Book 1
COBRA SPIRIT
Chapter 1
BELEM

A thief ran down to the waterfront. He stumbled as he turned through the gate to the docks, caught his balance, and sprinted along the quay, holding a tourist’s bag in his hand. He shook sweat from his face; sweat poured down his shirtless back. The thief covered about a hundred metres before disappearing into a warehouse stacked with mahogany logs. Fireworks were exploding in the streets nearby, as if giving him covering fire. The day was the feast of Our Lady of Nazaré, and the Brazilian town of Belém, a place of ancient tropical splendour at the mouth of the Amazon River, teemed with half a million worshipful revelers, each hoping for a blessing from the Virgin: a respite from illness, a job, a child, a miracle.
As he caught his breath in his dark hiding place, the thief found more than five hundred American dollars in the tourist’s nylon bag, as well as a passport and an air ticket. He made the sign of the Cross and said a prayer, then exhaled deeply but very quietly. One person at least had been blessed that day. He pocketed the money, returned the documents to the bag, and dropped it onto the cement floor. The thief sat very still in the dark, listening for the tread of a security guard, and waiting for the moment he could emerge and return to the confusion of the festival.
Up on the deck of the MV Narwhal, a man and a woman watched the thief as he ran to his hiding place. The man was tall and thin and wore a faded and torn blue overall. His head was shaven. The woman was small, had boyishly cut hair and wore a white t-shirt and white jeans. Their job was to make sure that none of the fireworks that the people in the crowd were throwing around – even though it was brilliant daylight -- landed on the deck and set fire to anything.
From its place of mooring, the ship commanded a view of the Avenida Presidente Vargas, a broad, straight avenue of dusty trees that led down to the waterfront from the Basílica de Nossa Senhora de Nazaré. The Basilica, the city's oldest and holiest building, overlooked the city from its highest point. It was the home of the miraculous figure of Our Lady of Nazare, a tiny wooden statue in a glass cabinet, adorned with a mass of yellow and white plastic flowers. This local manifestation of the mother of Christ was the patron saint of Belem. Once a year, at the culmination of a two-week festival, she was mounted on a wooden cart and wheeled through the streets of the city. People were crushing through the crowd to put their hands on the ropes with which she was slowly being pulled down to the market square.
“Someone has just lost their identity,” said the man in the overall, watching the thief emerge from his hiding place without the bag.
The woman replied, “I wonder if anyone will come after him.” No one did; no one would. The thief was safe.
The fireworks died down, so it was safe to leave their post.
“Let’s go inside,” the woman said, “and hear what the Dear Leader requires.”
“His Catholic Majesty.”
“His Serene Highness.”
“I’m not sure how serene he is at the moment.”
“We’ll just have to take our chances.”
They walked down the bow deck, over a pile of ropes and through an open door into the ship’s interior glow where the man they called their leader was waiting for them.

This close to the Equator, the sun sets with heartbreaking speed. It grows swollen and huge, turns a brilliant orange, then crimson, and for a moment the world is immersed in a perfect twilight that is all the more sublime for being so fleeting. Just as one begins to inhabit this perfect world of colour, it disappears. Within a few minutes, total darkness has taken over.
With nightfall the festival metamorphosed into a vast outdoor party. Thousands jammed the boulevards of Belém to dance to pounding sound systems. Towering loudspeakers blared carimbo rhythm; cooks sold duck stewed in manioc juice from smoking pans on rickety tables on the sidewalks. Vendors sold amulets and strange traditional remedies: crocodile teeth, bottled snakes, bunches of herbs. At the margins of this spiritual carnival the pious and the elderly walked the cracked streets in little processions of half a dozen, holding long beeswax candles, and offering for sale lengths of ribbon in honour of the Virgin of Nazare. You tied one of these to your wrist, then prayed every day to the Virgin for whatever it was you wanted. When the ribbon wore and broke, the Virgin would grant you your wish.
One atom of the crowd was moving differently to all the others. A young European man was elbowing his way through the mass of people as if he were trying to get somewhere in a hurry. No one noticed him as he jostled past them. He was barely a smudge of white in the corner of the eye.
He was moving away from the center of the town in the direction of the docks. As he approached the waterfront the crowd thinned out, and the young man saw the great river for the first time. He was sweaty and frightened and carried no bag, and he had a two-inch long gash by his right ear, to which he pressed a cloth. He passed through the open gate to the ferry terminal, and saw what he was looking for. It was not what he was expecting at all.
