Robert exploded out of the water immediately beside her, his face thrusting immediately up beside hers. ‘I touched bottom!’ he yelled, making her jump out of her skin. ‘This tree’s not going anywhere now. It’s wedged in place. If we want to get on, we’ll have to get off. We’ll have to swim a bit and wade the rest, but we can get to the shore, I think.’
‘Is it safe?’ She asked the fearful question before she realised that the thing that had brushed her foot must have been the bottom of this shallow lake.
But it was a serious question. They would have to swim for quite a way and then wade for the better part of five hundred metres to gain the first slope of mud. The slope itself stretched for nearly a kilometre up to a cliff dead ahead and away to the west into a seemingly limitless field of dead reeds. And until they were actually out of the water altogether, they would be in very real danger of attack by crocodiles and whatever other monsters lurked here.
‘No choice. We can’t just sit on the log and wait for the next rains to wash us free. We could be here for years. Come on, untie us and let’s get it done. And remember, that helicopter might well have spotted us.’
That, carefully calculated, spurred her into action. Within minutes she was floundering down beside him and the pair of them were moving as quietly as possible through the sluggish westward tug of the water. In her mind, Ann was reciting the names of all the demons which most terrified her, working on the superstitious assumption that if she named something it would be less likely to attack her. It was always, as Nico Niccolo never tired of telling her, the unexpected which got you in the end. And her Neapolitan lover’s magic seemed to work, for no crocodile caught her, no snake bit her, no raft of floating insects, soldier ants, spiders or scorpions drifted down to explode against her unprotected head. No ravening fish — the African equivalent of piranhas, if such things existed — latched hungrily onto her legs. No electric eels came writhing to shock her to death. No swimming python came to emulate his cousin the anaconda.
This time she did not scream when her feet touched the bottom and as she waded out of the water onto the clear expanse of hard-baked, blood-red riverine beach, everything seemed to have passed off perfectly. They staggered across the rock-hard mud towards the distant earthen cliff. A wind, the evening breeze, rustled sinisterly through the hollow skeletons of the reeds away to their right. It brought dead leaves and a fetid stench from the jungle ahead of them and, had they not been so desperate, they would have stopped then or gone back. But if they stopped now, the next helicopter would definitely spot them; and there was nowhere to go back to.
Their shadows were long across the red ribbed mud by the time they reached the concave cliff of crumbling earth which had once been the shore. It had looked like the merest mud dune from the water’s edge, but now it revealed itself to be a wall the better part of four metres high, concave and overhanging. Wearily, they turned until the westering sun was in their eyes and began to plod along it, hoping for a tributary opening before the vast, threatening forest of the dead reed bed overwhelmed them.
What they found was not a stream bed but an animal track which had broken down the high bank and churned up the red earth down to the distant water. It was still going to be quite a scramble up to the top of the bank but it would be possible to do it if they organised themselves. They would have to do this at once, for it was coming disturbingly close to sunset — and whatever had made the track would soon be using it again. In spite of the drained weariness they both felt, they prepared to scale the two-metre mountain in front of them. A very few half-coherent words sufficed for a plan: Robert would go first, with Ann pushing him upwards from behind; then he would pull her up. Simple.
For the first time since they had come out of the water he went ahead of her. He reached upwards towards the crumbling crest and she closed in to push him upwards. His shirt tail had pulled out of his trouser waist and as she bent to shove her shoulder under the swell of his buttocks, she saw the broad expanse of gleaming skin over his kidneys. And, beneath her dazzled eyes, the skin writhed and rippled with an obscene life of its own. Great blisters and welts raised upon it, black and glistening, alive. She froze and he turned, sensing at once that something was wrong. He found her pulling her own shirt out of her shorts with manic concentration and saw at once that the same obscene black welts, the size of his thumb to the wrist and bigger, were gathered vividly against the pallor of her skin.
‘They’re leeches,’ he bellowed, his voice trembling with disgust. ‘God! Oh God!’
She was shaking as though several thousand volts were coursing through her body and he, too, very nearly went out of control. Had they not been in such desperate straits, he would almost certainly have done so. But he knew with inescapable certainty that if he let slip then they were dead. He caught her by the shoulders and shook her with far too much savagery. ‘We don’t have time for this!’ he snarled. ‘We have to get up before the evening wallow or we’ll be killed. Trampled to death. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ The word released a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth, but when he let go of her the shaking had stopped.
‘We’ll get up and get clear,’ he said, his eyes fastened on her as though he could mesmerise more strength into her. ‘We’ll get clear and we’ll build a fire then we’ll get rid of these things. We’ll be all right. All right?’
‘Sure.’ Her eyes slid away from his. She did not believe they would be all right at all. But then, even if they did build a fire, he couldn’t see how they were going to light it anyway.
In the end they lit it with the gun.
They scrambled as planned up the incline onto the animal track then struck west into the last of the setting sun at once, driven by the certain knowledge that something big enough to step up and down two metres of bank was coming to have its evening drink with several of its family and friends. In the last of the sunlight, from the eastern edge of the reed bed they looked back across a kilometre of empty bank to see a small herd of elephants move like the silent spirits of the dead jungle out of the grey trees onto the red mud. As the huge animals stepped down, the tallest one stopped and spread its ears, raised its trunk and looked at them. Red light glinted off long, curving tusks. A challenging scream came echoing on the evening air. Suddenly a kilometre seemed hardly enough.
By the time they found a place to stop, the sunlight was gone and the darkness was closing down like a door swinging shut. The warmth was draining out of the day as rapidly as the blood was draining out of their systems, and they had reached the time for decisive action. They were on a tongue of dry mud exposed to the sky between the outer scrub of the dead forest and the whispering field of dead reeds. The forest seemed marginally more welcoming, so they struck south until they reached the edge of it. Here they pulled together a pile of sere leaves and broke dry branches on the top. Robert had used the walk from the elephant track to rack his brains about lighting the thing, but had come up with no ideas at all. It was Ann, her memory of the muzzle flash as the bullets destroyed the chimpanzee twenty-four hours earlier still fresh in her mind, who suggested using the pistol.
Only their desperation to be rid of the clammy, unutterably disgusting creatures on their skin and the overpowering need for some comfort and reassurance could have made them risk doing it. But their world had closed down to such an urgent intimacy that worries about Nimrod Chala’s scouts or the ease with which a passing helicopter would spot a fire in this shadowy desolation shrank to insignificance. Crouching, trembling, beneath the overarching branches of the first broad tree on the edge of the forest, they thrust the gun into the pile of dry kindling they had assembled and pulled the trigger. The bullet exploded out of the other side, scattering twigs. A tantalizing smell of burning lingered on the air. Robert crouched and blew with increasing desperation. Nothing else happened.