The Tiger Warrior Part 9

"The G.o.davari is the second holiest river in India, after the Ganges," Pradesh said, as he steered the boat into the central channel. "I wanted you to experience the final fifteen miles of our trip by river so you could empathize with those soldiers in 1879, going up into the unknown on their paddle steamer, with no idea of what lay ahead."

"Except mosquitoes," Costas said, slapping his leg.

Pradesh nodded. "By the end of the Rampa campaign, four-fifths of the troops had been laid low by malaria, and many had died. The Koya people of the jungle have some degree of immunity. They believed the fever was the vengeance of their most dreaded demon, their konda devata, the tiger spirit."

Costas peered dubiously into the haze ahead, at the shapes of low-lying hills just discernible to the east. "Is the source of the river up there?"

Pradesh shook his head. "Much farther west. Some say it pours from the mouth of a holy idol near Bombay. Some even say it's joined by a subterranean channel to the Ganges, linking the great waterways of India together."

"Sounds like wishful thinking," Jack said.

"The engineer in me agrees, but it's still an attractive concept. In India, everything from the north seems to flow down, to trickle to the south. Invaders like the Mongols, religions like Buddhism. But hardly any of it permeated the hill tracts, the jungle. Rampa district, where we're going, wasn't even surveyed until 1928. At the time of the 1879 rebellion, it was a big blank on the map. Even now there are hundreds of square miles which have only ever been visited by Koya and other tribal hunters. Even the missionaries won't go there."

For almost half an hour they carried on upstream without talking, watching the muddy banks as the river gradually constricted from over a mile in width to only a few hundred yards. They glimpsed oxen plowing paddies between lines of coconut palms. They pa.s.sed women in wet saris bathing in the river, and others thrashing the rocks with washing, risking being swept away in the current. Men in loincloths hung low in the water against the gunwales of their boats, cooling off Everywhere they saw signs of decay or repair, it was hard to tell which. Jack realized that the tranquility of the scene belied the violence of the coming monsoon season, when the floodwaters would sweep away everything on the riverbanks before them.

They pa.s.sed a line of wooden posts in mid-stream, with the tattered remains of fishing nets bowed out in the current between them. To Jack it was as if the nets were there to catch history, fragments of the past dislodged from the jungle ahead. Since leaving Arikamedu, he had been trying to attune himself to the archaeology of rivers, places which could hold treasures, like the fleeces used to catch gold in mountain streams, but at other times were void, swept clear of anything tangible. It was a different kind of archaeology here, more elusive, with none of the certainties of a shipwreck.

Like the coast at Arikamedu the human imprint on the riverbank seemed ephemeral, constantly reforming. The only permanent structure they saw was a beautiful white temple on a rocky island in the river, its roof a swirl of sculpted snakes above painted tiers of gold. Pradesh slowed the boat down, reached into a bowl and tossed a handful of flower petals into the water. "That's Vishnu, asleep under the coiled snake Sesha, the five-headed one," he said. "The deep blue, the blue of lapis lazuli, the color of Vishnu, is the color of eternity, of immortality."

"Are the jungle people Hindu?" Costas asked.

Pradesh shook his head and opened up the throttle again, raising his voice above the noise. "Up ahead there's a hill called Shiva, on the edge of the jungle. Naming it Shiva is a bit like putting a Christian cross on an old Roman temple, only here there was no attempt at proselytizing, no attempt to suppress the old beliefs. Hinduism's like an archaeological site. Strip away the upper layers, and the old G.o.ds, the old religions, are all still there. Only where we're going, there's nothing to strip away. That temple's the last bastion of the lowland people against the looming jungle ahead, a place where even their G.o.ds fear to go."

After that they saw fewer people along the sh.o.r.e, and then none. The open paddies gave way to scrub and then jungle, a dense green foliage that reached down the slopes and enveloped the sh.o.r.eline, fringing the river with palmyra and coconut palms that hung over silvery stretches of beach. Mist rose off the trees and tumbled down the riverbanks, leaving a narrow pa.s.sage in the center of the river where their vision was clear. Soon the jungle-shrouded hills rose three hundred meters or more on either side of the river, the upper reaches barely visible in foggy blue-green silhouette.