To arrive at a destination for the first time in darkness is always disorienting, but the young man was so astonished by the appearance of the ship that he almost turned back. Then he remembered he had nowhere and nothing to turn back to. It was a sleek modern craft, brand new and gleaming white, like a huge toy that had just been taken out of its box. It was moored beside an elderly Amazônian river boat that looked like a floating slum, listing alarmingly to starboard, with laundry hanging from the railings, and paint peeling from the hull. Maybe this one was the ship he was meant to be boarding; but no, on the other one he could read the ship’s name, MV Narwhal. It was spelt out on the bow in stylized uncial lettering. There was a design of a narwhal underneath, with a tusk like a corkscrew, painted in the flowing primitive style of an ancient Celtic manuscript. This indeed was the ship he was looking for.
It looked more like a yacht, a pleasure boat, than a working vessel. Even in the darkness, it seemed to glow: it was painted a glossy white of unreal pristineness, like something out of a magazine. The hull reflected the coloured lights that were flashing nearby. The windows of the bridge sloped back like the windshield of a sports car, tinted an inscrutable mirrored gray. Above this an array of navigational and communications devices blinked and rotated and probed the skies.
Now he was no longer in a hurry. He walked very slowly towards the ship, studying it anxiously. The gangway was down, so there would be no difficulty boarding, if that was what he decided to do. The lights were blazing inside, and he could see people moving at the windows. He stood still in the hot, humid, starless night, with the river lapping against the dock before him, his wound stinging, and music pounding behind him, and he felt relieved that no one had noticed him, that he could remain where he was, camouflaged in darkness, for as long as he needed to.
A chill shook his narrow shoulders. He was tired and thirsty, and he needed a bandage. On a ship like that, he realized, he could probably even have a shower, whatever else happened. Once he had put his hand on the railing he knew he had committed himself, and he walked up the creaking aluminum gangway. For the moment, at least, he was safe.

The young man with the bloody ear stood in the doorway with his sweaty hand on the door handle and tried to compose himself. He looked down into the ship's lounge, trying to get his breathing back to normal. Some people were in there but no one noticed him. He remained on the threshold and waited, holding the bandanna to his temple. A few distant notes of samba blew in from outside on the breeze, and a warm smell of diesel and dirty water.
The room he saw below him glowed with comfort. Deep leather chairs slouched against the walls; a big flat-screen TV hung on the far wall, with a tall wooden statue of an unsmiling Buddha standing beside it. The shelves below the portholes were covered with books and newspapers. He felt like he was standing on the edge of a deep tank of dark water, and knew he had to plunge in. He could see himself from outside his own body: his own heavy descent through black metallic cold; then at last the buoyancy slowly pulling him through bubbles back to the surface to gasp for air.
Here we go again, he thought, feeling once more a familiar dread: another terrible new place. Then he remembered what he had just come from. It was time to jump in.
At the far end of the room, three people sat in discussion at a low table. They were the two people who had been on the deck earlier, and an older man with long gray hair tied in a pony tail. They were looking at a map. The older man was jabbing it with his finger. Noticing the figure in the doorway, he turned around suddenly, in mid-sentence, clearly fearful and alarmed by the intrusion. He was afraid it was a kid from the streets, with an eye on a handout or a chance to steal. The intruder's face was in shadow, and he couldn’t see him properly.
“Who's that?” the gray-haired man said. “What do you want?”
The stranger spoke without moving from where he stood, still gripping the door handle.
“I heard you might need a crewman.”
“What?” The two other faces turned towards him with frozen expressions, like foxes in an alley.
The older man beckoned the stranger to the chair opposite his own. The stranger came in. He sat down in the soft chair. There was a map of the Amazon basin on the table between them.
“I said I heard you might need a crewman.”
The man he was talking to might have been the aging leader of a Hell’s Angels chapter, if there were a chapter of the Hell's Angels in Beverly Hills. He wore a faded sleeveless denim jacket, cutoff jeans and leather sandals. His grizzled beard was tied in a knot under his chin, suggesting time spent in India. Both wrists were festooned with Tibetan and Native American turquoise jewellery, and he wore a small Tiffany watch on his left wrist. There was a glint of wildness, something flickery and restless, in his attention. He was a well-known environmental campaigner, and a professor of ecological philosophy at a small liberal arts college in New England. His name was Seb Cardew, and he was the leader of the environmental group Narwhal's mission to Amazonia. Seb was a Buddhist, and had conquered within himself the Threefold Fire, until it was a mere ember, but at this moment he was conspicuously not happy.
“I heard you,” Seb Cardew said irritably, pulling at the knot of his beard. “I just didn't understand it. Why not start at the beginning.”
