This Green Hell

Greig Beck This Green Hell

For the martyrs of the River Plate, and all the other men and women of belief, who marched out into an exotic and dangerous world … and then simply disappeared from the pages of history.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you Lucy Sherriff — geeks truly will inherit the earth, and to Lawrence, Rob and the US GEO for allowing me to share some of their research. To Kathleen, Cory and Brad — my biggest supporters … and critics! To my publisher, Cate. And finally to my editors, Joel and Nicola — wordsmiths, interrogators, and counsellors, I thank you.

Hell is not hot, or cold.

Nor is it deep below ground, or somewhere in the sky. Instead it is a place on Earth filled with sucking bogs, disfiguring diseases and millions of tiny flesh-eating creatures.

Hell is a jungle, and it is monstrously green.

PROLOGUE

It had travelled for a billion years.

Exploded from its cold, black world by a massive meteor strike and scattered in a spray of diamond-hard matter throughout the universe.

Different-sized fragments would arrive at different times; some many millions of years before others. Some were folded deep below the primordial earth; others perished under a toxic sunlight.

It didn’t matter. It had travelled for a billion years. It could wait a billion more.

ONE

North-east Paraguay River, 1617

Father Juan de Castillo looked up from his journal, his eyes drawn once again to the small church being erected in the clearing. Only months ago the local Indians had cut the land from the jungle, and already the building’s foundations were laid. A deep and solid basement had been sunk into the black loamy soil and now the workers were dragging heavy stones into place from one of the few quarries on the banks of the Rio de Paraguay. At this rate the church would be finished in a matter of weeks — days even.

Father Castillo smiled as a small girl ran up to drop an exotic flower on his table, scampering off before he could thank her. She stopped at the edge of the clearing and stood on one leg just under an enormous fern frond, watching the young Jesuit with large chocolate-coloured eyes. The priest picked up the flower and twirled it between his thumb and forefinger — it looked like a large blue star with a triple stamen of the brightest vermilion.

‘Bello— beautiful,’ he said, loud enough so she’d hear.

He lifted the flower to his nose and recoiled with disgust; it smelled like rotting flesh. The girl giggled, clapped her stubby little brown fingers and disappeared into the deep green of the jungle behind her.

The Jesuit went back to his notes, describing the flower, its odour and characteristics, and then drawing the face of the girl, spending considerable time shading in her large dark eyes as best he could with his charcoals and ink. He used a sleeve to wipe his face, which was covered in insect bites. It was only mid-morning and already his body was slick with perspiration beneath the heavy black cloth of his robes.

He squinted through the rising morning steam to the clearing where his travelling companion, Father Alonso Gonzalez, was on his knees polishing the huge bronze bell that awaited its home in a church tower that, so far, existed only in the Jesuits’ imaginations. Father Gonzalez was in his sixties but still tall and vigorous, the only sign of his age visible in his thick, square beard, which had a swathe of grey at his jawline.

Castillo slid his eyes from the senior Jesuit to a small group of elderly men sitting half-hidden, in the shade. One sat like a stone and stared back at the him through rheumy, smoke-damaged eyes. If not for an occasional tic in his left eye, the shrunken, teak-brown body would have been invisible among the jungle’s dark shadows. It seemed that not all the Guarani Indians were happy to see the Jesuits — Nezu had arrived a few weeks back — a powerful medicine man from the upper Paraguay River. He locked eyes with the Jesuit and lifted a small gourd with the plumage of a dozen different colourful feathers tied to one end and shook it twice, making a rattling sound, before pointing it at Father Castillo.

‘And God bless you too,’ said Castillo softly. He closed his journal, put two fingers to his lips and then touched them to the ornate gilt crucifix pressed into the cover of the leather-bound book.

He looked up with a smile when he heard a small boy trying to speak in Spanish to his older friend.

‘Com … uhhh, como bello … flor de oro, padre.’

‘Si, una flor de oro gigante,’ Father Gonzalez responded.

Castillo nodded; the boy was right: the bell the older Jesuit was polishing did look a bit like a flower — a giant golden flower waiting to bloom high in a holy tree, he thought.

He wrinkled his brow and turned his head slightly — there was a faint noise, a whistling, little more than a whisper, just audible above the sounds of the surrounding jungle.

‘Alla! Mire, padre.’ One of the children with Father Gonzalez was pointing a small finger up at the sky.

Castillo craned his neck to see beyond the foliage that was shading his table. Cutting across the heavens were flaming orange streaks, like long lines of fire, all heading down towards the jungle. More appeared, until eventually they filled the entire sky.

The faint whistling had become a scream. The young Jesuit stood and walked a few paces out into the middle of the clearing; he placed one hand over his brow and squinted upwards. Children were laughing and hopping around him in excitement at the strange spectacle, but many of the adults were shouting in alarm, and mothers ran to gather their babies into their arms.

Castillo could hear the grating voice of Nezu as he rattled his gourd at the sky; he was yelling something about the fingers of Tau reaching down for them. The priest knew that Tau was the local people’s word for the Devil.

Just as Father Castillo was about to call out to his older colleague for advice, the gleaming bell rang with a loud, deep bong. Everyone froze and looked towards the golden dome.

Castillo was wondering how the bell could have tolled by itself when the high-pitched whistling ended and something thudded into the ground. Another crash came from one of the huts, a hole appearing in its roof. Seconds later, it burst into flames. A further object smashed into a tree trunk at the edge of the clearing.

‘It’s raining stones!’ Castillo yelled to Father Gonzalez.

More whistling, this time at a volume that startled birds from the green maze all around them. He saw Father Gonzalez look up at the noise — in time to catch one of the speeding projectiles in his left eye.

The old priest fell flat on his back, blood and jellied optical fluid spraying the children who stood nearby. Castillo ran to his friend, gagging as he saw smoke curling from the ragged hole in his face. Father Gonzalez gasped in agony as steaming fluid pulsed out of the wound and oozed down his cheek; then, thankfully, he shuddered and