A long, flat boat came into view around a bend, drifting with the current, its engine thudding in idle. It was laden with piles of coconuts and lengths of tree trunk, tamarind and mahogany. A policeman in a shabby khaki uniform lounged in the stern, holding an old Lee-Enfield rifle and eyeing them suspiciously as the boat slid past. Pradesh waved at him cheerfully. "The police have always been an issue up here," he said. "The hill people see them as protectors of the lowlanders who are given forestry concessions, people who come and cut down their precious hardwoods. And you can hardly imagine that chap standing up to Maoist terrorists, can you? But that opens up a whole other problem. If you militarize the police, you antagonize the hill people more, and if you send in the army to confront the Maoists, you risk a return to the situation in 1879. Sappers are the best option, because the hill people can see them doing useful things, building roads, clinics, school-houses. Sappers are soldiers too, but they are a different breed of men."

"So I can see," Jack said, smiling.

Pradesh throttled back and steered the boat out of the main current and into the eddy waters along the left bank, where the gentle puttering of the motor was drowned out by the screeches and chattering of a band of white-faced langur monkeys who leered at them from the treetops. The boat rounded a bend, and they saw paths leading up from a beach to low-set houses in a jungle clearing, the palm-frond roofs overshadowed by mango and gnarled tamarind trees. For the first time they saw the Koya, dark, finely muscled men wearing only loincloths, standing under the fronds watching them. One of them sported a leopard skin with a peac.o.c.k feather pendant hanging from his neck.

"That's the village of Puliramanaguden," Pradesh said quietly. "It means 'Place of the Tiger G.o.d.'"

"Tigers," Costas murmured. "Any elephants?"

"Rarely, but plenty of gaur, the local bison. The Koya call this stretch of jungle Pappikondalu, the Bison Hills. The bison are about the size of small elephants. I've heard them at night, thundering together through the jungle, roaring and panting like creatures from mythology. All you can see is the whites of their eyes. Even the tigers steer clear of them."

Costas grunted. "Another choice IMU holiday destination."

They went on farther, still enveloped by the mist along the bank, and reached another bend, the flow of the central channel now visible in the water ahead. Pradesh kept in the lee of the sh.o.r.e until they were only a few yards from the point of the bend, holding the boat almost at a standstill as he waited for the current to pull them out into mid-stream. Jack saw a woman sitting on the tangled roots of a banyan tree. She was very old, and blind. Her eyes were like those of an ancient statue, the paint gone and only the white remaining, yet Jack felt that she was staring directly at him, holding him fast. She seemed like a pieta, a mother anguished, mourning a lost child. Jack remembered the Victorian photo of the mother and child above the old chest in his cabin, his great-great grandmother and her baby. He looked up at the forest canopy above the woman, and through a break in the mist he saw the hills dark against the sky. He felt an intense sense of familiarity, and then it was gone. From around the point a water buffalo lurched into view, lunging on a halter tied to a stake, a sudden, violent movement that set Jack's pulse racing. The current caught the boat and Pradesh gunned the engine, bringing them out into the central channel, away from the woman and around the point, until she was lost in the haze. The river widened and the mist lifted, and Jack knew they were there. The place exactly matched the description in his great-great-grandfather's diary. Pradesh steered the boat back into the still water beside the left bank, and nudged the prow into the beach until it stuck fast. Jack gazed at the opposite sh.o.r.e, a sandbar extending several hundred meters along another bend in the river where sediment had been pushed by the current. The sandbar was cut by a dry streambed he could just make out coming through the jungle. "Over there," Pradesh said, pointing. "That's where it happened."

"I know," Jack replied quietly. "It's just as I imagined it."

"Don't expect to find anything from 1879 on the riverbank," Pradesh said. "That sandbar's swept away every year by the monsoon floodwater, and then reformed anew. We need to go to the riverside village you can just make out higher up, on the fringe of the jungle."

