Thorny branches scratched and snagged the equipment fastened to the outside walls. Red ants were shaken out of them, and stung the men hard. Whiskered scarab beetles crept over Istvan’s legs and began to buzz on his knees. He shuddered. The professor held out a pill in his open hand and shook it gently.
“It is for seasickness. Too much shaking.”
“Thank you. I’m all right.”
But a moment later he felt a spasm when the orderly hung over the side of the car and threw up, snipping off a crystalline thread of saliva with his hand. The man turned away his face, which was the color of an unripe lemon, and apologized, rolling his enormous dark eyes.
They drove into a ravine with furrowed violet banks. Its bottom was washed with water which, milled by the wheels, splashed high and trickled from the talus.
“Be careful not to let us bog down,” the professor warned.
“I see the end of the trap.” The driver grinned, showing white teeth under his dark mustache. “I will push hard on the gas so it does not suck us down.”
The vehicle scrambled out onto the bank, its body streaming with watery mud. A plain overgrown with dense bushes lay before them. A flock of sheep scurried away down a dark gray rivulet. The shepherd, sheltered from the sun by a large sack, held a spear under his arm and clasped the base of a water pipe in both hands. Its smoke spiraled around him in a blue cloud. The driver and then the orderly shouted to him, but he only sucked the mouthpiece and looked distrustfully from under his three-cornered hood. They passed so close to him that he stretched out a hand and touched the mud-streaked vehicle as if he could not believe his eyes.
“A dark peasant,” the driver said contemptuously. “He does not understand what is said to him.”
“Perhaps he was afraid of us?” Istvan suggested.
“He?” The chauffeur laughed. “He did not move back one step. That kind, when they get angry, may even kill. They throw a spear and run away. They fear nothing but spirits. Stupid peasants.”
The car began to quake rhythmically. It was as if they were riding over a washboard. They shook until their teeth shattered.
“Damned roadless backwater!” the counselor complained.
“We are coming to a village or watering place. The buffalo stamp out ruts like these,” the professor said. “Stop.” He nudged the driver’s arm. “Turn off the engine.”
With unexpected alacrity for his age he jumped out, holding up a shotgun. He pointed to a pair of coffee-colored birds.
“Pigeons.”
The driver fastened on a revolver in a holster made of sacking and moved out behind him. They vanished into the bushes between clumps of cane and grass. When the motor had quieted down they heard the voices of the bush: the whistle of birds, the deep-throated cooing of pigeons, the jingle of innumerable crickets.
Istvan got out to stretch his legs, and suddenly stood as if he had turned to stone. From the grass, which was knee-high, rose a flat head covered with scales. Narrow, shrewd eyes looked doggedly at him. He glanced around for a stick; he was ready to run away. The unknown creature stood on its hind legs and tail like an antediluvian reptile, its forelegs resting on the springy grass. It stared at him angrily.
“That is a lizard, sir.” He heard the orderly’s voice. “A mud lizard. Not poisonous.”
“That large?”
“There are even larger ones. They do not bite. Their skin is good for handbags and shoes.”
He snatched a spade from its mounts and handed it to Istvan.
“Hit it, sir! Stun it!”
But the amphibian understood the danger it was in and took a long leap, bending the tufts of grass and then gliding into them until it was lost to view. Only the zigzag waving of the rushes showed which way it was darting. The grass, which rose taller and taller until it was waist-high, hobbled the men’s feet as they ran, and the spongy, quaggy ground brimmed with water.
“It got away. Careful! It’s a bog.” The orderly grabbed at some branches. “Best go back.”
They heard faint blasts of gunfire muffled by the incessant, piercing jangle of insects. They counted: two, and after a moment two more.
“Four, perhaps even five pigeons.” The orderly puffed out his lips and pushed wisps of hair back under his turban.
He was not mistaken. Wading through the bubbling, miry meadow, they saw the professor with his shotgun on his shoulder and the driver, who triumphantly brandished a shock of freshly killed birds.
“Congratulations!” Terey clasped his hands above his head and waved them.
“It is nothing. They are so trusting; it is like aiming in a shooting gallery. A slaughter, not a hunt,” the professor demurred. “I wanted us to have them for this evening — if they do not go bad. The heat is unbearable.”
They wiped their perspiring faces with handkerchiefs to remove the tiny midges that were creeping over them. They ripped away clinging spider webs, nearly invisible but elastic and sticky, and daubed at the yellow dust from the blossoming grasses.
Satisfied with the results of the shooting, they fell onto the hot oilcloth seats. They welcomed the bass whirring of the engine with relief. It slightly dulled the numbing rasp of the cicadas and the hissing of grasshoppers — annoying sounds whose shifting timbre made them impossible to ignore.
The vehicle tore itself out of the bushes and grass that had become entangled in its axles. They rode up the slope of a gentle hill toward two oblique red ruts that crossed the grassy ridge. Again they came to a road.
The orderly pulled open the wings of the pigeons Salminen had shot and peeled away bird ticks as big as peas from between the feathers. Istvan saw how the breeze inflated the shirt on the professor’s hunched back, and how it clung again until dark stains of sweat appeared. There was a ringing in his ears; he swallowed thick saliva. He dreamed of a thermos of strong tea with slices of lemon and lumps of half-melted ice, of the first sip that would run down his throat as he felt the cool breath of the roomy interior of the jug on his face.
“I do not like those clouds.” The professor pointed to the sky, blinking in the glare. “Too many clouds like that have given us a drenching.”
“Let us go over to the old bed of the Yamuna,” the driver urged. “The sands begin farther on, and the rain will not be so dangerous.”
Air sticky as oil, carrying the stifling smell of the swampy meadows, brushed their faces. Large, sunny fields were still opening around them when with a dull humming, a lashing of leaves, and a tumult in the sky, the first spears of rain cut through the air. The Hindus leaped to put up the roof, but the professor commanded, “Drive on! A momentary shower. We will press forward.”
But when water splashed them, when their shirts were wet and their trousers clung to their legs, he himself raised the steel frame that supported the canvas roof and put the catches in place. The rain rattled on the canvas as if it were a drum.
“Well — we are having an adventure,” the professor scowled. “From the beginning that sun today looked too bright to me. The proverb rightly says, ‘In the season of monsoons, do not lose sight of home.’”
They did not ride so much as dive into the water that poured from blue sluices. Innumerable flies and tiny moths with unerring instinct sought shelter with them under the moving roof. They attached themselves to the canvas or, frightened by the patter of the rain, flew about, beating against the men’s foreheads or clinging with their wings to their sticky skin.
The landrover rolled on at a slant. One side lodged in a deep rut, churning up and driving before it a red wave of rain water. Below them a village appeared: a dozen or so scattered cottages plastered together with clay. Their flat roofs with high railings had openings at the corners, and on each roof a kind of gutter had been made from the halves of a split stick of bamboo. Streams of water fell from them in full, foaming arcs, with loud splashes. The few trees bent and shuddered under the burden of the rain.