This time he had no dry riposte to offer. He gave a numb, defeated nod. She was right. They had very little chance of escaping the situation alive. If they were caught, death would be certain — and unimaginably protracted and horrible. He met the hopeless desperation in her gaze and frowned with fear in reply.
‘How do people keep going in situations like this?’ she whispered.
‘One step at a time, I suppose,’ he answered. His voice was rusty, as though he had been screaming until it broke.
‘Right. Our first step is to get down to the plain. Any ideas?’
Under the influence of her impassioned fear, he refrained from making any grim suggestions about flying and seriously began to think about the question. Soon after they had left the N’Kuru township, they had crossed the bridge over the Leopold Falls. The river was running low and the falls themselves had been revealed as a series of rocky steps down to the plain. How far back were the falls? Pretty far.
‘Wasn’t there some kind of cable car affair a little way back?’ asked Ann suddenly. ‘I remember coming under some machinery. I think it was broken down.’
‘Yes! I remember it. It was a bauxite lift or some such thing, designed to get minerals from the plateau down to the river for transportation to the city — in the days when the river was a reliable way of transporting anything. It’s ruined and deserted now. There may be a way down there, though. Good thinking!’
The lift had been constructed on a widening of the ledge where it was possible for goods trains to stop and be loaded if there were no barges available. The whole thing consisted of three compounds, one at the head of the cliff high on the jungly escarpment, one here on the main ledge behind the railway track on a semi-circular spur line, and one at the foot of the cliff on the river bank far below. The middle compound, behind the track, was the smallest by the look of things, a couple of hundred metres square surrounded by rotting, jungle-covered fencing. Inside the compound was a big storage shed, a loading facility beside the rusty spur line and the winding machinery which controlled the big box lifts that raised and lowered the consignments of ore from the cliff top. Outside the compound, in a little area of its own on the far side of the main tracks, stood another winding house which controlled the lines down to the riverside. It was all deserted and, in the gathering evening when Ann and Robert arrived, chillingly eerie.
They had been following a rough path through the jungle, trying with marked success to stay out of the general view. They had cowered behind mercifully massive bushes on the two occasions when trains had thundered past and had been fortunate to be under such a solidly impenetrable canopy, for time and again helicopters had swooped unnervingly over the cliff edge just above them and blattered away across the river and out over the grasslands. The vegetation in the groin between the horizontal ledge and the vertical cliff face was surprisingly lush, fed no doubt by the constant rain of detritus from the abundant vegetation overhanging the edge three hundred metres above their heads. It was very light in animal occupation, however, and although there were vivid, occasionally shocking hoots and monkey calls from the jungle far above, here there were only the calls of birds and the chitterings, rustlings and flutterings of the insect world. The earth upon which they trod so silently was a strange, soft stinking mixture of rotting vegetation and bird droppings liberally intermingled with the shattered corpses of monkeys who had fallen over the cliff above and failed their flying lessons as spectacularly as the people from the train. There was nothing of real soil about the place at all, no earth, no sand, stones or rock fragments, simply this thick, incredibly fertile layer of rotting ex-life on the flat black basalt. Only the roots of the abundant vegetation held the whole microcosm together, and these were beginning to give way as the bushes and trees slowly surrendered to drought.
Dead or not, dying or not, the jungle had invaded the ancient compound and held it in its thrall. The rusted, rotten diamonds of the compound wire surrendered to the first tentative push as though there was no trace of true metal left within them at all. The concrete which had once graced the main compound area was crumbling and floury. The rails of the little spur were the colour of dry blood in the setting sun as the two lost humans followed them ever more slowly across to the storage facility. The necessity of keeping out of sight forced first Robert then Ann into the bush-bulging web-clouded tombs of the buildings. Broken windows and doors gave easy access to desolate offices, which still contained, apparently undisturbed in nearly thirty years, a few pathetic sticks of furniture, books and calendars. Like children in a haunted house, they wandered through the gathering shadows, glancing here and there at the rubbish left behind by men who had apparently been spirited away like the crew of the Marie Celeste. The whole place had a disturbing air, as though sometime during its long, lonely wait, the buildings had gone native in the worst possible way.
It was an impression intensified by the big warehouse behind the offices. Here, everything that had been constructed by humans had been taken over by other, older life forms, which had then died in their turn. The branches of the adventurous vegetation which had explored the buildings lay about like white bones, twisted and alien. In the square metal box girders high above, the huge untidy nests of nameless, long dead birds extended the shadows and were, seemingly, home to nothing but insects now. On the ground, low bushes, dead and skeletal, rose and fell over piles of invisible produce so worthless that no one had even bothered to stack it properly. There was a silence about the place, emphasised by the chittering of the insects high above; a silence so intense it seemed to whisper. Robert and Ann stood side by side on the threshold of the place, looking across the wilderness of dead things. Ann thought inescapably of the spiders that had run across her body earlier that day.
‘I’m not going in there,’ she said aloud.
The sound of her voice echoed briefly. The vibration of the words seemed to set dust to slithering down walls and settling through the strange dead sunbeams reaching across the dead air.
In the tiny silence that followed, something stirred. Something strange and close by.
‘We don’t need to be in here anyway,’ said Robert more quietly, his eyes everywhere. ‘We just need to see whether there is anything that will get us down.’
‘If the winding gear is in this state, nothing mechanical will,’ opined Ann, also quietly. The pair of them were backing out of the big room now, still side by side, their eyes searching for whatever was making that strange, snuffling movement.
‘You know I still have the pistol in my camera bag,’ breathed Ann as they fell back through the frame of the main access door into the corridor between the derelict offices.
‘Forget it,’ suggested Robert. ‘Let’s just leave whatever is in there well alone!’ and the pair of them turned and fled.
Outside, they followed the sagging cables across the compound, over the spur line, out past a crazy gate, across the main line and out to the edge of the plateau. As they moved, glancing nervously over their shoulders, they discussed what the thing in the main shed might have been, but they had nothing to go on and could do little more than guess. In spite of the gathering darkness, the blustering of the increasingly boisterous evening wind and the way in which the red-edged shadows intensified the disturbing atmosphere, they tried to keep their speculation within reasonable bounds. It could be anything from a goat thrown off one of the trains to a big dog that had scavenged its way along the ledge from the township. It might even have been one of the monkeys that had fallen from the cliff edge above and flown a little more successfully than the rest. Whatever it was, it was left well behind them once they had crossed the main track, and their quiet conversation began to speculate whether or not there was a direct way down from here.