There is a sky again. The ceiling of the Great Wall has broken up into isolated roof-trees (how hard it is to give names to things, to describe them as they are, not how they seem!) rising sheer out of what Moon describes elsewhere ‘drained coral reef’. Yes, but on the mountainous scale: The finger-corals are hundreds of feet high, the brain-corals the size of houses, hand-trees almost as tall as the parasol-sequoias, miniature Foa Mulakus, all stilt legs and horns. Most of what we pass through I can only describe by listing their mundane counterparts. Cornucopias. Organ pipes. Mug-trees. Bubbles. Light bulbs. Frozen chickens (really! About the size of a truck, and exactly that morbid shade of factory farm chicken skin). Cathedrals. Mixer taps. Windmills. Cheese graters. Pantyhose. Watch springs. Candelabras. Scramble nets. We follow the narrow, twining watercourse through a Disneyland of kitchen paraphernalia. FX by Hieronymus Bosch. Our boats are eerily silent, powered by truck-battery engines. We leave hardly a crease on the water as we move between the overhanging pipes and frills. Jake is in the lead boat with Moran and M’zee. Mere women and dogs follow, with the untrustworthy Sugardaddy’s hand on the tiller.
We are in a state of armed vigilance. The Chaga seems to suit everything that comes into it very well. Hippos are public enemy number one. They could easily capsize these snap-together canvas assault boats. Bushbaby and Rose have Uzis: the only satisfactory way to stop a hippopotamus is to put the maximum number of shells into it, in the minimum amount of time. Personally, I’d feel much happier with something with the firepower of half a regiment rather than this fifty calibre Magnum they’ve given me, even with the dandy little Chaga-proofed laser sight that I mustn’t use too often because we can’t change the power pack. Go ahead, hippo, make my day. Did I fire five shots, or did I fire six?
Some of the birds I’ve seen hunting in the shallow water seem to be carrying strange parasites like autonomous, mutated body organs.
About ten minutes ago, Rose, through Bushbaby, asked if she could braid my hair for me. I’ve been admiring hers since I met her at the pick-up point: plaited and wrapped with threads, string and wax, strung with tiny Indian bells and amber beads. Bushbaby says they’ve both been admiring my hair for as long. They can’t get over the colour. Rose unpacks her threads and wires and beads from her pack, sits behind me and sets to work. She lifts my hair. I grasp her hand, turn to face her.
‘Posse?’ I ask, holding up the maimed hand.
She nods her head. ‘Mombi.’
You see the pink Cadillacs and the zoot suits and the girls cute and pouting in nylon and leather. You never see the deputies and the law they enforce. For the first infringement, the left little finger. For the second, the right little finger. To keyboard users, this maiming is symbolic as well as functional.
They lose their patience when it comes to the third offence.
I kiss the back of Rose’s hand, never taking my eyes off her.
She’s doing a fabulous job on my hair. The beads swing and click at every move of my head. It’s more than just a pass-time or sign of personal affection. It’s a ritual. A marking. I’m one of the tribe now.
Moran is shouting back from the lead boat. We’ll camp tonight at the remains of Ol Tukai Lodge where this snow-watered swampland runs out of Lake Amboseli and we enter the Loolturesh Discontinuity. I am back in her footsteps again: Moon, Niamh O’Hanlon, my Arne Saknussen.
(Later)
Moran says he thinks there is somebody else out there.
Day Three
M’zee agrees. We are not alone in here. It’s not the Wa-chagga: their country is on the far side of the discontinuity. UNECTA explorers are a possibility. The Black Simbas have no quarrel with them, but UNECTA reports to the military, with whom all the Tacticals are unilaterally at war, so contact is best avoided. The only thing the Tacticals hate more than the military are their cartel rivals. A lot of wealth and power crosses terminum into the camps, some are realizing later than others, so they send combat teams to follow the safari squads to their source, kill everything that breathes and claim what they find for their cartel. They’re scary. The Wa-chagga nation have a treaty with the Black Simba Cartel, they will protect us from claim jumpers. But they are a day away across Lake Amboseli in open canvas boats and the first and last you will know about claim jumpers is the itch of a laser sight on your forehead and nothing ever again. Fabulous. Apocalypse Now in the Loolturesh Discontinuity.
There are things scarier than claim jumpers. Obi-men. Forest wanderers. People who have found their way into the Chaga, become trapped by it, and changed.
Changed? I ask.
No one answers.
Jake is with us in the women’s boat today. He wants footage of the lake crossing and feels he should direct the shots so we don’t waste space on our limited supply of discs. He’s never been this deep. Lake Amboseli had once been seasonal, fed by subterranean springs drawing snow melt from the mountain, evaporating in the heat of the dry season. Now it is permanent, sealed under the transparent roof of the Loolturesh Discontinuity. The roof is made of balloons fifty metres in diameter, stuck together somehow, moored about three hundred metres up on lines and gnarled hold-fasts gripping the floor of the lake. Thousands, probably millions, of balloons, as clear as glass. Shot: a receding perspective of the still waters of Lake Amboseli with infinite regress of vertical lines. Steering through the hold-fasts makes slow passage, especially when you do not know what you will find around the next knot of cables and roots.
There are things moving in the balloon canopy; things that cling to the curved undersurfaces, feeding off the occasional veils of translucent blue moss; and other things that float like animate zeppelins, steering themselves between the cables by languid ripplings of gossamer tail membranes. Jake has to tell me to stop shooting. But they’re there, they’re real. I have them.
Monkeys have colonized this vertical landscape. They run up and down the cables, fingering morsels out of the crevices between the plaited strands, cramming their faces as they watch us pass beneath. Many of them carry elegantly obscene deformities: antlers of green coral, mottlings of green and purple mould, extra sets of red arms and hands.
Changed.
She saw this, I remember. She noted this. But she draws no conclusions about whether these are pre-natal deformities or the Chaga somehow manipulating the flesh of the grown animal. No conclusions that I have read. Maybe they, like so much, are in the vanished pages.
This landscape breeds paranoia.
Jake. I am learning not to treat him as a folio of clichés. He is more alive here, with death so strong inside him, than I have ever seen him before. He manages to maintain his sartorial crispness – God knows how, I look like Jana of the Jungle after a heavy night. Even his sweat rings are precisely circular. His spirit is strong, but I fear that his body is beginning to betray him. He tires easily. And his sleep is troubled – several times a night he will cry out loud enough to wake the camp. Jake tells me he hears voices in his sleep. Mutterings in his hind brain, like someone talking in another room, loud enough for the voice to be heard but not the words it is speaking.
She wrote about spirit voices, calling her deeper into the heartlands. She imagined them to be lost, crazy Langrishe’s. Did she ever find him? Is he still out there in all those thousands of square miles of the alien?