10

That day, too, passed, and the night with it. Shankar was now possessed of a desperate courage. If he was to escape this terrible forest with his life, he could not afford to be afraid. For two days, he went nowhere. He sat in his tent, trying to steady his mind and decide what to do. Suddenly, he recalled Alvarez’s words… Salisbury… some five or six hundred miles southeast of here…

Salisbury.… The capital of Southern Rhodesia, Salisbury. One way or another, he had to reach Salisbury. He would live for a long time yet; it was written in his birth-chart. He would not perish miserably in this place.

Shankar studied the maps with great care. There was a map from the Portuguese Government’s Forest Survey, a coastal map prepared in 1873 by the Royal Marine Survey, a map by the explorer Sir Filippo de Filippi, and—apart from these—a worn, faded draft chart, hand-drawn by Alvarez and signed by Jim Carter. While Alvarez was alive, he had never made a serious effort to understand any of these maps; now, his very life depended on deciphering them. He had to plot a direct route to Salisbury. He had to pinpoint his own location and find his way out of the labyrinth of the Richtersveld forest—all with the help of these maps.

After much looking and listening, he came to understand that none of the maps contained any particular detail about this mountain forest—none, that is, except the draft chart by Alvarez and Jim Carter. And even that was so brief, and used so many coded and secret symbols, that it was almost indecipherable to Shankar. For they had always lived in fear that if the map fell into the hands of others, someone else might come and claim a share of their treasure.

On the fourth day, Shankar left that place and set off, by his best guess, to the east. Before leaving, he wove a garland of wild flowers and laid it upon Alvarez’s grave.

There is such a thing as ‘bushcraft’. To travel through a vast, desolate, deep wilderness without this knowledge is to invite certain peril. From wandering with Alvarez for so long, Shankar had picked up some bushcraft, yet a doubt lingered in his mind: had he truly acquired the skill to cross this forest alone? He would have to rely on luck alone; if his luck was good, he might get through the forest. If fortune did not favour him—death.

He crossed two or three small hills. The forest was sometimes dense, sometimes sparse. But there was no end to the giant, ancient trees. Shankar knew that the appearance of a jungle of tall elephant grass would mean he had reached the forest’s edge, because elephant or tussock grass never grows in the deep jungle. But there was no sign of elephant grass anywhere—only great trees and low forest scrub.

The first day ended in a still denser part of the forest. Shankar had left almost everything behind, taking only Alvarez’s man-killer rifle, a great many cartridges, his water bottle, a torch, the maps, a compass, his watch, a single blanket, and a few basic medicines—and he had also brought a rope hammock. Although the tent was very light, he had considered it impossible to carry and had left it behind.

He slung the rope hammock high between the branches of two trees, a good distance from the ground, and lit a fire at the base of the tree for fear of predators. Lying in the hammock, he remained awake with the rifle in his hand, for sleep was impossible. The mosquitoes were one thing; on top of that, soon after dusk, a leopard began to prowl a little way from the base of the tree. In the deep darkness, its eyes glowed like two fiery coals. Shankar would shine his torch at it, and it would flee, only to return half an hour later to stand in the very same spot, staring up at him. Shankar was afraid that if he fell asleep, it might just leap into the hammock and attack. The leopard is an exceedingly cunning animal. And so, all night long, Shankar could not shut his eyes. Added to this was the cacophony of various wild animals all around him. He had just drifted into a light doze when he was startled awake by the sound of a group of young boys and girls giggling nearby. Where were children laughing? In this uninhabited forest, it was not right for boys and girls to be about, or to be laughing so late at night. The next moment, he remembered Alvarez once telling him that the call of a certain species of baboon sounds exactly like the laughter of children.

At dawn, he climbed down from the tree and set off. He was moving through the forest in the way aviators call ‘flying blind’—relying entirely on fate, with his eyes shut, as it were. After travelling for just these two days, he had completely lost his bearings; he no longer had any sense of north, south, east, or west. He understood now how terribly difficult it is to hold a direction in a great forest. All around you are tree trunks—countless, endless, beyond number. Above your head, always, is a canopy of branches, vines, and leaves. The stars, the moon, the sun are not visible. Even the sunlight is faint; it is always as if it were twilight. You can go for mile after mile, and it is the same. With the compass rendered useless here, how could he possibly keep his direction?

On the fifth day, he stopped to rest at the foot of a hill. Nearby was the mouth of a massive cave, from which a thin stream of water emerged, winding its way out of sight into the forest.

Having never seen such a large cave before, he was overcome by curiosity. Leaving his things outside, he entered. There was some light at the cave’s mouth, but inside it was very dark. Lighting his torch, he advanced cautiously until he came to a place where two more openings appeared, one to the right and one to the left. Shining the torch upwards, he saw that the ceiling was quite high. Thin and thick pendants of what looked like hard white salt—calcium carbonate—hung from the roof like chandeliers.