“My name is Murdo. I’m a qualified marine oiler, and I have a valid merchant mariner’s document.” He said this very slowly and deliberately, in a quiet voice that Seb had to strain to hear.
He looked like a pretty sorry specimen, a piece of human debris blown in from the chaos of the carnival outside. He carried nothing, and wore only a thin sweaty t shirt and narrow jeans that were grimed with oil and dirt and high-top sneakers with no socks. Seb looked him over, looking for clues in his appearance that might reveal the truth of who he was, where he came from, what he wanted. He certainly hadn't washed for a long time. He was tall and angular, with long thin legs and bony arms. His hair was an untidy, greasy mass, and he kept brushing it off his face. His eyes were red and bleary, and he was holding a grubby bandanna to his temple to cover a fresh wound.
Seb thought, I want to get rid of this guy as painlessly as possible, and the sooner the better.
“Is there anybody with you?” Seb said. He feared that this might be an act, the opening trick in a robbery, that there was someone waiting outside in the dark with a gun or a knife. The kid was hard to read: he spoke English, but with an accent that wasn’t American. British, perhaps. Seb had had waifs and strays on his earlier campaigns, but nothing like this.
Some empty soda cans on a table caught Seb’s attention. He hated waste. He slapped his knee, got up and put them into the can crusher one after the other, ramming down the handle with such force that the crusher pulled at its mounting. After throwing the crushed cans into the bin, he took a litre bottle of water out of the refrigerator and handed it to him.
“What happened to your ear?” Seb said.
Murdo didn’t answer. He was drinking the water in long gulps, and didn’t stop until he had finished the bottle. He screwed the cap on the empty bottle and set it beside his chair.
Seb repeated the question. Again the kid didn’t answer, but took the bandanna from his temple and examined the blood.
There was a kind of insolence in the length of time he took to formulate an answer.
“I don’t know what happened to my ear,” Murdo said, raising the bandanna to his temple again. “I can’t remember.”
“What do you mean, you can’t remember?”
“I mean I can’t remember. Something happened, and I blacked out, and I don’t know for how long. I know that we came into Belem – the ship I was on came into Belem – and then I don’t remember anything until I found myself in a bar talking to a guy called Tom, with this -- ” he indicated his ear – “and using this to stop the bleeding. And he told me about this ship, and how to find it. And that’s why I’m here.”
“You met Tom?”
“Tom, your engineer. Or rather, your former engineer. He told me all about that. How he had just quit.” He gave a slight smile. “He didn’t want to come back here.”
Seb pursed his lips. “I bet he didn’t,” Seb said.
“What?” Murdo said.
“Never mind.”
Seb understood that the unexpected arrival of this strange young man was Tom’s final gesture. It signified both his defiance of Seb and a concern that the mission should nevertheless not be jeopardised, a concern that was based on a gamble that Seb would have no choice but to accept his offering of this unlikely replacement. It galled him to think that Tom knew that he would have to do this.

Tom was the first engineer. Down in the guts of the ship, in a dark, hot chamber, there were two massive diesel engines. Only Tom could speak their language, these two gunmetal gray rogue elephants. Although the ship was still almost new, the engines were notoriously unfriendly and unreliable. Two months earlier on its maiden voyage, to Greenland to do battle with seal hunters, the engines had had a near death experience and the ship had nearly frozen in pack ice, and the crew had had to be evacuated by the Royal Danish Coast Guard. Tom had coaxed the ship back to life with the aid of a flashlight, a blowtorch and a large adjustable wrench, and a very long and very expensive satellite telephone call to the shipyard in South Korea where it had been built. Tom was the ship’s institutional memory, and now on the eve of the Narwhal’s mission in Amazônia, he was absent without leave.
Tom's disappearance was unlikely to be an accident, unless something had happened to him in town, which was a possibility. There was a lot of street crime in Belém, and Tom would stand out as a foreigner and be a target for robbery. Maybe he was lying in a gutter somewhere, bleeding and unconscious. Maybe the police would come. The more likely explanation was more worrying. The day before, he and Seb had had an argument.
It was a stupid argument. Tom had emerged from the engine room in his overalls, his hands black with oil, and stomped into the galley to make coffee. It was nine o’clock in the morning and Tom had been up since four, working on the air conditioning unit which had broken down in the night. Everyone was hot and sweaty and irritable in the equatorial heat. Roberta, the cook, was pleased to see Tom appear in the kitchen: he looked like he was hard at work and that tolerable conditions would soon be restored. “What do you need, Tom?” she said.
