Then, round the corner, upstream, as though it had been following them down the river on purpose, came a felled tree, its roots in a wild, mad tangle, as if it had taken Medusa as a figurehead. With silent, powerful majesty it moved, sweeping along like a queen. Robert looked at Ann and the pair of them looked around themselves once again. They were alone. Exposed. There was no other help, no promise of help, in sight. ‘I’m going for it,’ announced Robert.
‘Give me the end of your rope, just in case,’ she ordered. ‘If anything goes wrong I can pull you back.’
‘Good thinking.’ He was already pulling loops of it from round his waist, glancing alternately down at his stiff, clumsy hands and up at the stately progress of their one true hope. She caught up the end at once and began to tie it round her own waist. He paused, looking doubtful, but it was as clear to him as it was to her that she could never have held it with any firmness. And there was nothing down here to belay it round. She caught his look and shrugged. ‘Needs must,’ she said.
He nodded, his attention dwelling on her only for a moment, then his eyes were pulled back to the steady sweep of the tree trunk. It was nearly level with them now, out in the middle, less than a hundred metres away but swinging in towards them, moved by the current round the proto-rapids.
‘Thank God I’m not at home,’ he said, and began to wade into the water.
‘What?’
He paused and gestured down at the water which was so thick and dark that his legs were invisible already. ‘Piranha,’ he said. ‘Anacondas. They don’t have either of them here.’
‘That’s right,’ she said brightly. ‘So you don’t have anything to worry about. Except the crocodiles.’
He may or may not have heard her. He took another step and fell forward, preferring to swim than to wade. She regretted having said it, however. He was doing a brave thing and trying to make light of it. She had been joking, not supporting, and it seemed a little petty, somehow.
As he swam, the rope uncoiled and it soon became clear to her that she would have to get her feet wet too if he was going to stand any chance of reaching the tree. The current was swinging it round and in towards him as he swam, but there was only a hundred metres or so of the rope and it looked as though the bulk of the tree would pass nearly two hundred metres out. With the closest approach to quick thinking that her exhausted mind could manage, she began to run down the spit of land and out into the thick, warm water.
As soon as it flooded into her boots she stopped again, doing her best to calculate rapidly while making sure the blessedly watertight camera bag was done up properly. A mass of sensation swept over her in the breathless instants which followed, as though her fatigue-stunned mind nevertheless recognised the onset of violent action and was preparing her for it with an excess of information.
Above the waterline, the ground was rock hard. Below it, the mud still oozed, and it sloped away surprisingly steeply. No sooner was she standing in the busy shallows than she found herself slipping and sliding forward and down, no longer quite able to stand still and think. The tug of the water on her ankles was insistent, and it was easy to see how the tree, and Robert himself, were suddenly moving so fast out in the main thrust of the current. The rope was all in the water now, streaming out in a loop downstream, adding its strong tug at her waist to the sinister suck of the river at her calves and knees. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep her feet and she found herself waving her arms like a tightrope walker in a high wind as she fought to stay upright.
But it seemed to be working. Robert was a little downstream of her now but the tree was still level and the two of them were coming rapidly together. The branches reached out in a welcoming tangle for a good ten metres on either side of the squat, thick trunk. Not only did they reach out, but as the whole tree spun slowly in the grip of the water, so they swung across to catch the swimming man. One moment Robert was chopping his way through the water in an ugly but effective crawl, the next he was floundering onto a trampoline of small branches and actually pulling himself out of the water. Ann drew in her breath to cheer.
And something massive hit her in the back. That is what she felt, and visions came into her mind of the chimpanzee horribly resurrected or some soldier from Nimrod Chala’s army of police creeping up behind her. Thrust forward by the impact, she flew off her feet and out into the water. It was no animal or paramilitary policeman however, it was only the rope, behaving with the inevitability of anything caught up in the laws of physics; doing exactly what they should have known it would do, had they been thinking more clearly. There was no give in the line or in the knots she had tied. The rope was fastened at its far end to a big man solidly anchored in the branches of a tree moving westwards at five kilometres an hour, and as soon as the slack was used up, Ann sprang from rest to movement in an instant. For a moment or two her rate of acceleration exceeded that of a Bugatti and she was lucky not to crack a couple of ribs.
She hit the water hard and was pulled under at once. Shock allowed her to keep the lungful of air she had jerked in, in spite of the fact that she felt as though she had been thumped on the back. She kept that precious air in her lungs as she surged and floundered out into the stream. Once she was in the water, however, her movement became relatively slow; the water was moving slightly faster than the tree and the line which had been tight soon slackened, allowing her to fight her way to the surface. She exploded out of the water, waving her arms and fighting to keep her head clear of the thick green warmth of it. She breathed out and in, her mouth gaping, then heaved helplessly as she felt slimy drops cascade back onto her tongue. A wild phantasmagoria of fears whirled in her imagination — all the toxic chemicals used in farms locally, all the diseases the thick hot water would hold. The vision of the skeletons along the low waterline on the far bank returned and she wished acutely that she had not made that crack to Robert about crocodiles.
The perspective she had on the tree was very different now. It looked very large but suddenly distant — a great mass of twisted black limbs like a cloud on her waving horizon. And the horizon was waving too, for the tree was just coming out of the grip of the rapids now but she was being pulled across and into the busy water. She saw no alternative but to try and swim, so she floundered into action at once and understood immediately why Robert’s style had been so brutally ugly.
Robert rose into her vision then, outlined against the hard blue sky, a black figure among the wild black branches. The rope round her waist tightened once again and panic returned for a disorientating moment before she realised he was pulling her in like a fish on a line. Gratefully she began to flounder towards him and within a very few minutes her plunging hands encountered the first branches of their safe haven.
What sort of tree it was or where it had come from was impossible to tell. It had a squat, thick trunk in the middle and a riot of thick branches at one end and equally thick roots at the other. The girth of the solid part was perhaps fifteen metres in circumference and the length of clear wood about the same. It sat solidly in the water and, although it was spinning when they first got aboard it, the current soon reclaimed it and it settled into a straight line of motion with the wild roots as the prow.