The cave walls were damp, with water trickling down in many places in very fine streams. Shankar entered the right-hand passage. It was narrow at the entrance but gradually widened. Underfoot was not stone, but damp earth. In the torchlight, it seemed to him that the chamber was triangular. In one corner of the triangle’s base was another cave mouth. Entering it, Shankar found he had come into a narrow passage with high stone walls on either side. The passage was crooked, winding like a serpent, now to the right, now to the left. Shankar followed the passage for a great distance.

Two hours passed in this way. Then he thought, it’s time to turn back. But on his way back, he could not for the life of him find that triangular chamber. But why? This narrow passage had branched off from that very chamber, and the narrow passage had now ended—so where was the triangular chamber?

After searching for a long time, a sudden panic seized Shankar. He hadn’t lost his way in the cave, had he? Ruin!

He sat down and tried to quell his panic, thinking—no, he couldn’t afford to be afraid. There was no way out of this danger without a steady mind. He remembered what Alvarez had told him: when advancing far into an unfamiliar place, he should leave some kind of trail so that he could follow it back. He had forgotten this advice. What now?

He no longer dared to keep the torch lit. If the battery died, he would be helpless. The darkness in the cave was impenetrable. It would be impossible to take a single step forward in that unseeable blackness, let alone find his way out.

The entire day passed—his watch showed seven in the evening. Meanwhile, the torchlight was gradually growing red. The heat inside the cave was terribly close and humid; moreover, there was no drinking water. The water seeping down the rock walls had a taste—astringent, alkaline, faintly salty. And there was not much of it. He had to lick it from the surface of the walls with his tongue.

It must be dark outside now. The watch showed half past seven. Eight, nine, ten o’tlock. Shankar was still groping for the path. The old battery in his torch had been burning continuously since three in the afternoon; now it had grown so faint that Shankar, in his fear, became even more frantic. As long as this light lasted, so did his hope of life—otherwise, in this great darkness like a hell of utter blackness, there was no hope of finding the way. Not even Alvarez himself could have done it.

He switched off the torch and sat quietly on a slab of rock. He might have been able to escape this, if only he had light—but what could he do now in the dark? For a moment he thought, let the night pass, we’ll see then. The next moment he realised—what good would that do? Here, day and night were the same.

In the darkness, he began to move, feeling his way along the walls. Oh, why, why hadn’t he brought two new batteries with him when he entered the cave! Or at least a box of matches!

According to his watch, morning came. No light dawned in the cave’s eternal darkness. His body was growing weak with hunger and thirst. Perhaps his tomb was fated to be in the darkness of this cave; he would never see the light of day again. Africa’s thirst for blood had not been slaked by taking Alvarez; it wanted him, too.

Three days and three nights passed. Shankar had chewed and eaten the insoles of his shoes. There was not a single living thing in the cave—a cockroach or a rat or a scorpion—that he could catch and eat. His mind was gradually becoming unhinged; he had no awareness of what he was doing or what was happening to him—only this one thought remained: that he must, somehow or other, get out of this cave, that he must see the light of day. And so, even in his exhausted, lifeless state, he kept groping his way through the darkness; perhaps he would go on groping like this until the very moment of his death.

At one point, his exhausted body gave in to sleep. He had no idea how long it was before he woke up; day, night, hour, clock, all measures of time had been erased in this profound darkness. For all he knew, his eyes might have lost their sight.

After sleeping, he seemed to have regained a little strength. Again he got up, again he began to walk. He was Alvarez’s disciple; he would never give up and sit idly by, waiting to die. …He would search for the path, search and search, as long as he was alive.

Strange, where had that stream gone? …While wandering in the labyrinth of the cave, he had lost the watercourse somewhere. If he could find the stream, there might be a chance of rescue, for whatever direction one of its ends took, the other end had to be outside the cave. But forget the stream, he hadn’t come across even the faintest trickle of water for three days now. Shankar was on the verge of dying from lack of water. From licking the astringent, salty, foul-tasting water, his tongue had swollen, and his thirst had only grown worse, not better.

Feeling the stone walls, Shankar searched to see if any moss had grown on the damp surfaces—he could eat it to stay alive. No, not even that! The stone walls were bare everywhere—here and there a thin film of calcium carbonate had formed, but not a single mushroom, not a single moss-like plant. Without sunlight, plants could not survive here.

Another day passed and night fell. For all his wandering, it didn’t seem to be doing any good. Despair was closing in on him. Would he walk on? For how much longer? There was no point to this, no end to this journey. Where was he going in this dense, pitch-black darkness, in this terrifying silence? Oh, the horrifying darkness, and the horrifying silence! It was as if the earth had died, as if the sun and moon had been extinguished in the final cataclysm at the end of creation, and on the unpeopled, soundless, timeless funeral ground of that dead world, he was the sole living creature.

If this went on for much longer, he would surely go mad.