All in all, it seemed safer to stay where they were until it grew light. Sleep was out of the question. The ground was covered in a thin, sandy grit but it was still rock-hard. The air stayed hot and filled with a whole range of insects, all of which seemed intent on sucking as many liquids from their bodies as possible. Grimly, they sat face to face on numb buttocks with cramping legs, swatting unavailingly with swollen fingers and raw palms, and planning their next step as the interminable hours wore on. Immediately above, in the arch of smotheringly soft black sky which reached from the cliff edge across to the black skeletons of the trees on the far shore, extravagant stars slowly wheeled through their motions as Ann and Robert talked. But, for all the energy and hope they poured into their plans, both of them knew that their destinies might just as well have lain in the astrological dictates of the stars. No matter what they planned and how they acted, survival would just be a matter of luck.
Because of their position at the foot of a westering cliff looking south, the dawn came up over Ann’s shoulder and suddenly flooded into Robert’s eyes like a summer spate on the river beside them. From the very moment of its birth, it had a bludgeoning power as though the heat had some unnaturally powerful force.
As soon as it struck them, they pulled themselves to their feet. Ann tucked her camera bag under her arm and Robert tightened the length of rope into a kind of cummerbund round his waist. Then, staggering like drunkards, they walked side by side towards the river. The concrete of the loading facility was rough and cracked. The grey dust with which it was covered, and which now also covered the pair of them, was ample evidence of the extent to which it had perished. The far end of it was still in place, however, and although they were cautious and increasingly wary of simply falling through it, they made it out to the very end and sat down again, looking around themselves. Here the scene that greeted them had the remains of a wild splendour about it. But the splendour was raddled, diseased and dying. At their feet, and for more than half a kilometre, the river ran, dark, greenish and sluggish, clearly a dwarf where a giant had once rolled. Beyond it sloped bare mud littered with rubbish, bones, dead tree branches.
‘It reminds me of Rudyard Kipling,’ she whispered.
‘What?’
‘This. All this. It’s from The Elephant’s Child: “The grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees.” This is just what I always imagined it would be like.’ She shuddered so much that he looked down at her in concern, wondering if the mosquito bites had tricked off a fever after all. But after a glance, his weary gaze was seduced away again to the terrible sight before them, and he found himself echoing what she had said: ‘The grey-green, greasy river all set about with fever trees.’ This was it, all right.
On their left hand, flowing down out of the dawn light, oozing past them and curving away into the grey jaws of the dying forest far back on the dry mud banks on their right, the stream slid, far too small to keep the jungle here alive, far too big for the two of them to cross. Above the curve on their right, the beetling black cliff made it all too obvious that the shore on which they sat had as little life left to it as the vegetation growing on it. There was no doubt in either of their minds that the northern bank of the River Mau would be washing against sheer black basalt in a kilometre or two. It was equally obvious that on their left, it had flowed against sheer rock face from the foot of the Leopold Falls all the way down here as well. They were, in effect, marooned here, trapped on a thin, manmade tongue of land with the cliff behind them and the cliff on either hand washed by half a kilometre of sluggish, uncross-able water. If they didn’t find a ford or a boat, they might just as well climb back onto the ledge above and give themselves up to the soldiers.
‘What do you think?’ asked Ann, though she knew the answer perfectly well.
‘We’d better go downstream first,’ answered Robert. ‘We have to find a ford or a boat.’
They sat and thought for a little longer as the sun began to weigh down upon them as though it was the gold it seemed to be. The river slouched past, thick, green and impenetrable, more like bile than water. The sluggish breeze brought the putrid stench up to wash over them but the movement of the air did little more than stir the flies and mosquitoes to a renewed frenzy. It seemed too much trouble to get up and get on with things; they were both far more exhausted, shocked and drained than they realised.
Their thoughts rapidly became so depressing and the weight of the day so enormous that at last they were glad enough to pull themselves up once more and seek some shelter in the trees, no matter what dangers might lurk beneath the shadows lingering in the dying undergrowth. Had it not been so near death, they would never have been able to get through the undergrowth. Clearly no human foot had been set here since the thirties, and they would both have needed heavy machetes had the vegetation been strong. As things were, the branches and fronds yielded to the pressure of their bodies with brittle weakness, and all they needed to be careful of was the shard-sharp edges which swung back into their faces like broken bottles in a pub brawl.
Keeping the sibilance of the river on their left, they wrestled their way westwards through the undergrowth, always alert for a chance to break out onto the bank of the river, eyes sharp for a crossing or a craft. To no avail. The river was much reduced and the bank on the outside of the curve was effectively a mud cliff ten metres high, but the nearer the edge, the thicker and greener the verdure. Tall trees stood strong and the bushes between them, with deep roots, had strong branches, long thorns and sharp-edged leaves. So there was no way to the edge, no way down the bank and no way across the river. Westward they plunged, through the dead grey forest, hoping against hope that there would be something to help them across before they ran out of shoreline.
But there was nothing. Forbidden all but an occasional look out over the river itself from an impenetrable wall of undergrowth, they fought their way westward through the first hour of the morning. The shadows protected their eyes but did little to cool them, especially as they were exerting themselves so fiercely. The movement of the branches, catching, scratching and cutting them, at least seemed to sweep the worst of the mosquitoes away. The canopy overhead remained thick enough to protect them from any prying eyes in the first low helicopter of the day, which swept in on the end of a long, sinister drone from the south-east, flying at no altitude from the direction of the Blood River and the border with Congo Libre.
At last, towards mid-morning, the forest around them thinned. The ground beneath them sloped down increasingly steeply. The bush began to die back and bare earth under their feet was briefly covered with a crisp pelt of dead grass, and they were out onto a long spit of dry mud which stretched westwards away to nothing along the foot of the black cliff, edged on the left with the sluggish surge of dull green water. The river turned in to the cliff foot here, but it was still a good three hundred metres wide and was just beginning to urge itself into something like a serious flow. Out towards the middle of the stream, the dull sage of the water was roused into sinister, lacy white by a series of irregularities which, had the water been shallower or quicker, would have been rapids.
On the far bank there was a wealth of debris, everything from lone trees through clumps of bushes, dead with their roots in the air, to a car tyre, an ancient wicker chair and an old divan bedstead. Had almost any of it been on this side, they might have made a makeshift raft. But there was nothing here. Nothing but a long, pointed tongue of stinking, sunbaked mud, as hard and red as brick. The pair of them staggered onwards, looking around themselves in dazed disbelief, going into slow motion like characters escaped from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Down at the thin end, with five hundred metres of rock face reaching up sheer on their right while the shallow green water chuckled and sucked away busily within a couple of centimetres of their shoes on their left, they stood, looking down, defeated.