Bat-Nose and Charming cast me unliking looks.
Y, now mostly recovered, announced this to me: the sailors thought I had changed into a ‘white tigapard’ in the night.
I pointed out that if that had been the case, I’d hardly have hung around.
It’s called a Jungle. A jungle-forest, this forest.
I’d never seen anything like it, not seen a picture like it, or even a description.
The trees are about two hundred feet high, or higher. Miles high, perhaps.
And at the top, mostly, they close together, so there’s a ceiling of foliage.
The light is almost wet-green, but often most like a soupy green dusk. Sometimes there is a break in the leaf-canopy, and the sky is there, but looking almost colourless, luminous yet somehow unlit.
Lower down, apart from boughs and leaves (plump, juicy leaves, or long whippy leaves, or dense fans of leaves) there are creepers and vines, many thicker than a man’s arm. Some have flowers, trumpet-shaped, or petal-plates. They’re pale generally, because of the lack of proper light. Higher up, you glimpse brighter ones, where thin trails of light pierce through, flashes of crimson, turquoise or tangerine.
But the flowers could be birds, too, because the jungle-forest is full of birds, some very small and some very big, and all of them all colours. There are also monkeys, and other tree-swingers. Silent as shadows or else shriekingly, jumpmakingly noisy.
On the ground grow great clumps of black-green fern, often taller than I am, or bamboos, which I’d seen at the House, but not like these – these are taller than tall Yazkool.
Perhaps most important, all the vegetation constantly knits itself together. The vines are using the bamboos to curl round and so climb from tree trunk to trunk. The trees root in each other. Other creepers come unwound high up, and loop down and get caught by ferns. Ferns grab high boughs and sprout forty feet up.
Through these attachments weave other things – ivies and grasses and funguses and blue-white orchids – all trying to climb up each other and reach the light. Any traveller has to hack his way much of the time with broad-bladed knives.
Once you’re in the middle of all this, if ever you can see far through any occasional gap, the jungle weaves on and around into the distance.
It goes on for ever in all directions. Or seems to. Sometimes a huge rocky hill may go staggering up out of everything, with trees leaning out sideways from it. But although a hill, it’s smothered too by jungle, and its summit won’t break through the canopy, only make part of the canopy from all its particular high trees.
Once there was a shower of rain. We heard it pattering above. Not a single drop fell through.
Just after the business about the tigapard on the beach, three men appeared out of the trees.
I’ve thought since, how did they know to meet Y and H just there? The storm had surely blown the ship away from any course she (they’re called ‘she’!) might have had. And the shore where we’d landed was quite a distance from the jungle-road which we eventually reached.
None of that occurred to me then. It just seemed horribly inevitable.
Two of the newcomers were slaves, the kind I’d seen at the House, and in the City, though these were dressed in absolute rags. It was so warm and humid, even by night, maybe their master didn’t think that mattered so much.
This other man, presumably the master, wore extravagant clothes, all colours (like the parrots in the trees) and with fringes, tassels, bells, buttons, holes cut out and embroidered. He jingled as he moved, but he had a hard face, like a brown nut no one could crack.
‘Hallo there, Zand,’ greeted Yazkool and Hrald. Then everyone started speaking mostly in yet another language.
Presently we went into the jungle. (Bat-Nose and Charming didn’t go with us.)
There was an instant clearing, with two more slaves (in rags) and a round hooped openwork little carriage. It was drawn by two stripy deer with horns. There were other, bigger deer, with antlers, in reins and saddles.
Hrald said, ‘Man, do we ride those?’ looking haughty.
The antlered deer snorted and looked even haughtier.
They put me in the carriage. I didn’t try to tell them I could probably have ridden as well. The deer seemed less reasonable than my lovely mare, Siree. Well, they were deer.
I didn’t even laugh at Hrald, slipping about all over his deer, which at once bucked and cantered about, taking extra pains to cause him trouble. Like a mule, really.
One of the slaves drove my carriage. His rags were a bit nicer, and he was black, like Blurn, but without any of Blurn’s quick wit or good looks. Of course, they all looked ugly and hateful to me. Maybe they weren’t.
At first the other three slaves went in front, hacking a way through the undergrowth and creepers. Sometimes it got so bad my driver, and then Zand, Hrald and Yazkool, had to join in the hackery.
Should I have slipped out of the carriage then and run away into the forest?
I vaguely considered it once or twice. But the jungle just looked – was – impassable. And where could I go? I was totally lost.
I should wait until I knew more, had learned more. Did I say that to myself? I think I just sat there.
Of course, the jungle was (is) fascinating.
Sometimes I’d feel a dart of real interest – those monkeys with velvet-black faces, yet white on their hand-paws and lower arms, like long white gloves. That huge snake twined round and round a fig tree; there seemed more snake than tree. For a split glimmer of a second I’d almost be happy. Forgetting. Only for a split second.
Soon we reached the road.
Zand seemed proud of the road, as if he had personally designed it, and then built it himself. Which I doubt.
It wasn’t much, anyway, not any more. Stone paving about three lying-down-man-heights
