of a pontoon boat as it chugged west up the broad expanse of the Godavari River, its bow wave cresting against the current. Jack was riding his own personal wave of excitement. This was his chance to fulfill a dream, to tread the same path as his ancestor, to discover what Lieutenant John Howard had seen in the jungle that day in 1879. Jack grasped the rail and looked out, preparing himself They had flown by helicopter north from Arikamedu along the coast of India to the port of Cocanada, and then veered inland up the delta of the river. They had swept low over a million acres of paddy and sugar cane, flying through billowing clouds of sweet ferment where the sugar was being processed into jaggery. At Dowlaiswaram, some thirty miles from the coast, they had landed on the great dam that was responsible for the fertility of the delta, and Pradesh had shown them where the Madras Sappers had been based while they built the dam in the 1860s. The figures were still reeling through Jack’s mind as they transferred to the Godavari Steam Navigation Company pontoon boat above the dam for the trip into the jungle. Two thousand miles of irrigation channels, a five times increase in the acreage under cultivation. It had been one of the enduring achievements of British rule in India, yet as they went upstream, evidence of human mastery over nature diminished, and they saw only adaptation, acceptance, just as they had seen on the coast at Arikamedu. Like all great rivers that swelled with floodwaters, like the Nile or the Mississippi, all attempts to harness the water of the Godavari presented only an illusion of success, ephemeral bastions against an overwhelming force that could sweep away the grandest human achievements in a mere instant.
“The Godavari 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 passed 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 passed 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 gods, 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 gods fear to go.”
After that they saw fewer people along the shore, 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 shoreline, 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 passage 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 peacock feather pendant hanging from his neck.
“That’s the village of Puliramanaguden,” Pradesh said quietly. “It means ‘Place of the Tiger God.’”
“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 shore 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
