“How much longer can we stay on here?”
“A little while. Not too long. It’s taken us an hour to come this far. They can’t catch up with us in five or ten minutes.”
Full sunrise, with the lower rim of the flashing disk clear of the ground, already found them struggling through a solid wall of steam, temporary but blinding, as the night mists rose from the jungle in evaporation. He kept thinking of Mitty. It was the heat from the sun that was doing it. She’d worshiped that. Maybe it would destroy them. Maybe she was in it, had become a part of it. I’m going crazy, like she was, he told himself, and checked the errant train of thought.
In a little while the steam thinned again, drained off. A hot, invisible exhalation took its place, refracting things, warping them as though they were seen on a dripping wet mirror.
She kept looking back more and more frequently. He hated to make the decision to quit the trail, narrow and difficult and half obliterated as it was. Once they were off it their progress would be slowed to almost nothing. It was like capitulating, giving up their chance of reaching the mountains. But it had to be done; to stay on it meant an invitation to almost certain capture. She was staggering now, lurching, and she’d have to rest soon anyway or she’d collapse.
He held off as long as he could, until he felt that to delay any longer was dangerous. A good half an hour had already elapsed since they had heard the first warning growl of the drum. And maybe it was even more; he had no exact way of measuring time.
He tottered to a halt, and called to her, and she halted too, making a little groggy circle in her tracks that brought her around to lean up against him exhaustedly.
“Come on,” he said tersely. “This is where it begins.”
They left the trail and went stumbling and moving through the matted growth offside, he now in the lead.
It was all that he had feared it would be and worse. The trail had been a passage already sundered for them, no matter how interlocking and entangling its accompanying vegetation. Here they had to burst their own way through a veritable feather bed of green, making passage for the first time. Even at a hand span away from each other, they were at times entirely invisible to each other below the neck, so cut off were they by great padlike leaves or curved, fringe-dripping scimitars of fernery. At times there was such a choked multiplicity of flora and prismatic colorings around them all at one time, filling every cranny of the three dimensions they were travelling through, that the whole thing became a blurred, maddening pinwheel, in which white butterflies starting up were mistaken for disks of sunlight on the leaves and disks of sunlight on the leaves were mistaken for the white butterflies, and the whole became just a confusion of spots in front of the eyes.
But it was not all this prolific. There were patches that were comparatively sparse, and even occasional dells and glades where the going was almost normal. The trouble was that these clearings were all isolated from one another, and in between were stretches that were almost impassable, where it was like walking through the upper branches of a dense, spreading tree for all practical purposes, save that they could not fall through it to the ground if they should miss a step.
For a length of time that seemed to equal the time they had spent on the trail — though since they were going slower it was probably only half as long — they lurched and wavered through this botanical spume, until they’d stumbled upon a place that was almost made to order to hide and rest in. To have gone beyond it would have been suicidal. Neither of them could have by now, even had they wanted to. A tree had fallen, whether shattered by lightning or from some other cause they could not tell. Even prone, its massive trunk was nearly the height of their waists. It was festooned by a curious vinelike growth, lashing it to the ground along its entire length, but this did not cling closely to the turn of the trunk but stretched out from it taut, like a sort of green spiderweb. Close beside the trunk, therefore, it formed what amounted to a triangular bower or lean-to. To make it better still, a little rill of water ran nearby, the first they’d come upon so far.
He wouldn’t let her drink at sight, knowing what it might do to her. He dipped a corner of the rags he wore into it, and sponged her lips with it and pressed it out against her forehead and the back of her neck. Then he let her have a few tantalizing handfuls from his own hand, and promised her more later.
Within this little tent of natural green they crawled, and then collapsed, lungs beating against the cages of their breasts like swelling bladders threatening to explode.
She cried a little when she felt better. He liked that about her, that she was a girl who cried and not a damned Indian jade without emotion. “It hurts too much,” she whimpered, “even to stay alive.”
“I know, I know it does,” was all he could say.
They had been there about five minutes, and were only beginning to draw breath more slowly, when suddenly he tightened his hand on her wrist, holding it down and holding it taut, and she understood, made no move.
There wasn’t a sound or the trembling of a fern around them to show anyone was approaching. And then suddenly the green facade walling them in split into two saw-toothed edges and a figure flashed into view, at a distance of not more than ten yards from where they crouched. Cinnamon-brown, crouched low in deadly quest, making its way with a swift, soundless dexterity they never could have attained.
He was stunningly near. For a moment the hard-pitted black eyes seemed to glance over the very coverlet beneath which they lay, in their whiteness and helplessness. He slithered on, with a snake’s vertebral twistings. The saw-toothed edges of visibility on the opposite side interlocked once more behind him, and there was nothing to show they had seen what they had seen.
He let go of her wrist, but outside of that neither of them moved. She simply turned it over and left it there, supine on the ground.
“That was close,” he breathed. “They’re not sticking to the trail either. Not all of them, anyway.”
“How did you know in time?”
“I couldn’t tell you now any more. Must have been some variation in that chirping and twittering going on all around us.”
Her head bent over dejectedly. “They’ll get us.”
“What’s the good of giving up before we have to?”
Twice he left her after that, but for just a short distance, and not upright but creeping out on his hands and knees. Once to bring her more water — he dipped his entire shirt in this time, and they both squeezed it out into their mouths — and the second time to bring back some berries.
He tried them himself first, and made her wait a while. Then, finding that he’d had no ill effects from them, he gave her some.
Then after that they lay still; breathing, surviving, nothing else. Waiting for the friendly night to return. To lie hidden like that in one place was the safest thing to do during the daylight hours. In that way they had only one dangerous series of movements to guard against: their enemies’. Had they moved about themselves, they would have had two: their enemies’ and their own as well, which might have worked toward one another when they least expected it.
He looked at her and her eyes were closed. She’d dropped into a sound sleep, head pillowed against his recumbent shoulder.
He was glad she could sleep. Only the very young could sleep that way, with imminent death all around them, with life hanging by a thread, hanging on the rustle of a leaf, the turn of a blade of grass.
His own eyes flickered, but he forced them open again. Someone had to watch.
The dazzling sun beating down on their leafy covering spilled through the innumerable little criss-cross, waffle-like gaps, and fell all over them in leprous disks that burned, almost like the centering of rays through a ground lens. It was like being covered with spangles.