The Tale of the Lazy Dog

on its back. He had the jeep grinding in bottom gear, his view dominated almost entirely by the slow-heaving wrinkled grey rump above him. The French map said the turning was some twenty kilometres out of town; he had gone more than half of that now, but the road was still too narrow to pass the elephant. The sweat was itching down his face, stinging his eyes, his shirt soaking against the seat. He tried hooting once, but the boys took it as a salute and returned it with waves and smiles, while the beast continued its dogged, lumbering pace. He kept cool, remembering that patience was the great secret, the supreme advantage of this country. Only the Americans stayed on the ball, keen and bustling, and there weren’t enough of them. At least he hoped there weren’t.

The rice fields had ceased. There was high jungle ahead, and Murray took advantage of a slight widening in the track to swerve round the elephant into the tunnel of trees. The road was climbing now, clogged yellow mud stamped with the deep-ridged tread of enormous tyres and caterpillar tracks, like the trail of some prehistoric reptile. The turning up to Nam Ngum, though unmarked, was unmistakable: the tracks turned abruptly to the right where the trees had been hacked down, their stumps half buried in banks of fresh mud pushed up by bulldozers; while ahead the old Route Nationale Treize to the north had shrunk to no wider than a footpath, soon swallowed up in bamboo forest.

Murray put the jeep into four-wheel drive and began the twisting climb towards the dam. The steel telegraph poles had turned with him — that single wire that even the most incompetent Pathet Lao guerrilla could have snipped through at almost any spot on the twelve-mile drive. But Murray was beginning to work on another idea: telephones could be confusing instruments, especially in a country like Laos.

He was thinking hard now, checking the time against distance — fourteen miles in just over fifty minutes, taking into consideration the elephant — all the time concentrating his sweat-stung eyes on the deep, deceptive shades of the jungle. Then suddenly he was there. A last steep turn and the track had flattened out on to a broad road laid with strips of steel mesh used for emergency airfields. He felt the dawning of great excitement.

The trees on one side had thinned to a screen of limp palms, drooping in the damp heat like broken parasols. Beyond them lay the chasm of the dam. Luke Williams had said it was nearly five hundred feet wide and two hundred deep. To Murray it now looked more — a slender curving span of marble-white concrete on one side, shelving away between cliffs of rainforest down into the uncertain darkness below the sunline.

He had stopped the jeep at the end of the steel road and got out, taking his Leica and notebook. Above the ticks and hummings and snuffles of the jungle he thought he heard the throb of an engine. Otherwise it seemed unnaturally quiet. He snapped several frames of the approach road to the dam wall, noting the spongy surface underfoot — how the mud squelched up through the mesh and over the soles of his shoes — coming to a guard-house on his left where the Lao sentry bobbed out and saluted, his helmet just a little too big for him, a child dressed up as a soldier. There was a second, larger building beyond, with an air-conditioner grill built into one of the sealed windows. Murray noticed that the telephone wire, which had followed him up from Vientiane, ended here on the roof. There was also a powerful radio-transmitting aerial.

On the right, just before the dark pit of the reservoir, a wide clearing had been made in the jungle — a terrace of churned mud cluttered with miscellaneous hunks of machinery: caterpillar tractors, tip-trucks, bulldozers, mechanical diggers and grabs, all like giant bright yellow toys, their wheels and flanks splashed a duller yellow by the mud — except for the sharp metal of the grabs and digging scuttles which flashed in the sunlight, their jaws hanging open with the mud lodged between their teeth like lumps of half-chewed meat.

He counted five trucks, each with a load of at least ten tons. And the bulldozers could shift a medium-sized house. The Americans didn’t do these things by halves, he thought. God bless America! He began to walk on up to the edge of the dam wall. Perhaps there was work going on somewhere — he thought he could hear the thump of the engine more clearly now — but otherwise there was this weird, shut-in stillness.

The last twenty yards of the approach road were of concrete, broad solid slabs laid out as wide as a three-lane highway. As he walked he went on snapping the camera, at various angles and speeds, until the film was finished. He paused, groping in his pocket for a new cassette. There was no barrier across the beginning of the wall, not even a parapet. And no sign of arc-lights, hurricane lamps along the edge of the dam — none of the essential paraphernalia for a crash-programme of night work to meet a deadline. At night, he decided, it would be as quiet as a sepulchre.

He reached the edge of the wall and looked down into the reservoir. At that moment a cloud passed in front of the sun and a deep shadow fell across the whole dam. Murray gave a little shudder. The reservoir was like some monstrous well. It sheered away into damp lichen-veined darkness lapped far below by water as black as ink, stirred by no ripples.

He took a couple of steps forward and aimed his Leica down at the water-level — calculating that it must be still at least a hundred feet below the top of the wall. But he never