Had Ann not been sleeping with the strap of her camera bag wrapped round her arm, she would have lost it. Like Robert she sprang from deep sleep into total wakefulness and, like him, she found herself facing a charge by a leopard. But this leopard was fiercely ablaze. The sight of it and the sounds it was making were utterly, overwhelmingly terrifying. She was on her feet at once and running wildly along die riverbank far beyond rational thought or the faintest hope of self-control. Because she was screaming at the top of her lungs, the leopard was able to follow her movements, and because it was mad with agony and rage, it continued its vain attempts to destroy her.
Robert abruptly found himself alone in the wreckage of their makeshift camp. Because of the noise, he too was able to follow Ann and the leopard. He was up without further thought and off after them at a dead run. Sometime during the first five steps he switched on the red dot, and he followed this along the top of the river bank, sweeping it from right to left. After five minutes of feverish activity he paused to draw breath and compose his thoughts. There was now neither sight nor sound of them. How could they have vanished so quickly and so utterly? he asked himself in an agony of worry. The low, bright stars gave him light enough to see a possible answer. He found himself looking forward and to his right down the slight slope into the massive featureless field of dry reeds which lay between the high bank and the mud slope down into the dry lake bed. The wind stirred the tops of the dead reeds as he watched and he suddenly realised that if Ann had vanished into this then he would never be able to find her again. ‘Ann,’ he bellowed as loudly as he could. ‘Ann, can you hear me?’
He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, and even to slow his tumultuous heartbeat so that the could listen for her reply, but there was nothing. Nothing save the wind and the weird whispering of the reeds.
He pointed the gun up into the air above his head and pulled the trigger. A brief burst of bullets ripped up into the air. It was a short signal but a clear one, he thought. Surely she would hear. He listened, straining his ears.
The faintest mumble of sound above the seductive sibilance of the reed sea.
He raised the gun again and pulled the trigger. Nothing. He swore and yelled at the top of his voice again but there was no reply. Except that when he stood absolutely still, and listened with every nerve of his body, he could hear a quiet babble and the odd crackling of footsteps.
Just behind him!
Spooked, he swung round, expecting to see the smouldering leopard creeping up with Ann’s arm drooping palely from its smoking jaws. But what he saw was much worse. He saw yellow brightness gleaming through the tall columns of the dead, dry trees, and he realised that the whispering and crackling were die sound a bushfire makes when it is spreading swiftly through undergrowth.
He stood for just a moment, calling to mind all the foulest swear words he had ever known. What the hell was he going to do now? ‘Ann!’ He swung round again, to look over the reeds. The wind gusted warmly from behind him, carrying smoke already; smoke and sparks. ‘ANN! For Christ’s sake! AAANNN!’ All too close, the first tree exploded into flame and he was running. As though observing a complete stranger, he noted that he was running wildly along the bank above the dead sea of reeds. If there was any kind of a plan in his head it was this: to cut round behind the reeds away from the blazing forest and down across the wide expanse of mud to seek refuge in the sluggish water. Even the leeches seemed a fair exchange if he could escape die all-consuming fire which was exploding terribly into life behind him as he ran. And if he remained on the high mud crest he could keep an eye out for Ann, for he was still convinced that she was somewhere down there.
As he ran he kept swinging his head to right and left, for the starlight was not strong enough to reveal the details of the bankside path ahead and he was forced to rely on his more acute peripheral vision. Furthermore, he was half fearful that the path the leopard took between die dry stems of the reeds would burst into flames at any moment, ignited by the burning creature’s fur; and in any case he wanted to keep an eye on the wildfire spreading through the woods behind him. When it got firm hold it would, he knew, be able to move at more than sixty kilometres an hour. Downwind. His way. Of all the things he feared most, fire ranked highest on the list and he had no intention of being outrun by this one if he could possibly avoid it.
When the next tree exploded into flame and sent a wave of red light rolling down the bank after him, he thrust Ann into the back of his mind, tucked his chin down and started to run in earnest. He was going at full sprint, the better part of ten kilometres per hour, when the ground gave way under him and swallowed him with one silent gulp.
He slammed down the throat of a shallow pit with stunning suddenness and dropped into a mud-walled little cave. A long hard balk of wood broke his fall and he found himself precipitated head first into a claustrophobically narrow corner where the hard earth of the roof pressed terrifyingly against the back of his head. The cave was clearly some kind of fault in the high bank, and was apparently prone to flooding for it stank overpoweringly of the river. He choked in the fetid air and scrabbled backwards until he could at least sit up straight and look around him. But there was nothing to see on either hand except the suffocating blackness. He looked up and high above his head he saw the grass-edged jaws of the hole through which he had fallen. The blackness surrounding it made it impossible for him to judge how high it was above his head, and without thinking he began to scramble to his feet, already reaching up to see if he could get some kind of purchase on the sides of the rim.
But as he moved, so did the balk of wood he was standing on and he lost his balance and sat down suddenly. Chillingly, close by, something stirred. In his mind’s eye he tried to conjure the situation he now found himself in. The cave, low in the bank, open to the river though the water was long gone now. Open at such an angle that tree trunks and branches and balks of timber had been swept in here by floods over the years, like the tree which had brought them this far today. Great lengths of wood piled atop one another and stirring now uneasily under his weight. Great trunks beginning to rot and give off that fearsome fetor which almost smelt like rotting meat.
He was already whimpering with visceral, atavistic realisation when he switched on the red dot and saw it reflected off a cold, golden eye. He shouted with fear as his own eyes cleared just enough to reveal the length of the snout beyond that cold, cold eye and the length of the teeth around it. With trembling concentration he pressed the barrel to the patient eye, until the steel circle was mere millimetres from the bright red dot. Babbling a childhood prayer he believed he had long forgotten, he pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Still praying, refusing to the last to believe that there was no way out of this, he pulled the trigger again only to hear the quiet click of the hammer falling on the empty chamber.
The eye closed, squeezing a fat tear from its corner. The mouth opened.
And he was screaming wildly all through the next few dreadful moments as his finger pressed and pressed the pistol’s trigger — and continued to press it long after the hand controlling it was ripped from the end of his arm and lay nestling for ever in the belly of the largest of the twelve ravenous crocodiles into whose bankside nest he had fallen.