“Isn’t there any milk?” Tom said, pulling open the refrigerator.
“There’s soy milk,” Roberta said.
“That’s not milk,” Tom said.
“It’s all we’ve got.” She disapproved of cow’s milk.
He gulped his coffee black, leaned against the sink and lit a cigarette, feeling worse about the lack of milk than anything else. Seb, who had been prowling around, came into the galley. “There’s no smoking in here,” he said. “And I hope you’re going to wash that stuff in the sink.”
“Do you want air conditioning or not?” Tom said.
“If you want to be part of this campaign, you do what everybody else does.”
Tom thought about what he was going to say, and then said it.
“Go to hell, Seb.”
Then he went back to work, without looking at Seb’s reaction: his expression of stunned, humiliated fury. An hour later, the air conditioning began to hum, and the ship was cool once more, but Seb didn’t see Tom again that day. Tom went ashore at lunchtime. Seb assumed he would be back that night, having cooled off, but Tom didn’t come back.
Down below in the cabin he shared with three others, his locker was empty, his bag was gone and his bunk was stripped. Tom had been careful to leave everything neat.

Seb may have been a Buddhist, but at this moment he was feeling full of piss and vinegar. The two crewmen were watching him with anxious expressions, waiting for him to speak. The kid might be lying. He might be as bad as he looks. Seb didn't want to be rushed into anything.
“So tell us what you do remember,” Seb said.
Murdo spoke as if reciting a memorized text, something that he didn’t understand and that didn’t quite belong to him.
“I was working as an oiler on a Liberian-registered freighter from New York to Rio de Janeiro. The ship was called the Neroli, and it had stopped in Suriname to load cargo before going on to Belem. It had a Dutch captain and a crew who were mostly Filipino. It was a bad ship, very bad atmosphere and conditions, the worst I’ve ever been on. The food was terrible and the captain was a bastard and I couldn’t understand a word any of the crew said. I was counting the days until we got to Rio and I could go home.
“I remember everything that happened until the ship tied up at Belem. I don’t remember even getting off the ship. All I remember was that it was very hot. Then there’s a blank. I have a vision of heat and darkness, nothing else. All my stuff is still on the ship – my passport, everything. The next thing I remember is waking up in a bar in downtown Belem. I remember sitting at a table, and the American was sitting with me, and talking to me.
“He was asking me questions, trying to get me to tell him what had happened to me, but I couldn’t remember, and I don’t think I was making much sense. I remember that I was shivering, and saying to Tom something about how cold it was. I asked him if he didn’t feel cold. He said he didn’t. I remember that.”
He shivered.
“There was a picture of a waterfall over the bar. It had an electric light inside it, and something in it that turned around, so that it looked like the water was flowing. I guess I was staring at it, because I remember him asking me to describe what I saw. I think it was an advertisement for beer. It was the only thing I remember about what the bar looked like inside, except that it had a lot of tables and chairs and it was dark and there weren’t many people.
“He kept asking me to tell him about it. It may have been just to calm me down, or to get me to keep talking, as if that would bring me back to reality.
“Oh, and I remember he had a woman with him. She must have been Brazilian. She was very dark and didn’t say anything. I don’t even think she spoke English. Tom didn’t introduce her. She was wearing a pink T shirt and had little gold earrings in each ear and a cross around her neck. Probably some kind of bar girl, I guess. I remember these little details.
“After a while I began to feel better. He told me about this ship, and how to get here. He drew me a map on a piece of paper. Wait, I still have it.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, and took out a damp scrap of paper and spread it on the coffee table for them to see. It looked like it had been torn from the back of a paperback book. ‘MV Narwhal,’ it read. ‘Gate C, berth 14.’ There was a crude diagram of the route from the commercial port to the ferry terminal. The ink was beginning to blur.
“Donna, does that look like Tom’s writing?” Seb said.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I really can’t tell.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Seb said.
“No, he just said he was going back to America.”
“That figures,” he said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Can you find something for his ear?”
Donna shot up and dashed out of the room, as if in zeal to obey Seb's order, but instead of searching for a first aid box she rushed up to the bridge, where she grabbed the telephone. She found the number of the port office and punched it in, then gripped the phone tightly as she waited for a response. A voice came on and in as calm a voice as she could muster she requested details of the Neroli. There was another long pause as the information was found. She found a yellow pad and a blunt pencil. Just as Murdo had said, it was a Liberian-registered freighter, en route to Rio de Janeiro. It had arrived two days ago, and it had left this morning. He wasn't lying about that, at least. The captain’s name was van Maaren: that sounded Dutch. They were unable to tell her anything about a missing crewman. She scribbled all this down, hung up, then tore off the pages, folded them and stuffed them into her back pocket. The main thing was that the Neroli had left this morning. That meant they were probably stuck with him.
