Turning Back the Sun(61)

“They”re not hostile?”

“I don”t know what they are. They”re not my people.”

Next moment, with bewildering suddenness, the rocky slopes dropped behind them and they were advancing under trees. With every step these thickened inexplicably round them, until they were moving down a dense, sunless glade. Giant silkwoods lifted from the shadows thirty meters or more, and tossed down a tangle of lianas or spun them overhead from branch to branch. Enormous they seemed, festooned with their creepers and lichen, and after the open savannah the damp smell of the rotted trunks and dark earth rose to the men”s nostrils with a fetid closeness. They went nervously now. Nobody spoke. The rifles slipped from their shoulders and into their arms. And their range of vision had dwindled drastically. Among the thronging trees a host of savages might have touched them with their hands. Rayner, moving in the center of the column, could not glimpse Ivar, near its head. Momentarily he forgot what the soldiers might do, and felt the threat of a spear tip in his back.

Then they came upon the explanation for this fertility: a deep, auburn river. It had risen somewhere higher in the bluffs, and must escape by another gorge to die far out in the wilderness. But for the moment it carried its rain forest luxuriantly between the cliffs. Turtles and thin black fish were swimming under the bank, and big trees had slumbered into the water, which was already brown with the tannin of rotted vegetation.

As the column advanced, it was clear to Rayner that the savages must know they were coming. The natives” traces were all about. A maze of stone fish traps ruffled the shallows, and he noticed a midden of shells in a water hole near the shore, where mussels had been baked in the earth and eaten. He remembered the mussel-shell necklace which the old man had given him, and was touched again by a fear that the couple might have reached here.

But there was still no sign of anybody. Even the mosquitoes seemed to have gone. The soldiers tried to tread lightly, but the forest floor was a matted commotion of fibers and palm branches, friable as bones underfoot. Their march across it detonated like pistol shots.

Only once, the column stopped to listen, and the forest fell silent. A diluted light survived here, like sunlight infiltrating a crypt. Parrots flew through its half-darkness. But all Rayner could hear was the rasp and click of leaves falling through branches to the ground. He prayed that the savages had taken fright and might simply watch from hiding places until the troops had gone; he even imagined a reception party at the end of the path, stately and bemused, with a basket of doughy welcome-cakes.

But instead the track ended in an empty space and a rearing cliff. The dying sunlight streamed in their faces. The scarp might have been no more than fifty meters high, but loomed immense in its suddenness: a red-rocked peninsula swept on its far sides by the river. Its size and clarity, cut by the brown water, proclaimed: this is a holy place.

The column shambled to a halt on the edge of the clearing, which was ringed by stones as if for ceremony, and Rayner saw that in its center stood a limestone pinnacle. The soldiers sat down in an exhaustion of heat and nerves, while Ivar and the lieutenant consulted quietly. Rayner took the half-caste corporal by the arm and turned him toward the pinnacle. “What is that?”

The man gazed at it with the faint knot of savage puzzlement, and said, “It”s something they worship.”

He seemed reluctant to walk over to it, but Rayner led him. A polished monolith six meters high, it grew more awesome as they reached it. It sprang from the flat earth with the lone momentum of a tree, and its base was piled with baskets of roots and berries.

Rayner said, “It”s not a god.”

“No. These people don”t make their gods.” The corporal apparently wanted to dispel his mistakes, but not to supply answers. Perhaps he did not have any. But he said, “This stone is more like a memory.”

“A memory of what?”

But the man pursed his lips and gazed up at the cliff. It was impossible to tell if he was being protective of native sanctities, or was just sensitive about his own mixed blood. Then Rayner added, “Is it the tree?”

The corporal turned his back and scrutinized the offerings. “Yes, they have some myth that this stone led up to heaven. Like a tree. You could climb up and down it.” He touched it with one hand, tentatively. “Who told you about that?”

“An old fellow I once treated. He said the tree was felled. And that was when everything began to go wrong.”

The sergeant”s boots scraped behind them, and the corporal”s voice, which had been wary and a little somber until then, changed. “That”s right, ever since then these poor fuckers have been lost,” he said. “They want to climb back but they can”t. So they”re stuck down here like the rest of us.”

Rayner recalled the old man”s sketch of the tree in the dust; he remembered his own childish illusion that perhaps the savages” stillness meant beatitude; and he felt a remote sadness for them all. Then the corporal straightened from examining the offerings with a sharp “Eh!” “What is it?”

Beneath the panniers of food he had uncovered coconut bottles in bark containers. They gleamed dark, like hand grenades. “Water …” He murmured more to himself than to Rayner or the sergeant. “Djannu.”

“What”s djannu?”

The corporal glanced at the sky but did not answer.

The sergeant demanded: “What the hell”s Jah-noo?”