"We're in your hands," Jack said.

Pradesh looked at his watch. "The helicopter's due in an hour. It'll fly us deeper into the jungle. My two sappers will be on board. I didn't want to excite any hostility by having them with us on the river, but I don't want to go into the jungle without them, meaning no disrespect to your nine-millimeter Beretta, Jack."

"You spotted it," Jack said.

"Just keep it out of sight. It's a tinderbox up here. If any of the hill people who don't know me suspect we're government officials, then the game's over. They'll clam up completely. We'll stop here for a break before going over to the village. It may seem odd in this heat, but I'm thirsty for tea."

Pradesh busied himself with the battered old kettle and Primus stove from the boat's store box, and Costas disappeared discreetly ash.o.r.e. Jack sat alone, looking around. They had left the mist in the narrows behind them and entered an oasis of light, as if the air had been cleansed. The beach opposite swept around in the shape of a sword, the sand a dazzling gold. Behind it rose shimmering tree trunks and great boulders of sandstone that had been scoured clean by the floods. Above that was the jungle canopy, myriad shades of green climbing the steep sides of the cliffs as they converged upstream in the great gorge of the G.o.davari.

"Ahead of us, where the gorge narrows, the river's only two hundred meters wide," Pradesh said, handing him a gla.s.s of tea. "The hills on either side rise to over eight hundred meters, and the river's very deep, almost a hundred meters."

Jack looked at the jungle-clad walls of the gorge. It was enticing, yet forbidding, like a high mountain pa.s.s that promised a lush valley beyond, but threatened grave peril in the crossing. To the few lowlanders who ventured here the promise was the Abode of the Immortals, the Heavenly City. To the first Europeans it was the fabled kingdom of Golconda, the Mountain of Light, where the Koh-i-noor diamond had been mined, somewhere beyond the gorge ahead. Yet before the arrival of steamboats this was the end of the river journey, and most who came here turned back, powerless to resist the current as it tumbled through the gorge, pushing their boats back and letting the river return them downstream to civilization. Jack peered into the water. It was murky, not with mud but with some other darkness, and the sunlight seemed to vanish into it. The canyon walls should have been reflected in the water, but instead he saw nothing. It was disconcerting, as if the river were a black hole that swallowed up reality, leaving him wondering whether the mist-shrouded sh.o.r.eline was some kind of phantasm, almost too close to his boyhood image of this place to be real. He snapped out of his reverie as Costas came crashing back through the undergrowth and leapt onto the bow of the boat, a picture of dishevelment with his shorts barely on.

"Something threaten your manhood?" Jack said.

"Spiders," Costas panted, sitting back, checking his legs anxiously. "Giant hairy spiders the size of saucers."

"The spiders are harmless, unless you provoke them," Pradesh said, handing him a tea gla.s.s. "Just keep an eye out for the cobras. The Koya use a root as an anti-venom, but I've never been able to find it."

"There's always Jack's Beretta," Costas said.

"Bad karma to shoot snakes," Pradesh replied, wagging his finger. "Anyway, don't worry. We're not going trekking through the jungle. Jack wanted to retrace his ancestor's footsteps, but I convinced him that we should go by helicopter. Jack agreed. He was concerned for your safety."

"My safety? Jack? Yeah, right, that would be a first," Costas grumbled, wiping the sweat off his face and swatting a mosquito. "At least we've all taken our anti-malarials."

"That's another thing," Pradesh said hastily. "They don't always work out here. But I know someone who can give us a little booster in the village."

Jack looked again at the scene, imagining it one hundred and thirty years before. "So what do you know about August the twentieth 1879?"

Pradesh eyed him keenly. "Well, you were right about what happened."

"Human sacrifice?"

Pradesh looked at the riverbank. "I told you I was brought up near the G.o.davari River, in Dowlaiswaram. Well, my grandfather was actually a Koya, from this place. The story of that day in 1879 became a kind of legend, kept secret, even from the anthropologists who occasionally came up here asking questions. As far as I know, what I'm about to tell you has never been told to any other outsiders."

