As soon as she had dragged herself out of the maze of small branches into the arms of the more solid boughs, and thence into Robert’s arms, Ann led the way down, as though they were climbing out of a tree house, until they reached the junction of the lowest, thickest branches with the trunk. These made makeshift backrests and it was possible for them to sit side by side with their legs reaching down the trunk itself and their backs against the easy slope of the branches. It was by no means a comfortable situation, but they both felt relatively safe, especially after they used the slack line to anchor themselves in place.
Had Ann ever in her wildest dreams imagined that she would find herself drifting down an African river on a makeshift raft, she would have imagined herself standing intrepidly looking around, noting the finest detail of everything in sight for inclusion in her next book. As it was, she had no intention of doing anything but clinging on for dear life and waiting for the next thing to happen to her. What that thing might be she had no idea and did not speculate. Nor, apparently, did Robert. They simply sat side by side in stunned silence and allowed the day to wash over them.
The river swirled the tree trunk slowly and gracefully in against the foot of the cliff almost at once, showing them all too clearly that they would never have managed to come any further along the northern bank — unless they could have found a way of scaling several hundred metres of seamless, glassy black cliff. The movement of the water towards what was clearly the deepest part of the river bed also served to pull them well clear of the far bank, however. And any temptation they might have felt to use the tree as a launching pad for a second swim was nipped in the bud by the sight of a crocodile sunning itself on the muddy slopes which would have been their destination. It was difficult to be sure at this distance, but it looked to be about ten metres long. For a moment, the photographer in Ann stirred as she stared across at the great beast, but then she thought of the danger she would be putting her precious pictures in if she opened the camera bag here. She thought of the danger she herself would be in if she did anything but cower here and pray for deliverance.
And so the day passed. Apart from the occasional crocodile, they saw nothing alive on the desolate shores. On their right, the cliff continued interminably. Only occasionally, as the river made a desultory attempt to meander, was there any shoreline on that side, but it was never more than a bulge of red silt like the flank of some buried giant or the shard of some huge terracotta jar baked hard. And the only sounds which came from that side over the insistent rustling chuckle of the river was the thunder of trains rushing ahead of them to the coast.
On the left, however, lay a dying desolation whose atmosphere hung like a miasma across the water. From the green edge of the shrunken river, red mud rose seemingly interminably up a long, weary slope to a low cliff of ancient bank. The mud alone rose ten metres above the water level in three-quarters of a kilometre, and the long-dry cliff rose another ten above that. Above the red, overhanging cliff, the better part of eight hundred metres from the thick water, stood the tall jungle. It was grey and sere even against the hard blue sky, and the sun in the southern quadrant struck through the upper canopy as though it was a mist. Ann was American. She was more used to autumn in Vermont that to this hopeless surrender of lush leaves to grey death. She found the sight of the jungle distasteful; ultimately disturbing. Great trees stood as though wrapped in restless shrouds of dirty paper. Their massive limbs writhed in a mute agony of drought, as though begging the water for succour. But only the hot wind answered, and when it gusted it brought with it red dust from the naked grassland far beyond. So that beneath the ghostly grey giants, the dead scrub, as ghastly as the hopeless mess of limbs in the bauxite store which had been home to the crippled chimpanzee, was tinged with wind-channelled runnels of red.
And the jungle was silent. Dead. It seemed like one great creature to her, one massive entity which should have been composed of verdant leaf and burgeoning branch, pullulating with teeming insects and whirring flies; dappled and dazzling with the gleam of quicksilver wing and exquisite singing of birds, and heaving with the pulsating explosion of roaring, howling, trumpeting and calling animals.
But there was nothing. The whole thing was dead. They were sailing through the still heart of a corpse.
As the afternoon gathered around them and the sun came blazingly over their heads to glare down upon them, its terrible light and heat multiplied beyond bearing by the reflective quality of the black cliff just beside them, so the river, too, began to die.
The first sign of the onset of death seemed to be positive. The depressing spectacle of the dead jungle fell back silently, unobserved, and the far bank slowly withdrew to more than a kilometre distant. Dozing, stunned by the lethal afternoon sun, hardly more than braising bundles of mud and clothing, Ann and Robert did not notice that the black cliff, too, was effectively withdrawing as the river itself spread out into a shallow lake and the flow which held the tree trunk began to meander and their steady progress began to slow. The branches under water began to scrape along the river bed, and the tree drifted to a dead stop.
It was the helicopter which woke them, swooping low like an inquisitive fly, monstrous not only in its size but by its vivid movement in this place of sluggish death. The clattering roar of its approaching rotor jerked Ann awake first and she peered out from under the sun shield of shirt and camera bag which was perched precariously upon her head. It was shockingly close, skimming in over the distant jungle, kicking up leaves in its wake like an autumn gale. ‘Robert!’ she screamed, feeling unutterably exposed at once. She had no idea whether the tree trunk they were on was a unique feature or one among many, effectively invisible. And she had no idea whether the two of them were visible upon it. She felt an overpowering need to run at once. She froze, fighting the panic, watching the hawk-swoop of the helicopter as it sped unerringly towards them. She could feel the weight of the pilot’s eyes like sunburn on her skin. With a whimper she rolled off the log and into the water. The rope held her and she rose back above the surface, clutching a handful of roots and hiding as best she could behind the swell of the wood. A slithering splash and the gentle stirring of the wood informed her that Robert had followed suit. Terrified, she hung there as the helicopter clattered by, seemingly only a couple of metres above her head. The down-draught stirred against her scalp like a cold shower and she realised that, warm though it was, the water, too, felt cool against her parched skin. As the silence returned to the heat-weighted air around them, she felt her body beginning to relax, as though she was in a warm bath.
Then something brushed sluggishly beneath her dangling toe.
She actually screamed with terror. Gripped by a fear which was far more powerful even than her exceptional self-control, she went scrambling up out of the water, whimpering as she went, until she was crouching on the trunk again, looking around herself at the still, impenetrable water, sobbing with incipient hysteria. Only when she was safely out of the reach of whatever had touched her did she think of Robert. ‘Robert,’ she called, and only when she had said the word and it was echoing back from jungle and cliff alike did she realise that she had screamed it. There was no reply. ‘Robert!’ This time she knew she screamed. The thought that he might be gone was more than she could bear. She hurled herself wildly across die wood and hung over his side, barely restrained by her section of the rope. The thick dark water was still. His rope trailed into it, apparently attached to nothing. Making a kind of keening noise, far beyond sensible control, she reached a trembling hand down towards it.