Consternation and anguish fought to take her breath, and though her lips parted the doubts and fears were too many to be put into words.
‘We are going to see,’ Blanche said, her face, her lips, absolutely without colour.
Liz turned like an automaton to accompany them.
‘Can I help?’ Cresswell asked. ‘Come with you?’
‘I’d rather you stayed here and looked after my men,’ George told him. He hitched his revolver in the holster. ‘You’d best show us what you’ve found, Chemor.’
The scout turned and led the way in the direction of the manager’s bungalow, but after about thirty yards he turned abruptly to the right through part of the plantation. He pointed to the ground, parting ferns so they could see the tracks of a vehicle.
Here and there it looked as if dead vegetation had been deliberately pulled over the tracks. For some distance they walked straight into the trees, then turned abruptly left. Looking round, Liz for the first time really understood how confusing these plantings could be. The rubber trees were set some twelve to fifteen feet apart and whichever way you looked they formed lines, radiating away from you like a fiendish maze. You could go only a short distance into the trees before becoming totally disoriented.
She did remember that in the direction they were going, to the southeast of Rinsey, were a number of rocky waterfalls cascading from the hills and culminating in a steep, jungle-clad ravine. She glanced at her mother’s back as they walked in line — the scout, her mother, herself, George last. Her mother looked like one travelling in a nightmare, dragging her feet wearily free of the encumbering undergrowth, moving only because compelled.
Liz wondered if Blanche remembered the one time they had brought their daughters this way for a picnic. It had come to a premature end as Wendy had ventured too near the edge of the falls. Liz had also found herself the target of parental wrath and anxiety — because she had wanted to stay.
If her father’s vehicle had been hidden, it was by someone who knew the area well. She could think of no other place where it would be possible to drive through the trees and find flat rocks and a convenient ravine on the other side.
Once they came to the edge of the rubber trees they were on solid slabs of rock where water gushed down in wide and pleasant falls — until the fourth downward step was reached, where land and water fell steeply away, down into a deep midnight green mass of dense jungle. Against the dark panorama, parrots in hues of brilliant white, red and unnatural green flashed across like players in an airy theatre.
It was noisy standing above the crash of the water and alarming to see where Chemor had found the continuation of the tyre tracks. Losing them at the edge of the plantation and across the hard table of rock, he had found them again at the lip of the ravine.
‘I can see nothing down there,’ Blanche said, shielding her eyes, then exclaiming, ‘Oh, as the wind moves the bushes … ’
Liz knelt on the rock. She could just make out the back wheels and undercarriage of a vehicle, which seemed to be almost standing on its nose some hundred feet below.
‘Have you been down?’ Liz asked Chemor, who shook his head.
‘No, need rope to climb back up,’ he answered.
‘That — whatever it is — could be from the war?’ George suggested.
Chemor shook his head, pointing to the narrow stretch of earth and vegetation. ‘Tracks through plantation same as here.’
Liz could see where the tyres had dug into the lip, then where the vehicle must have fallen clear and free — down. ‘It could have been an accident?’ She turned an agonised look up to George. ‘My father could be ... ’ She swallowed and turned back, peering down, her ears suddenly singing; she felt very sick. George gripped her shoulders.
‘You stay here with your mother.’ He began unbuckling his holster to leave his gun with her. ‘Chemor and I will go down.’
‘There’s a way down the other side of the falls,’ Blanche said, her voice almost matter-of-fact in its control. ‘It’s not that far, actually.’
‘Would we be able to reach where the vehicle is?’
She nodded at George. ‘Neville and I often came here and explored these falls, long before we had the children.’
Blanche and Chemor changed places and she led them across and down the first two shallow slabs of rock to the other side. The route led down a narrow gully which the falls would wash out when in full spate during the monsoons. The noise of the water grew louder as they proceeded and the path was certainly slippery and dangerous for the unwary. Liz adjusted her view of her mother’s concern for the tiny Wendy.
The gulley the water had cut fell back so the light came to them through a curtain of water, blue at the top of the slope when they could still see the sky but greener and darker as they descended down the rocky course. Liz could imagine her parents younger, carefree with no children to hamper their explorations, discovering this strange and rather awesome pathway with the wonder of living water before them.
A sharp turn to the right and a level stretch of rock, amazingly quite dry behind the falls, made her realise they were actually at the bottom of the ravine. They had crossed the falls at the top through the water, now at the bottom they walked back to the side they started from, this time underneath the falls.
Chapter Seven
The last hundred yards from the falls were the most hazardous. None of them was dressed for pushing through this mass of growth and Chemor unsheathed his machete.
‘Don’t catch hold of anything if you can help it,’ George advised, and, as the slope grew steeper once more, gripped Blanche’s hand and supported her down.
Sliding and slipping, Liz remembered from her childhood that the most beautiful plants and flowers usually had the biggest, sharpest thorns. Under the massed jungle canopy the gloom increased. Perspiration poured from them as they negotiated each step, while Chemor worked with steady rhythmical sweeps of his machete from head height to ground level to clear a way large enough for them to pass through. Roots, ferns, tortuous vines and creepers climbing up to the light, wonderful pale ghostlike sprays of orchids, and butterflies that looked like flowers until they moved, inhabited this dripping, drowned world.
Liz wished she could stop dwelling on the thought that anyone who had gone over the edge in that vehicle would, even if they survived, never have made this climb back up. Then again, they might still be there in the jeep ... A gasp of alarm came with the thought and the consequent stumble. She raised an arm to sweep away both tears and the perspiration which was running into and stinging her eyes.
Chemor heard and paused to look at her. Then they both turned to look farther back to George, who, progressing at her mother’s pace, was some way behind.
‘Your mother a brave lady,’ Chemor said. ‘This is bad jungle.’
Liz nodded, too breathless to speak.
‘You too.’
She shook her head with conviction. She was terrified of what they might find — a bloated body cooked in a metal jeep for two tropical weeks. Oh, God, stop it! Stop it!
‘Go on!’ she urged.
They battled on for another half an hour. She felt as if they had travelled to the far side of the peninsula, but calculated they had probably only gone about a hundred yards. She suddenly had a different fear, of not finding the vehicle after all. Once they had descended into the ravine they could no longer see where they were heading. George had taken sightings from the sun and the steep escarpment, but once in the jungle proper they could see neither sun nor rock face.
In another quarter of an hour, George hailed from the back for a halt. It was not until Liz’s laboured breathing had eased that the two caught up. George swept his boot and then his hand along a wet but substantial fallen branch where the two women could sit down.