"Go on," Jack said.

"The rebels put on a spectacular show. They executed their police captives on that beach, in full view of the sappers on the river steamer trapped on the sandbank. But they also stirred the rest of the Koya into a frenzy, feeding them alcohol and G.o.d knows what else. The tribals carried out three sacrifices that day, the full meriah. A man, a woman and a child."

"A child too?" Jack murmured.

"Later, the authorities in the lowlands refused to believe it was a sacrifice, and thought the rebels had given their executions the guise of meriah to make them seem more terrifying, as if they were reviving a dread practice the British thought they'd stamped out years before. But the authorities were wrong. That scene on the riverbank was the real thing. Even today, sacrifices are still performed using langur monkeys and chickens, but the meriah ritual is still here, lurking just under the surface, and it would take little provocation, the re-lighting of that tinderbox, for it to be revived."

"But what happened?" Jack persisted. "What made my great-great-grandfather end his diary that day?"

Pradesh pursed his lips. "I don't know. Something traumatized him. It would have been a dreadful sight, the child especially, the flesh ripped from them while they were still alive. Maybe he felt impotent, unable to help. You say he was the father of a young child himself? You told me he was in India as a boy during the mutiny, when there were terrible scenes of slaughter. Maybe some latent memory of that horror resurfaced as he watched the sacrifice. By all accounts he was an excellent officer, a tough soldier, so whatever he saw or did, it must have been pretty bad."

"So where do we go from here?" Jack asked quietly.

Pradesh paused. "I know where he and Lieutenant Wauchope went that day."

"Go on."

Pradesh reached into the front of his shirt and took out a pendant hanging on an old leather necklace. "It's a tiger's claw," he said. "The tiger was killed by my grandfather, who was a muttadar. That's a village chief, but also a kind of priest. The tiger was attacking a boy playing by the river, and my grandfather shot it with an old East India Company musket the Koya had stolen years before from the native police. But the tiger is sacred here, and by killing it my grandfather became an outcast, forced to leave the jungle. He met my grandmother, a lowlander, and they lived in Dowlaishweram. But their son, my father, became the district forest officer, and he used to bring me up here. I was adopted by the villagers of Rampa and learned to speak the Koya dialect. The tribal people revered my father because the officials posted up here are usually lowlanders, and traditionally the lowlanders were seen as corrupt moneylenders who treated the hill people with contempt. My father actually went to Delhi to fight their case for forest rights. He was a great man."

"He must be proud of you."

Pradesh looked downcast. "He might have been. I'll never know. Ever since the time of the British Raj, the cause of the forest people has been hijacked by others. A hundred years ago it was the Indian nationalist movement, who claimed that the tribal uprisings were somehow part of an independence struggle against the British. And now it's the Maoists, the so-called People's War Group. The tribals are angry again because the government has been selling mining concessions, and the PWG have taken the tribals' side. In reality the PWG couldn't care less. It was just a way to get the tribals to leave them alone in their jungle bases where they plan terrorist attacks around India. My father confronted them and was murdered for it."

"I'm sorry," Jack said.

"It's why I've never been posted up here," Pradesh replied ruefully. My colonel knows my family history. I was too close."

"You don't look the vengeance type," Costas murmured.

"Try me," Pradesh said quietly.

Costas pointed at the claw hanging from Pradesh's neck. "Isn't that going to get us into trouble with any Koya we come across? I mean, if the tiger's sacred?"

Pradesh shook his head. "Once a tiger's dead and the spirit has left, the skin and claws have great value. The skin is worn by a muttadar for dancing and ceremonies, and the claws are distributed among the young men of the village. They're good-luck charms, to ward off the angry spirits when the men are hunting deep in the jungle."

Costas downed his tea in one gulp. "I think I'd opt for an a.s.sault rifle."

Pradesh grinned. "That would help too."

"Let's have your story," Jack said. "What the Koya remember about that day."

