"She's all business." Father slapped my back with pride.
But Mother was not "all business." She took things easy and always asked us if we were hungry or tired, or if there was anything we wanted. It was through Mother's encouragement that we roamed the forest and made our jungle camp at the Acre. Father treated us like adults, which meant he put us to work. But we were children — homesick half the time and afraid of the dark and not very strong. Mother knew that. It was Father who, in what you would have expected to be a coconut kingdom of sunshine and lazy days, was always roostering around and crowing for us to get down to business.
It was going to be an all-day trip today, and I knew that with Mother it would have been different. Father might say things like "I'm working for you" and "Tell me what to do," but he was in charge. He had made Jeronimo succeed — it was all his doing — and he knew it. Yet at times like this I wished that Mother was here. She would have walked behind the ice sled with us. We would have talked to her about the hopes we carried on our backs like parachutes. With Father, we listened and sweated.
"It's another mile up this crooked path, at a loose guess," Father said, looking up the hill. "We'll keep dragging this old Skidder. Once we get up there, it's all downhill."
He was pointing ahead to what looked like a mountaintop. It was a dome we could see from Jeronimo. An hour later, when we reached it, we saw that it was not a mountaintop at all, but the hip of just another slope. This mountainside seemed to go on and on.
Jerry said, "I want to rest. Will you wait for me, Charlie?"
"Dad won't like it. We can't sit down while they're doing all the hard work."
Jerry was hot-faced and blush-blotched and damp from the heat. His hands were dirty and his skinny legs were clawed from the brambles that grew beside the path. I told him I would run ahead and ask Father. I felt sorry for Jerry, but I wanted a rest too.
"Jerry wants to stop," I said. "He's tired."
"He says he's tired."
Father kept on walking. He called to the Zambus.
"We'll have lunch on top. Then we'll have a lovely postprandial glissade behind this baffle and sock this frozen monolith into that benighted wilderness."
Francis Lungley grunted.
Father winked at me. "You've got to talk their language."
But where was the top? These summits were as false as the ones beneath. They showed nothing but other summits beyond. Looking back, we could see the succession of crooked slopes that had appeared to us to be mountaintops until we scaled them. We had climbed the mountain's bum only to see, miles away, its sunlit shoulders.
"After this, it'll be all downhill," Father said, on the steepest parts.
The ice block jiggered and its leaf mitten crackled as it was dragged. Though I could not see them, I could hear the Zambus gasping. Their gasps were regular and harsh, like the scrape of a bucksaw in a log.
We were used to the damp shade of our own trees, the buggy riverside, the flat gardens and cool hollows of Jeronimo. Up here, the trees were thin and burned dry by the sun, the slopes were rocky, there was no shade or shelter. We heard dogs bark and now and then we smelled smoke. But we saw no people. Father was still talking, still promising us lunch and predicting that soon it would be all downhill.
Pretty soon, Jerry and I were walking in mud. Water was shaking out of the bamboo sled and drizzling onto the ground. The ice was melting fast — the lower portion of the banana-leaf mitten, all that insulation, was blackened with moisture. The angle of the track was so sharp that the ice sled was not pulled steadily but jerked, and water flew out from the runners with each jerk.
I crept with Jerry from behind the sled. The Zambus were bent double in their harnesses. They gasped in their wood-sawing way, and their chins dripped with sweat and their faces were twisted horribly. Crouched like this, struggling forward practically on their knees, they no longer looked like men. They had been turned into suffering animals by this hard pulling, with dog faces and bruised thumbs. Their nostrils were wide open and their eyes buried in squints. They looked so frightening with froth on their necks, we did not dare tell them the ice was melting. And we knew that if we told Father he would go into fits.
It was well past lunchtime. Father had hurried on to get a glimpse of what lay ahead. When he came back and said "Let's break for lunch," we guessed that we were near the top of the mountain.
Jerry and I were carrying the lunch in our knapsacks. We spread it on a rock — tomato sandwiches, boiled corn, guavas, bananas, and Jungle Juice — and Father began describing how much more useful a cable car would be on this tortuous path.
"Project a series of tripods, bearing a cable for slinging passengers and cargo up and down the mountain." he said. "It would be no more trouble to build than a ski lift."
And while the Zambus were panting and Jerry whimpering over his sore feet. Father cantered around the slope saying, "Section it — that's the way. Hoist some pylons here and get pulleys working. Your trolley simply swings up and over these little cliffs. If you had a system of finely meshed cogs, you could work it manually above or below, or counterbalance it on an opposing line and make it self-operating. Then your descending weight would hoist your hopper to the summit. That's not ordinary rock you're wearing out shoe leather on — that's potential ballast. Oh, Gaw!"
He had jogged over to the sled to admire its size, but he had seen that the ice was melting.
"We've got shrinkage! Charlie, you fruit, why didn't you say something? Come on, let's move out before it all goes to pieces."
And he ran ahead saying. "We should have put a rubber sock around it!"
The Zambus sighed, and harnessed themselves again.
By mid-afternoon we still had not reached the ridge. But Father shouted so much, the Zambus stumbled. And they tried so hard to please him, they rushed the sled into a boulder that punched it apart. With a grunt that was almost human, the block of ice cracked in half, splitting its mitten of leaves and fracturing the sled.
"That's wonderful," Father said quietly. "That is just what I need. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Now, don't mind me. I'm just going to take a walk around the block. You stay here, and if you're inclined to pick up the pieces, I promise you I won't stand in your way." He gave us all a weak smile.
He disappeared. A minute later we heard him scream from behind a rock.
Francis Lungley looked at me in alarm.
"He's mad." I said. "You'd better fix this."
The Zambus cut the ice free and, grumbling among themselves, made two sleds. It was almost an hour before we could set off again, but now Father and Bucky were harnessed to one sled, and Francis and John manned the other. This was worse than before, for Father was angry, growling at his work, straining and yelling. The broken ice had melted smaller, the two teams moved fast along the track. But we were no nearer to the ridge. Jerry and I scampered ahead, listening to the men breathing hard beneath us.
The next rise brought us to a bowl in the mountainside that was filled with white flowers and bees. The track, descending for the first time (but it rose again on the other side), gave Father and the Zambus a chance to take it easy. When they caught up with us, Father said, "Your hands and necks are filthy. What's the matter with you kids? Can't you keep clean?"
We explained that we had rubbed black berry juice on our skin to keep the flies and bees away. It was the trick Alice Maywit had shown us at the Acre. The berry juice was as good as insect repellent. The Zambus had used it too, only it was impossible to see the dark juice on their black skin.
Father had been bitten — his wrists and neck were pebbly from insect bites. I thought he might thank us for this information. It was natural medication, it worked, and it was free.