazines. A few bleached-looking birds twittered in the trees. Although they had long ago left behind any sign of habitation, they twice surprised cattle grazing in the underbush: black or brindled steers which lifted their heads in terror and blundered away through the scrub.

Rayner travelled in the rear jeep, beside the driver. Six soldiers sat facing one another behind, their rifles unloaded between their knees. They had started out exchanging boisterous jokes and lewd songs, but the heat and silence, the lonely immensity of wilderness and—now—their distance from home, had gradually turned them quiet. One by one they had peeled off their battle-dress shirts and sat sweating bare-chested, but the faces under their bush hats had gone uneasy. Rayner could feel the perspiration dropping down his ribs under his army shirt, but dared not take it off. He asked the driver, “Where d”you think we”re headed?”

“Dunno, sir. Reckon it”s due south. But there”s nothing there.”

Already Rayner was nervous of their objective. He guessed they were making for a place where the savages presented a solid target. It would be typical of Ivar to mete out punishment as if the natives were a coherent nation, and a few raiders in one part of the wilderness identical to an isolated clan in another. The last clash had occurred fourteen years ago, Rayner remembered, against a savage raiding party sixty strong. No white man had been killed because the natives had never reached spear-throwing distance. The soldiers had simply gunned them down at a range of 120 meters and left their corpses to the sun.

He asked the driver, “Were you told to expect anything in particular?”

“No.” The man was squinting into dust. “Just maybe a battle.”

Now the forest had resolved into a harsh simplicity of red earth and white trees. It looked as if the rains of some earlier year had melted the ground into a rosy sea and smeared it over the jungle for hundreds of kilometers, until it had solidified again into this coral-colored pavement. The gum trees shone matt-white, like plaster of Paris, but often their bark had peeled back to reveal black, coagulated innards, as if the trees had burnt to death from inside.

They stopped three times to eat or rest. The soldiers debouched from their jeeps and dispersed among the trees to smoke against orders, or defecate. They were a motley lot, Rayner thought, many of them young and jittery. With each stop they seemed to trust the forest less, until at evening they reclined with their backs to the trucks and their rifles at their sides.

“You go into that fucking scrub,” said the platoon sergeant, “and in ten minutes you”ll be history. He”ll come and stick a spear in you and you won”t even see him.”

Once the convoy slid to an unplanned halt. Rayner saw nothing at first but a screen of trees, then the soldiers clambered out. He found them in a wan semicircle, their rifles drooped. In front of them, sunk to its axles in the scarlet earth, was a burnt-out jeep. Grey termite hills rose round it like tombstones. It must have lain rotting here for fourteen years, ever since the last troubles. But nobody, not even the sergeant or the half-caste corporal, could recall the incident in which it had been lost. It simply rested there inexplicably, pillaged of any identification. For a moment they gazed at it in silence, while butterflies flickered through its empty windscreen. Then Ivar ordered them to move on.

Rayner”s driver just murmured, “Christ!”

For a long time now the convoy had travelled over an earth prickling with termite hills. There were millions of them. They covered the ground like a fakir”s bed, and seemed to go on forever. The lighter ones crumbled in powdery bursts against the jeeps” bumpers, but the drivers wove between the larger ones in a wearying eternity of curves. So dust thickened and stifled the sky worse than before. The whole earth, Rayner felt, must have been sifted through the intestines of these termites. It caked the men”s bodies like a darkening skin.

Yet to Rayner, dreaming of Zo?, the forest had become attractive, and oddly restful. And its lifelessness, of course, was an illusion. The trees flashed with phosphorescent green and red parrots, and along the way a flock of blood-breasted cockatoos rose screaming from under their wheels. He even had the idea that he might find the old savage and his daughter wandering here, although he knew they could not have come so far and that they had taken another direction.

Toward sunset the convoy crossed a region charred by bush fires. Eucalyptus trees still writhed from the ground, or had fallen all of a piece in white trunks whose pith had festered through them like rust breaking through paint.