Pradesh paused. "It was told to me by my grand father when I was a boy. For the hill people here it has become part of their lore, shrouded in legend like the foundation myths of the G.o.ds. But it concerns your great-great-grandfather."

"Go on."

"The most sacred objects of the Koya were velpus, a word meaning idols or G.o.ds," Pradesh said. "Each family had one, each clan. They were usually small objects that would seem commonplace to us but were exotic to the Koya, like a piece of wrought iron. Each velpu was kept inside a length of hollow bamboo about a foot long. They were guarded with great secrecy, only brought out on rare occasions to be worshipped. The greatest of them all, the supreme velpu, was called the Lakka Ramu. It was kept in a cave shrine deep in the jungle, and was never opened. It was said that the G.o.d inside was too dazzling, and would blind anyone who gazed on it. Perhaps it was gla.s.s, maybe a gem-stone, something exotic that had reached the Koya from the outside world countless generations ago. The supreme velpu held the soul of the Koya people. Without it, they would be living in a shadowland, at the whim of the malign spirits who haunted the jungle, especially the dreaded konda devata, the spirit of the tiger. And they have been in that shadowland since 1879."

"What happened?" Costas asked.

Pradesh glanced around and lowered his voice. "My grandfather, the village chief, was a hereditary muttadar. By ancient tradition the chiefs of Rampa village had been guardians of the jungle shrine where the sacred Lakka Ramu was hidden. My grandfather's grandfather was the muttadar in 1879, but he didn't survive the rebellion. I know what happened to him from the rebels who watched the events of that day unfold from the jungle, men of my own clan who slunk back to their villages after the revolt was over and pa.s.sed the story down to their children. You showed me Howard's diary, Jack, the final entry. On that day the muttadar was surrounded by the rebels and shot full of arrows. They knew what he'd done."

"Which was?" Costas said.

"The muttadar feared that Chendrayya, the rebel leader, would come to the shrine and take the Lakka Ramu, and use it to control all the hill people for his own purposes. Chendrayya came from another clan, one that had been locked in a feud for generations with the muttadar's clan, an ancient dispute over which family should control the shrine. The British officers knew all about tribal feuds from their experiences on the north-west frontier of India, and they used it to their advantage."

"The muttadar came over to the British," Jack murmured.

"He took the velpu from the shrine for safekeeping, then he took a huge chance and volunteered himself as a guide and interpreter," Pradesh said. "His condition was that the British officers allow him to return the velpu to the shrine when it was all over. He was on the river steamer with the sappers on that final day in Howard's diary, 20 August 1879. It's in the pages you emailed me, Jack. It fits with what I knew exactly. There was a big firefight that day with the rebels in the jungle, dozens killed and wounded. Then Howard and the others on the steamer must have witnessed that sacrificial scene by the river. The muttadar saw it too, and got jittery, went to pieces. It would have seemed as if all the malign spirits of the jungle were converging on him, taunting him for taking the velpu. There's no record in Howard's diary of what happened next, and nothing more in the regimental records at Bangalore. Most of the officers who returned from Rampa just wanted to forget about it. But there's a story told to me by my grandfather. A British official with the sappers, a man called Bebbie, had been taken ill, and was still in the jungle. Howard and Wauchope set off with a rescue party. Bebbie was laid up near the shrine, already dead. The muttadar had volunteered to lead them to the spot, providing he could take the idol with him. The British officers probably felt they had no choice. Even with their superior weapons it would have been suicidal to venture into the jungle, a small force of a dozen against hundreds of rebels. They gambled that the presence of the idol would keep the rebels from attacking them. The muttadar backed off from the shrine at the last minute, terrified that the G.o.d would wreak vengeance on him, and then he was murdered. Howard himself took the idol into the cave."

"And afterward Chendrayya stole it?" Jack said.