She took the first aid box down from its shelf and began rummaging around in it. While she was doing this, her fellow crewman Desmond, who had been with her earlier on the deck, came into the bridge.
“What are you doing?” Desmond said, rushing up to her.
“He can't stay,” Donna said. She didn't look up. Frustrated at being unable to find what she was looking for, she overturned the first aid box and dumped its contents on the table. One by one in this mess she found a roll of bandage, some tape and a tube of disinfectant ointment.
Desmond paced the room, wrapping his hands tightly around his shaven head as if it were about to explode and he had to hold the plates of his skull in place to prevent them from flying apart. “This is terrible. This is really bad. Nothing like this has ever happened before. He might be some sort of police informer,” he said.
“He's got to go,” Donna said.
“I'm really afraid of how Seb is going to react to this. It's our fault. We should have prevented this.
“I never trusted Tom,” Donna said. “He didn't respect Seb. He didn't fit in. I could see this coming.”
“Certainly, it compromises the security of the campaign. What do you think we should do? I really think we should get rid of him immediately.”
“How?”
“We just ask him to leave. Tell him we don't need any more crew. He thinks he can just walk in and take Tom's place,” Desmond said.
“We can't do that. It's not our decision,” Donna said. “It's Seb's decision, and we have to let him make it.”
“I know that. But it's obvious he can't stay. We don't know him. Seb must see that.”
“He's in pretty bad shape.”
“Yes, and we have to leave Belem tomorrow.”
“He'll be better by tomorrow. There's no way Seb will let him come with us.”
“I hope you're right. Let's go back.”
“Do you think Tom had been planning this?”
“I don't know. What do you mean?”
“As an act of sabotage against Seb. Against this campaign, against all of us. I could tell something was brewing in him. But he wouldn't dare attack him face to face. So instead he goes to the police, and they send an informer.”
“Now you're being paranoid.”
“I'm not. I'm serious. There are a lot of people who want to see something bad happen to Seb. I don't want that to happen.”
“Let's go back.”

When they returned with the bandage, cotton and tube of disinfectant ointment, they could see that Seb's mood had changed. He was looking dreamily upward, toward the ceiling, gazing serenely into the middle distance with his eyes half-closed, and a faint smile on his lips. This was the expression that he bore when he had something important to say and wanted to show inspired, decisive leadership.
“Listen, everybody. Murdo can stay with us for a while. He is clearly not well, and certainly in no condition to return to Belem,” he said. “We can't delay our departure, so we'll leave tomorrow as planned, and Murdo can come with us. We'll decide what to do when he's back on his feet.”
Murdo sat slumped beside him in a heap, looking down at his own feet as Seb said this. Donna observed the look of shock on Desmond's face.
“Donna, take his temperature,” Seb said.
Donna was furious, but she did as Seb told her. She stomped off to get the thermometer.
When she came back with it, Murdo placed it abjectly between his lips. The thermometer poked out of the drooping corner of his mouth like a sulky child's lollipop. They waited two minutes. Then Seb pulled the thermometer out of his mouth.
“One hundred and two,” he said, squinting at the barely visible band of mercury. “That's pretty high. You'd better go straight to bed. Donna?”
If he had noticed her conspicuously frosty expression, he gave no sign of it.
“Yes, Seb.”
“He may as well take Tom's bunk. It's free, after all. Will you show him to it?”
“OK, Seb,” she said.
“Where’s the master?” Murdo said. “Shouldn’t I meet him?” There was a pause, as if Seb had to think about it.
“He’s usually asleep around this time, I think,” Seb said. “But you’re bound to see him sooner or later. He’s not going anywhere.”
Murdo thought this seemed a strange way for crew to talk about the master of a ship.

She stood sternly in the doorway of the cabin as Murdo looked around.
“You’re sharing this cabin with Dr Kilhuth. Supper is in half an hour, upstairs,” she said, and left him to it.
There were four bunks in the cabin. Murdo saw a bottom bunk that seemed to be unoccupied. As a matter of habit, he lifted the mattress and looked underneath: he found a small, grey, almost weightless coin with what looked like Russian characters on it. He turned it over in his fingers, then placed it on the table.
