rattle of Gatling fire. I feel the ground shake to a dull explosion and no more gun fire. The helicopters pass over us once again and swing away into the west.
When the satellite is down below the horizon, we roll up our thermal quilts and move quickly before ground troops come in to secure the area. I know from experience how far a column of smoke is visible in this country. Our course takes us close by the wreck: Jake begs a photo-opportunity. Moran agrees, sends Sugardaddy with us, for protection. Sugardaddy does not expect survivors, but death in the bush attracts a dangerous wake. I take shots of the smouldering shell of blackened steel and the corpses scattered on the charred ground. I’ve never seen a killed human being before.
The fire has burned the upper parts to the bones; the parts in contact with the ground are intact, down to the scraps of blue denim and cotton T-shirt. Jake says that is the way bodies burn in war. When a jackal more courageous than its packmates darts in to tear at one of the bodies, I scream,
Moran is angry that Sugardaddy has risked security with a shot, but Sugardaddy is a Luo, like Faraway, and, like Faraway, satanically vain. Calling on the respect due his age and experience, M’zee keeps the peace between the two men, but the day will soon come when Sugardaddy and Moran will fight to the death, like pack animals. We are all jackals, out here.
We were on such high alert watching for the dust trails of soldiers coming to investigate that I only noticed we had crossed terminum when I felt a crawling sensation on my left wrist like I used to get when I was a kid and the cats slept on the bed and I imagined their fleas were creeping all over me. My Swatch was breaking out in orange pimples. I had been so careful about everything else and forgotten about the plastic watch. I dropped it to the hexagon-cover just as the strap rotted into rags and drips of digested polyethylene. My last connection with the human world was broken: time. There is no time in here; no history, no future, only the eternal now. Present, and presence: the sensation of the Great Wall at my back is that of an almost sentient mystery, crawling toward me on a billion red millipede legs.
40
Gaby’s text diary
Day Two
Time for a line while they get the boats ready
All morning we have marched through the Great Wall. If the edgelands taxed my powers of description, the Great Wall staggers me. The slender red trunks rise for five, six hundred feet before dividing and re-dividing into hundreds of branch-lets, each of which supports a single enormous hexagonal leaf. These leaves all lie in a horizontal plane so that they form a more or less continuous surface: the impression is not of being in a forest, but among the pillars that hold up the roof of the world.
‘Ecclesiastical… like being in a drowned cathedral’, my forerunner described this place in her diary. I hate to have to use another’s analogy – especially her’s – but it best conveys the feel of this place. The roof-leaves are translucent and colour the light that falls through them in a cyclorama of ancient lights, interspersed by edges of white where the sun shines through the gaps between plates. About thirty, forty feet from the ground, the trunks split into enormous aerial roots and buttresses so that we walk through an architecture of vaults and arches and piers.
Things move up in the canopy; some so fast you cannot be sure you have seen them, some so slow you cannot be certain they are moving at all. A long way off, something is twittering. Nothing earth-born ever made a noise like that.
How do I feel, moving through this cathedral-like place? Spooky: exalted. Unbelieving, as if it has all been painted by Hollywood set designers and will fall down with a crash when the wind blows strong enough. Wishing it to be real, hoping to glimpse again that thing I saw gliding between the smooth trunks that looked the size of a microlyte, but at the same time impatient to see what novelty the Chaga will reveal to me next.
We move like small, fierce vermin through this colossal landscape. As befits El Macho Honcho, Moran goes first, his trusted deputy M’zee behind him; next comes Bushbaby, then the other woman, Rose, who has not cracked one word to me since we started, then Jake, me, and bringing up the rear, Sugardaddy. Seven of us. I’m sorry. Once it got into my head it just wouldn’t go away. How could you resist the temptation to sing ‘heigh-ho, heigh-ho’?
Not forgetting the dog. Which is a shit-brown mongrel that you see hundreds of sniffing around in the townships and pissing on things and being driven off with stones. But out here, its pariah nose triumphs where man-made navigation devices fail. It’s led us straight to the cache where they have buried the canvas boats. That is because he isn’t any old pariah, Bushbaby says proudly. He’s been bred to this work. By the silent Rose, her cousin. She breeds and handles Chaga-hounds. None better, she says. I believe her. While the boys snap the boats together, I sit and moan and groan and try to ease my blisters and nipple-rub. My collar bones are rasped raw. Rose reaches up to this thing that looks like a red honeycomb growing on the root buttress under which we are sheltering. She squeezes a brightly coloured blob from one of the cells. She offers it to me and, for the first time, speaks.
‘For you,’ Bushbaby translates from Kalenjin. ‘Eat it. It will make you feel better. It is quite safe. It is forest food. Anything that is red in the Chaga will always be edible.’
Better death than nushing out, as Fraser and Aaron Shepard would say. I pop the thing in my mouth. It is the size of a finger banana, the texture of a jungle slug and tastes of cinnamon, whisky and leaf mould. Two minutes later a glow starts in my belly. As I write this, I feel I can march straight up the trunk of one of these roof trees carrying everyone on one hand. Plus the dog. I feel good, da-na da-na da-na da. It grows all over the Chaga, this stuff. The market potential would be incredible, if I could get some out. Doesn’t keep, Bushbaby tells me. Like the manna of the Israelites. Didn’t their holy food come down from heaven too?
But I notice a thing about Rose. When she gives me the forest food, I see that the little finger of each hand has been crudely amputated.
Moving out now. More when I get the chance.
(Later)
Moon can’t have come this way. I can’t find any reference in her diary to these swamps and waterways that meander through this incredible, terrifying terrain. But she wrote years ago: the Amboseli swamps would have been outside terminum. The ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge she describes must be days ahead of us. When you are in the Chaga, you forget that as you move inward through it, it moves outward past you.
There is a sky again. The ceiling of the Great Wall has broken up into isolated roof-trees (how hard it is to give names to things, to describe them as they are, not how they seem!) rising sheer out of what Moon describes elsewhere ‘drained coral reef’. Yes, but on the mountainous scale: The finger-corals are hundreds of feet high, the brain-corals the size of houses, hand-trees almost as tall as the parasol-sequoias, miniature Foa Mulakus, all stilt legs and horns. Most of what we pass through I can only describe by listing their mundane counterparts. Cornucopias. Organ pipes. Mug-trees. Bubbles. Light bulbs. Frozen chickens (really! About the size of a truck, and exactly that morbid shade of factory farm chicken skin). Cathedrals. Mixer taps. Windmills. Cheese graters. Pantyhose. Watch springs. Candelabras. Scramble nets. We follow the narrow, twining watercourse through a Disneyland of kitchen paraphernalia. FX by Hieronymus Bosch. Our boats are eerily silent, powered by truck- battery engines. We leave hardly a crease on the water as we move between the overhanging pipes and frills. Jake is in the lead boat with Moran and M’zee. Mere women and dogs follow, with the untrustworthy Sugardaddy’s hand on the tiller.
We are in a state of armed vigilance. The Chaga seems to suit everything that comes into it very well. Hippos are public enemy number one. They could easily capsize these snap-together canvas assault boats. Bushbaby and Rose have Uzis: the only satisfactory way to stop a hippopotamus is to put the maximum number of shells into it, in the minimum amount of time. Personally, I’d feel much happier with something with the firepower of half a regiment rather than this fifty calibre Magnum they’ve given me, even with the dandy little Chaga-proofed