Pradesh shook his head. "No. Howard kept his word to the muttadar. But then he and Wauchope must have realized that their only chance of escape was to take the idol back with them, to use it as a safeguard just as the muttadar had done on the way in. There was a firefight as they emerged from the cave, but when the rebels saw they still had the bamboo velpu they backed off The two officers retreated through the jungle to the river, with the sappers. And they took something else out of the shrine, another sacred relic. It was a broken sword, attached to a golden gauntlet in the shape of a tiger's head. The Koya believed it had been worn by the great G.o.d Rama himself."

"Well I'll be d.a.m.ned," Jack murmured.

"You know this?"

"Something I haven't shown you yet. A family heirloom."

"You have it?" Pradesh gasped.

"It's bra.s.s, not gold, but it must be the same," Jack replied excitedly. "Howard gave it to his daughter, my great-grandmother, and I've inherited it." Jack sat back, exalted. He had known the gauntlet had come from the jungle, but nothing more. This was extraordinary. Then he remembered Katya, her reaction when he had told her about it. And he remembered Katya's uncle, Hai Chen, the anthropologist who had disappeared in the jungle over four months ago. That was the other reason Jack was here. He stared out into the jungle canopy. Maybe Hai Chen had simply walked away. Maybe there had been an accident. Solitary anthropologists had disappeared in jungles before. Then Jack thought of the Maoists, the dangers that lurked out here. He pursed his lips. Something more was going on. The pointers were there, but it still didn't add up. He turned back to Pradesh, who said something under his breath, not in English or Hindi but in another language, a soft clicking sound. He looked at Jack, his eyes alight. "The recovery of this object would mean everything to the Koya," Pradesh murmured. "I hardly dare ask. Do you have the velpu too?"

Jack shook his head. "I'd never heard of that before now."

Pradesh closed his eyes for a moment, and exhaled hard. "What we know is this. The Rampa Rebellion continued for months more, but that day was a turning point. Never again was there a rebel force of that size, and afterward Chendrayya was only able to muster loyal bands of a few dozen, the hard core, many of them already outcasts and criminals. Most of the rebels in the early months had been honest forest men, Koya and Reddis. Once they saw the murder of the muttadar and saw how much Chendrayya coveted their sacred velpu, they lost their ardor for the rebellion. And knowing that the British had the idol - and realised its power over them - would have weakened their resolve still further. They knew they would only ever get it back when the rebellion was finished."

"But you're saying they never did get it back," Costas commented.

"That shrine," Jack said. "It's near a Rampa village?"

Pradesh nodded. "About eight miles north-east of here, through dense jungle. It's named after the G.o.d Rama."

"Rama," Jack repeated softly, his mind racing.

"Wasn't Rama a Hindu G.o.d?" Costas said.

Pradesh nodded again. "The image of the perfect man, raised to G.o.dhead, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu. But it's as I said before - he's an upstart here. The beliefs of the Koya have virtually nothing else in common with Hindu religion. The legend of Prince Rama, his wanderings and his search for spiritual redemption, is found all over southern India. The Koya believe this was where he ended up, finding his rightful kingdom in the heart of the jungle."

"Heart of darkness, more like," Costas said, looking at the dense green slopes on the opposite sh.o.r.e, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes that had enveloped him.

"Is that where you're taking us?" Jack said. "To the shrine?"

Pradesh took a deep breath and nodded, fingering the tiger pendant. "I went there when I was a boy. It was forbidden, but as a lowlander by upbringing I didn't believe in the superst.i.tion. No Koya had visited it since that day in 1879. My grandfather said there was a terrible storm that night, thunder and lightning. An earthquake sealed up the entrance after the two officers had left. To the Koya that was an absolute sign that the worst horror would befall them if they went anywhere near the place. And now there's another reason for staying away. The shrine's next to a stream in a jungle clearing, and it's been used by the Maoist guerrillas as a base. They caught me once and let me into their camp, and they played with me. That was before they murdered my father. I've been wanting to go back ever since."

"It sounds as if both you and Jack are on a mission," Costas said.

"Your ancestor the muttadar also wanted to get to the shrine when he stood beside Lieutenant Howard on the river steamer at this spot all those years ago," Jack added.

