And the nest remained safe even from the apocalyptic inferno which whirled by above and without during the rest of that terrible night.
Ann had in fact fled into the field of reeds, some half formed thought inhabiting her panicked mind that cats feared water and if she could elude the leopard until she had gained the river, she would be safe. In fact die unfortunate creature succumbed to a massive heart attack brought on by the shock of its terrible injuries soon after it had entered the reeds behind her, but she did not know this as she plunged wildly through the tall grasses. Nor had she any idea that the noise of her own terror, of her gasping for breath, of her wild passage was drowning out the gathering rumble of the fire behind her. As she shoved her way by main strength through the sharp reeds, they chopped at the skin of her forearm and scored along the flesh of her triceps into her armpits. Within two hundred metres, the shirt which was all she wore apart from her underpants and boots was hanging in tatters from her and only die camera bag hanging round her neck saved her breasts from more serious damage. But she neither knew nor cared: she was running for her life, not just from the leopard but from everything that had happened to her during the last three days. She was running away, far beyond control, and she had no real intention of ever stopping again.
She burst out into a kind of trackway and paused, disorientated, just as a single scream, crystal clear and utterly terrifying, sang out through the night. So piercing was the scarcely human sound that it would have echoed hauntingly off the cliffs even though they were nearly five kilometres away, but the dull crump of an explosion — exactly like the shell from a T-80 main battle tank — killed the sound utterly. She looked around, half convinced that there must indeed be a tank following her. As she did so, the sound was repeated and suspicion became certainty. Fear of the leopard was replaced in her mind by the conviction that Gogol and Nimrod Chala had found her, that within a matter of mere moments she would be utterly at their mercy, with nothing to look forward to but six carefully-placed bullets.
A ghastly yellow light showed her a wall of reeds ahead and a tunnel of shadow leading away on either hand. She turned right and hurled forward with almost Olympic speed, so far out of control that had there been space enough and time, she would probably have run herself to death. As she sped wildly along the reed-walled tunnel down towards the water, she brushed against the dead vegetation and, invisibly but thickly, long-legged ticks began to rain down upon her from their hiding places high on the grey stalks.
The air between the thick reeds was absolutely still, no wind could move it though a tempest raged above, and as Ann ran down towards the lake, a tempest was indeed beginning to rage above. Had she been thinking with even a tithe of her usual acuity, she would have realised that the gathering light which was blessedly guiding her down the pathway could be nothing to do with either sun or moon. And had she been at all interested in extraneous sounds, she would have thought beyond the explosions of a phantom military barrage at her back and realised that these were not the shells from Gogol’s tanks pursuing her at all, but the sounds of something much more immediately deadly. Had she even paused to look up, she would have seen that the stars had come low and turned red — and that they were rushing westwards like the river itself.
The rain of blazing sparks set the reeds alight as soon as they began to settle. A hundred little fires sprang up all around Ann, but the magic stillness of the tunnel of air down which she was running kept even the faintest trace of smoke out of her lungs for a few moments more. But this was a situation which could not persist for long. The wind did not die down after the first wild wave of sparks sped west. On the contrary, it gathered strength and the sparks thickened as the blaze intensified so that the fires in the reeds, too, became more and more numerous. The first that Ann knew of her terrible danger was a sudden flash of yellow brightness which she half glimpsed through the stalks as through a bamboo screen. Disorientatingly, she supposed for an instant that she had somehow run full circle and returned to the camp and the fire she had been so proud of lighting. She paused in her panic flight and would have drawn breath to call to Robert but something drove her on — something blessed, for had she stopped for long enough to come to realise what she was doing to her body, to register even the tiniest part of the pain and exhaustion she was inflicting on herself, she would have collapsed and died where she was.
The pause was only die hesitation of the running deer; it lasted less than an instant and she was off again, with every part of her brain closed down except that part where the irresistible urge towards self-preservation lies. The pathway led straight down towards the river which in fact came closer to the parched outthrust of the tall, stately skeletons than it did to the rest of the jungle which had died for lack of it. Beyond the outer edge of the reeds there was scarcely a hundred metres of steep, animal-roughened mud before a sluggish wash of shallow water filled the outer edge of what had been the lake-still bow of a meander. But once the fires caught hold in that band along the outer edge of the wind’s capacity to bear substantial sparks, the restless, intensifying breeze spread them sideways as it drove them down towards the water.
Had Ann been able to take an aerial view, as the passengers in the last train to Mawanga that night halfway up the opposite cliff could and as the observer in the police helicopter summoned by the first reports of the conflagration did, she would have seen a whole range of black fans all across the terrain in front of her, each fan topped with a thick arch of flame. Had she been able to see what she was running into, she would have paused for thought and realised the full hopelessness of her situation. And collapsed. And died.
Instead, she hurled herself like a stampeding animal along the final section of the track. Unsuspected, the flames closed in on either hand. Now all she could see between the thin reeds beside her was mocking, dancing brightness and the sky in front of her was filled with bright-bellied billows of smoke. Distantly, she thought of trick or treat and a terrifying night of childhood when she had been pushed irresistibly towards the biggest bonfire she had ever seen. And still she ran on, like a lemming towards a cliff top. The roaring all around her cocooned her, pushed her further into her adrenaline-drugged dream world, hid the added thunder of the helicopter passing just above her. She never knew that it was the down-draught of the machine which upset the almost magic stasis which had kept her safe so far. The whirl of air beneath the machine’s great rotors sucked the nearest pincer of fire inwards and as the chopper lifted to turn and speed away downstream, the walls of the passage Ann had been following exploded into flame on either side of her.
And still she ran on, plunging madly through the wild whirl of blazing air, screaming nonstop as the withering caress of the flames moved lovingly over her curves, igniting every little hair on her thighs and flanks into a tiny prick of agony. She beat her hands before her face as though she could knock the deadly flames aside. But some part of her knew that her hands were useless against the heat and her only chance of survival lay in the water of the river. A chance of survival which receded almost unreachably when her thick brown hair caught fire.
Out onto the sloping bank she exploded, the wash of flame pursuing her as she flashed down the rough bank, miraculously keeping her footing, until the cool, healing balm of the River Mau welcomed her and she went under, and stayed there until her lungs threatened to suck in water, leeches and all, if she did not let them breathe.