Frank stopped, in the middle of the tracks. Hands on hips, white shirt sweat-damp beneath his rib cage, he stood glaring this way and that, saying, “It’s around here someplace.”
“What is?”
Isaac slowly turned in a circle. Fore and aft, the rail line was flanked by near-jungle growth, hedges and shrubs and limber small trees crowding in on both sides, green walls ranging from eight to twelve feet in height. There was a special small mower locomotive made for this sort of climate, manufactured in Cleveland in the United States, with whirring cutter blades mounted on both sides; three or four times a year, that engine had to be run up and down the line to cut back the encroaching plant life. With the sudden new spurt of growth following the long rains, the mower engine would be due soon for another run.
“Hey!” Frank yelled, as though to somebody. “Goddammit, where are we?”
Nowhere, as Isaac could plainly see. Way to the east, the track curved gently out of sight around to the left, still enclosed by greenery except for the one break at the access road. The same was true to the west, except that the curve to the right was closer and there were no breaks for roads.
“Goddammit,” Frank said, “do we have to walk all the goddam way around the other way?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Isaac said, and then he shrieked and jumped back, nearly tripping over the rail, as a huge section of greenery to his left all at once opened up!
“There you are,” Frank said.
“Wa—wa—wa—” Isaac stared at a tangled green mess of leaves and branches, eight feet square, that had simply separated itself from the real world and turned itself into a door, into something from a fairy tale.
From behind this now slightly ajar impossible door, a voice suddenly cried in Swahili, “It’s falling!”
“It’s falling?” In his bewilderment and panic, Isaac still remembered his duty as translator; Frank had no Swahili. “It’s falling,” Isaac told him in English.
“Shit!” Frank cried, and leaped forward, arms outstretched.
And it was falling. This segment of the green wall had now become a green wave, a tidal wave toppling slowly over onto them. “I can’t hold it!” cried the Swahili voice.
Frank had flung himself against the shrubs and saplings, was contesting his own weight against theirs. Isaac, reacting more slowly, now jumped to help him, at the same time crying out in Swahili, “We’re pushing!”
But it didn’t matter. The thing, whatever it was, leaned now off-balance, and the demands of gravity were inexorable. Slow, painfully slow, but nevertheless inevitable, the section of wall bore down on them. The voice from beyond it despairingly called out the name of a tribal snake god for the Lake Turkana region, and Frank and Isaac both collapsed backward onto the track, under a massive blanket of green.
Isaac, quite naturally, began to thrash about, but Frank yelled, “Don’t break it!” and Isaac stopped, baffled. Don’t break it?
The wall or wave or blanket or fantasy or whatever it was teetered now on the southern track of the rail line, leaving just enough leeway so that a man could crawl out from underneath, scratching his hands and making his chauffeur’s uniform filthy in the process. Clambering to his feet, hatless, covered with leaves and stones and dirt, Isaac found himself facing a barefoot man dressed in blue work pants, naked to the waist, who was grinning sheepishly and saying, “It takes more than one man to hold it.”
“What’s the son of a bitch say?”
Frank had crawled out from under the thing on the other side, looking just as messy as Isaac and twice as angry. Isaac translated what the man had said, and, “No shit,” Frank commented. “All right, just so it isn’t busted.”
Now Isaac looked down at the thing. On this side, there was a complicated trellislike arrangement of sticks and bamboo poles, lashed together, and with many tree branches and shrubs in turn lashed to the poles. The whole thing was two or three feet thick, and had to be very very heavy.
“We’d better get it back into place,” Frank said. “Tell him to call the others.”
“He says,” Isaac translated, “to call the others.”
“Very good.” Turning away, the man trotted off downhill.
And now for the first time Isaac looked through the magic doorway. A path as broad as a railway line extended away down the slope, and after a few yards there actually was a railway line on it, old and rusted. The old tracks ran directly downhill, becoming quickly obscured because of all the undergrowth choking them. Nearer, tree stumps and disturbed earth showed where the rail line had been cleared and the pathway to it created.
Isaac became aware of a sound that had been obscured when the wall was in place. It was the whine of a chain saw. Now, over it, came the sound of the blue-trousered man calling. The saw stopped; another voice answered. The voices rang clear and echoing in the upper branches of the trees, disturbing birds, which fluttered briefly, calling to one another, then settled back again.
“If he knew one man couldn’t do it,” Frank grumbled, “then why the fuck did one man try to do it?”
“Because you have such a loud intimidating voice,” Isaac told him.
Frank thought about that. Isaac could see him trying to remain stern and angry. “If I’m so fucking intimidating,” Frank said, “how come you talk to me like that?”
“Because I see through you,” Isaac said.
Up through the woods, along the rail line, the blue-trousered man returned with three other men, all dressed in a similar style, though two did wear frayed and torn shirts. The three newcomers were highly amused at the sight of their blind lying on the tracks, and they made several remarks at the blue-trousered man’s expense. He laughed along with the others, so it was all right.
The four men, with Frank and Isaac helping, lifted the blind and jockeyed it back into position, where it was wedged in so tightly by the branches on both sides that it didn’t even need to be tied in place.
All six men were now inside. Frank said, “Let’s see how they’re coming along,” and they all walked back down the hill, following the old rail line. They had to struggle through trees and thick undergrowth until they came to another cleared section, where the broad path began again. Once more, tree stumps and fresh shallow holes between the rails showed just how much plant growth had had to be removed. And looking down the line, Isaac could now see the engine shed and the spur track angling away to the right.
One of the men, who wore a pale-green dress shirt from which the sleeves had been raggedly cut off, gestured to the uncleared portion of track from which they’d just emerged and said to Isaac, “Tell him we’ll do that last.”
Isaac passed the message on. Nodding, Frank said, “Smart. Another layer of protection.” Isaac translated that, and the man in the green shirt smiled.
Walking on, they followed the spur down to the turntable. One of the potential problems, Isaac remembered, had been that the turntable was rusted into place at an unusable angle. But now it was aligned, fitting almost perfectly with the rails.
All four men wanted Isaac to explain to Frank just how difficult that job had been, how many tools they’d broken, how long it had taken. Isaac translated about half of it, and in the translation back, he made Frank’s casual acceptance of their work sound much more enthusiastic than it was.