"I'd never try to put myself in the mind of a Koya holy man. He may have been my ancestor, but that's one place I definitely don't want to go." Pradesh looked at Jack, his expression steely. "And my mission's not about ancient G.o.ds and spirits and idols. It's about the present day. It's about the duty of a son to the memory of a murdered father."

Jack nodded, then swung his legs out over the bow of the boat, ready to push off Pradesh sat down and turned on the ignition. "We've got about five hours of daylight left. The chopper should be here in forty-five minutes. That gives us time to visit the village on the opposite sh.o.r.e. There's something I want you to see."

"Let's move," Jack said. "From what you say, we don't want to be out here after dark."

Costas slapped a mosquito on his neck, leaving a b.l.o.o.d.y smudge. "Roger that."

Jack knelt in the bow of the pontoon boat, holding the painter line in readiness as Pradesh swung the tiller and nosed the boat out of the river current into a backwater by the sh.o.r.e. At the last moment he gunned the engine and rammed the keel up onto the sandy beach that fronted the jungle. Jack leapt out with the line, ran a few paces across the hot packed sand and tied it to the stump of a tamarind tree. Pradesh killed the engine and tilted it, then he and Costas jumped out on either side and pulled the boat up as far as they could. Jack tightened the line and looked around. The sand was pristine, as white as he had seen anywhere. He had half-hoped to find something straightaway, some evidence of that fateful day in 1879, but he also half-feared it, as if he were apprehensive of awakening some atavistic trauma inherited from his ancestor. But the sand was spotless, and there was no ancient stain of sacrifice. He saw where the monsoon flood had swept around the curve of the river, churning up the sand and re-creating the beach every year. He looked up to where the gorge narrowed, and remembered the words of a Victorian engineer who had seen the G.o.davari in full spate: It foams past its obstructions with a velocity and turbulence which no craft that ever floated could stem. They had only come a few hundred meters from the opposite sh.o.r.e, but it was as if they had crossed some kind of sacred boundary into another world. Even the air smelled different - tangier, organic - and the light above the fringe of the jungle had a peculiar aura, as if the air itself were stained green and blue at the interface between the canopy and the sky.

"Come on." Pradesh walked across the sand to an opening in the jungle between two trees, a well-worn path up the slope that led to the reed and bamboo houses they had spied from the opposite sh.o.r.e, built above the level of the flood. "This is one of the track-ways traced by the sappers in the wake of the 1879 rebellion, but it was neglected after they left. They weren't given the resources to put anything permanent into the jungle, and things haven't changed much since." Costas trudged behind him, and Jack brought up the rear. Costas took out a can of insect repellant from his bag and liberally sprayed his exposed parts, pa.s.sing it to Jack. "One small step for mankind since 1879," Costas muttered, slapping a blood-filled mosquito that had bitten through his shirt. Pradesh turned around and watched. "It's about the only thing that has changed," he said. "Prepare to walk back in time." A huge spider scurried over the rocky path between them, and Jack froze, catching his breath. Pradesh saw him. "Normal animal reaction," he said. "It's the first thing we were taught in jungle warfare training school. You step under the canopy, you instantly lose the veneer of civilization, you become an animal again, feral. You use it to your advantage, the heightened awareness. But it also reawakens primal fear, the survival instinct. Spiders can do it, and snakes."

"And tigers," Costas muttered. "I think I need a drink."

"That's another way of dealing with this place, unfortunately a little too tempting for the Koya people." Pradesh turned and led them up the path, across gigantic roots of tamarind and teak that had twisted over each other, enveloping the clearance made in 1879. There was a rustling overhead like wind in the leaves, and a troop of monkeys screeched. They reached a level patch and walked past several houses, each a modest affair of bamboo uprights with a roof of overlapping palmyra leaves, surrounded by a narrow verandah fronted by a trellis of bamboo and palmyra leaf stalks interwoven with sprouting bean shoots. Costas pointed at a fresh red mark on the wall. "That symbol looks strangely out of place."

"A hammer and sickle," Jack murmured.