A bottom bunk was convenient, but it was less private than a top bunk. He climbed in and lay down. There was no bulb in the reading light, but he had nothing to read and he was too tired to move. He looked at the lines on the underside of the upper bunk, and within seconds sleep enfolded him.
From above in the galley, the sound of the hefting and clanking of big metal institutional pots signalled supper, and he awoke with a start. He washed quickly in the basin, dried his face on someone else’s damp towel, and made his way upstairs.
The door opened directly into the steamy atmosphere of the galley. Pots and pans and cooking implements hung thickly from hooks on the walls, making the small room seem even smaller than it might. Murdo found himself standing in a crowd of people. In this confined space the crew of the Narwhal were queueing for their supper, taking turns to spoon food onto their plates from big pots on the stove.
“Are you a vegetarian?” a voice behind him said. Murdo turned around and saw a young Brazilian with long hair.
“No,” Murdo said. “I’m not.”
“That’s too bad. Neither am I. This is a vegetarian ship. They will try to convert you,” the Brazilian said. “Here, let me show you what to do.”
He showed Murdo how to take a plate and a knife and fork from their boxes, and to ladle food onto his plate. He sat with Murdo in the dining room next door. It was strange food. Vegetarian: a lot of tasteless vegetables that were hard to eat. Although Murdo was starving, he ate self-consciously. He seemed to be making loud glottal noises as he ate, and swallowing felt like squeezing a live animal down a drain.
On the ships he was used to, everyone sat in the same place in the mess, and if a newcomer sat in someone else’s place the meal would pass in a tense, surly silence. Here you could sit where you liked.
The Brazilian introduced himself. His name was Zezinho.
“In Brazil we like meat and rice and beans and beer,” Zezinho said. “Not this stuff. Where are you from?” he asked.
“Lots of places,” Murdo said, still chewing a mouthful of green beans. He set down his fork with exaggerated care, as if he were afraid of committing a faux pas.
Before he could say more, he felt something hot and wet in his lap: the man sitting beside him had knocked over a cup of coffee while reaching for something on the other side of the table.
“I’m so sorry,” the crewman said, in a German accent, and handed Murdo a cloth. He wiped himself off.
On any other ship, Murdo would have been angry about this careless behaviour. Here, he didn’t know what to think. Looking up from his lap, he saw that people were casting furtive, curious glances in his direction.

Chapter 3
KILHUTH

Murdo was woken in the middle of the night by a click.
The door of the cabin was being opened. Through half-closed eyes, he saw the door swing inward, casting a triangle of light onto the floor, and a man's hand slowly turn the handle. In the half-light, Murdo saw a gnarled forearm. The figure advanced half-way into the cabin, and then stood very still. Murdo saw a man silhouetted in the doorway, motionless yet silently alert. What was he doing there? He seemed to be sensing the room for the presence of another person. Aware that he lay in shadow, invisible to the intruder, Murdo lay as still as possible, not daring to breathe, lest any sign of movement betray his presence.
The man entered the cabin, and closed the door behind him, gently turning the handle into place so that it engaged the latch with barely a sound. Unsure as yet whether the man had noticed his presence, Murdo resolved to pretend to be asleep. He was still too groggy and too confused to remember that Donna had told him that he would be sharing the cabin. This midnight invader could be a murderer, for all Murdo knew in his present state of disorientation.
The man was certainly hideous. His head was completely bald, save for a grey stubble, and his features were gaunt and skull-like. Mottled ears and nose supported a large pair of severe steel rimmed spectacles; they rested on these parts like scaffolding. He wore a khaki-coloured vest with a lot of pockets.
The man went to a locker, opened a padlock with a key and gently opened the door. He clicked a button and a feeble light came on inside, casting a yellow glow onto his face. With long, thin fingers he carefully removed his glasses and put them into his breast pocket. Then he began to focus on something on the top shelf of the locker: it was a small cheap jewelry box of the kind a little girl might have in her bedroom. With both hands he opened the lid. A plastic model of a ballerina popped up.
He reached into into the box and began handling pieces of jewelry – bracelets, beads, bits of coloured glass. He chuckled quietly, then carefully put the treasures back, lowered the lid of the jewelry box and closed the locker door. He exhaled with a low whistle, through pursed lips.
Then he got ready for bed. Murdo lay frozen in his bunk, barely daring to breathe.
With a satisfied and weary gasp, the man dropped down into the middle of a bunk on the other side of the cabin and began to unlace his boots. His flabby feet now lay side by side on the floor like a pair of dying snails prised from their shells. He exhaled as they cooled. Then some phlegm caught in his throat; he coughed several times to free it, then swallowed, and then gasped again, billowing the breath into his cheeks, producing a note of gently falling pitch. Murdo could smell the feet as he pulled off the socks and shook them empty onto the floor.
