‘Look!’ whispered Lakshman. The boat lay motionless now, and under the slope of trees it was premature dusk. ‘They’re going to cross!’
What moved them to it no one could guess, but the tusker and his younger fellow had waded far out into the water, and the cows were moving without haste after them, and marshalling the little ones with them. The whole herd was surging steadily into the lake, and setting course unmistakably for the other shore. Forward they lurched until tusks and trunks and massive shoulders and twitching ears had all vanished under the water, like ships sinking at their launching; but when only the domed, glistening tops of their heads remained visible, the lurching gait changed, and they swam. Like animated black stepping-stones, the herd sailed across the narrow arm of the lake with hardly a ripple, unhurried, majestic, oblivious of the boat that lay off in entranced silence, watching their passing from some thirty yards away. Occasionally a trunk came up for air, waved gently for a moment, and was again withdrawn, or the tip of an ear ruffled the surface. The watchers hardly drew breath until the cluster of rounded stones drew near to the steep shore opposite, and the leaders heaved their huge shoulders clear of the lake, streaming water and phosphorescence, and thumped imperturbably up the slope and into the tall grass, to disappear among the trees. The cows thrust up their heads one by one and followed, nuzzled by their calves, and all the glistening herd passed out of sight with hardly a sound.
Patti drew a long, awed breath. ‘My God, and I never even knew they could!’
They looked at one another like people awakening from a dream. After that, anything was going to be an anti- climax.
Why look for more elephants? They had been so close that they could almost have leaned over and patted the littlest calf on its bobbing pewter head as it sailed by. And while they had been spellbound here, the day had lurched a long step towards its ending, at least here between the shrouding forested hills. In the opener water it would still be bright.
‘Have we still got time to go on to the wider part?’ Larry asked. ‘It must look marvellous in this light.’
Lakshman conferred with Romesh, and Romesh in his obliging fashion hoisted a shoulder, and flashed his grin, and said that they need not worry about staying out beyond their time, they had plenty of fuel, and there would be no more cruises after this one. So they headed for the open water, silvery and placid mile on mile to the dam; and the day changed its mind and came back to full sunlight as soon as they were out from between the enfolding arms of the forest. Several times they saw elephants again, and several times deer, and the sky over them became the clear, pre-sunset sky of a summer day at home, shading down from deepest blue at the zenith to jade green at the rim of the world. The few feathers of cloud were coloured like roses, in variations of pink and gold.
They turned back at last. Romesh was just bringing the boat about in a long, sweeping curve, the water hissing along its side, when they all heard a distant, muffled report, not at all loud, but borne across the mirror of lake as though it came from everywhere at once, or from nowhere.
‘What was that?’ Larry demanded. ‘I thought there was no shooting here. It isn’t a hunting reserve, it’s a wild life sanctuary.’
‘That is right, sahib,’ Romesh confirmed. ‘But sometimes wardens must shoot injured animal, or rogue animal.’
‘But it didn’t sound like a gun to me,’ Dominic said. ‘More like what you hear at a good distance when they’re blasting in a quarry. But I don’t suppose there such a thing for a hundred miles around here.’
They listened, straining their ears, but the sound was not repeated. They had the broadest expanse of the lake to themselves, and the silvery hush of the hour was like a glass bell enclosing them.
‘Ah, we’re dreaming!’
But they had not been dreaming. Looking ahead as they sped towards the narrows, they saw a tiny puff of iridescent cloud rise and assemble in the sky far before them, and there hang shimmering like gilded dust for some four or five minutes before it disintegrated. In a countryside almost without aerial pollution, even a shot in a quarry would have produced little more than that. And before the arms of forest rose on either side to shut them in, it was gone.
The successive bends of lake became surfaces of steel mirror, reflecting pastel channels of sky, and shut in by black walls of forest. But wherever a wider bay opened the light took heart and returned. It was well after six o’clock when they came back to the place where they had seen the elephants cross, and instinctively looked again at the shore from which they had set out, where a few dead trees provided scratching posts in the shallows, and man-tall reeds grew, a paler patch in the dusk.
‘What’s that?’ Larry asked, pointing. ‘There in the reeds, look – something white… ’ Reddish elephants they had seen, but a white elephant would be too much to ask. Deer, perhaps? Anything pale would look white at this hour.
They peered, and caught the gleam he had been the first to see. Too white for deer, and too motionless; something low in the water, half obscured by the vertical stems of the reeds. ‘Wait!’ said Dominic sharply. ‘Ease up, Romesh, there’s something queer there— Take us in towards it a bit.’
Romesh slowed down, and obediently turned the boat’s nose into the bay. They drew nearer to the pale patch, and it took on shape, veiled as it was, the curve of a white hull, a tarter of canvas trailing overside into the water.
‘It’s a boat – but it’s foundered – it’s filling!—’ Dominic leaned over the side, and caught the quicksilver gleam of water inside the settling hull, and something else, pale wisps and bulges of cloth, awash among the bilge and hanging limply over the distant side. ‘Something’s happened— Closer, Romesh, get us alongside. My God, there’s someone in her!’
They were all braced intently at his back as he kneeled on the seat and leaned far over to get a hand on the gunwale of the other boat. Patti’s voice said, in tones of stunned and frozen unbelief: ‘There can’t be! It’s only old rags – it’s an old boat, it must have been abandoned here long ago…’
‘Impossible, we couldn’t have missed seeing it.’
The reeds rustled, brushing their hair and sleeves. Dominic got a hand on the rail and steadied them alongside; and now they could all see down into the unmistakable shell of Mahendralal Bakhle’s smart white launch, awash from end to end with sluggish water.
All its seating nearest the engine was torn and splintered, and the motor itself hung drunkenly forward into the wash, a mass of twisted and fused metal. Every seam had been started, and oozed water and slime. The boat-boy lay with one arm trailing over the side, gashed by flying splinters and raked raw by blast, a few rags of his clothing dangling. And in the bottom, the water whispering from side to side over his shattered face as the boat swayed, lay
