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 shore, 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 ashore. 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 Godavari.
“Ahead of us, where the gorge narrows, the river’s only two hundred meters wide,” Pradesh said, handing him a glass 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 pass 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 shoreline 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 glass. “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 Godavari 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 god 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