Next, fingertips probed the solar plexus as he unfastened the buttons of his shirt. This he did by touch, gazing abstractedly forward. He removed the shirt by pulling it over his head, and then assayed its freshness by sniffing the area around the armpits, perhaps with a view to wearing it again the next day. The trousers came off next, and joined the other clothes in a heap in the middle of the cabin floor.
With another satisfied gasp, the man rolled into bed and almost immediately fell asleep and started to snore loudly and arrhythmically.
Home at last, Murdo thought. Back in the land of in between. He lived for this kind of situation. It was why he travelled ceaselessly around the world, enduring the discomforts of strange ships and steep learning curves. Moments like this revealed gateways to the kingdom of the obscure, the marvelous world of which he was the sovereign and the sole citizen. In this realm, he could see through the gloom and look at earthly matters as they were, their essences glowing faintly in the twilight. He wanted to know things that no one else knew, and see things that no one else saw, spreading through keyholes like a gas, entering realms of experience that would be forbidden to most people. Home at last. He sank back into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed the rhythm of the ship’s engine: an irritating circular argument -- no it isn’t, yes it is, no it isn’t, yes it is.
He felt he had been asleep only a few minutes when a clang stirred him, and he encountered again the three faceless spirits who patrol the bleak border country between sleep and waking: salt-eyes, heaviness and dread. In the half-light he noticed that he was alone in the cabin; the Other’s clothes were gone too. There was a padlock on the locker door. If there had not been, Murdo would have opened it to look at the idol contained inside.
There was a porthole by his bunk. He pushed up the shade and looked out at the smooth, muddy brown water of the Amazon. Clumps of vegetation floated by on the current; on the horizon, a thin green line marked the river's distant bank. Under a white overcast sky, a helix of black birds revolved over the distant treetops, gradually drifting downward to an invisible object. Though only a few hours out of Belém, the waterway looked as broad as the open sea.
He had not had a good night’s sleep. The man in his cabin had coughed and snored all night.
As his mind once again climbed into the saddle of consciousness and settled in for the day's ride, ghosts of the previous day, and how he had got here, climbed in with him. The fever that he had experienced yesterday seemed to have abated, yet he still felt achy and weary, and his wound stung.
He raised himself on his elbows for a moment, then dropped back down onto the thin pillow and pulled the blanket up to his neck. There's no point getting up yet, he thought. The best thing to do would be to let things settle down. I'll stay here for as long as I can. If I continue to be ill it will give people a chance to get used to me. I'm here now. I'm not going anywhere. And besides, it's quite interesting in this little cabin.
Within a few minutes he fell into a doze, a comfortable state in the shallows of sleep; an amphibious condition in which he was able to perceive objects on either side of the membrane that separated the two mental states. Sounds of footsteps in the corridor outside – members of the crew rushing about at the start of a new day – passed into a dream in which he was anxiously trying to get to sleep on the hard stone floor of a bustling railway station concourse.
Later in the morning he was woken abruptly when the door of the cabin swung open and crashed into a locker. Donna came in, holding a bowl of something in her right hand. She was wearing a large white shirt that might have been a man's, with long sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The door swung shut with another bang. She stood in the middle of the cabin with her feet close together, like a soldier standing to attention.
“Seb wants to know if you're still sick,” she said. Murdo sat up to think about an answer. Donna spoke in a low, emotionless tone that made it clear that this inquiry about his health originated not with her but with her superior; she was simply following orders, and doing so without enthusiasm.
It was clear to Murdo that she considered him an intruder; that she didn't like his presence on the Narwhal one bit, and the sooner he was gone the better. All this she conveyed through a tense, fidgety impatience. This vehemence and force of will emanated from what to Murdo seemed the frailest and most unlikely source. She was very small in height, delicate in build, with fine hair and skin. The smallest scratch or pressure would wound her mortally, Murdo thought. As if aware of this, and compensating for it, she seemed to move about enclosed within her own personal perimeter of barbed wire.
“I am still sick,” Murdo said.
“I don't know how long you can stay here,” Donna said, handing him the bowl.
“What's this?” Murdo said. The bowl contained a brown porridge.
“Buckwheat,” she said.
“I need a spoon,” he said. “Can I have a spoon?”
She went to get it, again letting the door slam. When she returned with it, he began to eat, although the spoon was rather large.
“It doesn't taste of much,” he said.
She did not reply.
“You can't stay in bed forever,” she said.
He did not reply.
She might have been a metropolitan heiress addressing a vagrant she found on her doorstep, blocking her exit and bringing down the neighbourhood.
“You don't even have any clothes,” she said.
She looked around the cabin, then pulled open the wheeled locker under the bed Murdo was lying in. As she suspected, Tom had left some clothes behind. There were some t-shirts, a pair of jeans, even some underwear. Everything was clean. The last thing she pulled out was a baseball cap with a T on the front.
“See?” she said. “He thought of everything.” She pulled the stuff out of the drawer and dumped it onto him in a heap.
“Get well soon,” she said, leaving with another noisy bang of the door.
“Charming,” Murdo said aloud. He pushed the clothing onto the floor, and put the empty bowl down too. Through his porthole he watched the brown, monotonous, rippling water of the great river. There was not much to see. He was aware, though, of humid tropical heat, the faint whiff of diesel and the throb of a ship's engine. These things were familiar to him; everything else around him now was new.
A sensation of claustrophobia combined with the urge to pee made him turn out of his bunk and put on the clothes he had been given.
It felt good to be wearing something clean and dry.

Zezinho and two crewmen were sitting in the mess when Murdo entered. They immediately fell silent when they saw him.
“We thought you were dead,” Zezinho said. “But now you have risen from the grave.”
“I'm still here,” Murdo said.
“We're going to call you Tom from now on,” Zezinho said. “It will be easier.”
Murdo didn't mind. He felt comfortable in this disguise, though the clothes were a bit too big for him.
He felt emboldened to ask them about the apparition he had seen in his cabin the night before. He wanted to know if Zezinho knew anything about the man with the khaki vest and the steel-rimmed glasses he had dimly seen in the darkness.
“That’s Dr Jac Kilhuth. He’s an anthropologist. He and Seb teach at the same university in the United States of America. He’s officially here to advise on relations with the Indians.”
“There’s something very strange about him,” Murdo said.
“Kilhuth is strange, but Seb is stranger,” Zezinho said. “Before you came in we were discussing who we think is going to go crazy first.”
The crewmen smiled at each other knowingly, as if sharing a private joke.
From nowhere, a large brown beetle dropped onto the table with a click. Its glossy carapace was a reddish chestnut colour. Languidly the beetle collected itself and crept slowly across the smooth alien surface. Zezinho flipped it onto its back with his finger. The beetle's brittle little legs wiggled frantically. Then Zezinho aimed with his thumb and middle finger and flicked the beetle back into nowhere.



Dr Jacinth Kilhuth sat in a corner of the mess far away from everyone else. He dined alone, using his own cutlery. He fed with meticulous dignity, as if he were attending a state dinner in his own honour. Dr Kilhuth was delighted with his life at this moment: being on this cruise was a kind of holiday for him, although it was officially described as a period of research leave. He was far from the daily cares of academic life, and was aboard an amusing ship full of attractive young people. Above all, he was in Brazil again, after an interval of twelve years. Soon, he hoped, he would be able to return to the Yururoa, the Indians among whom he had lived while conducting research for his doctoral dissertation in anthropology.
The dissertation was entitled ‘Devouring the ancestors: burial practices of the Yururoa.’ The Yururoa were a small Indian group who inhabited a handful of settlements in the central part of Brazilian Amazônia, near the Tapajos river. At the time of his research, he estimated their population to consist of no more than about two hundred adults; they were on the verge of extinction. The remaining population were the survivors of an epidemic of a strain of measles that had been introduced by gold miners in the 1970s, and which had killed more than half the original population. Those who remained were being tempted away from their traditional way of life, based on hunting game and small-scale jungle farming, by an equally deadly strain of American Protestant missionaries, a band of poorly-educated fundamentalist Christians called the Sovereign Church of the Holy Ghost Baptism. Saving their souls required relocating the Yururoa to their settlement a day’s canoe journey down river, where they learned to live in complete dependence upon the Church, in wooden houses with screen doors and electricity. Typically, the Yururoa would live in the settlement for a few years, learn to speak rudimentary Portuguese, see a few childish videos about Jesus, and then migrate to the shanty towns on the outskirts of Manaus, where they lived in poverty.
Dr Kilhuth discovered that while this civilizing mission was going on, the Yururoa were maintaining one important tradition, and keeping it secret from the missionaries. For hundreds of years (Kilhuth estimated that the practice pre-dated the arrival of the Spanish conquerors five hundred years earlier), the Yururoa had been disposing of the bodies of their dead by cremating them on open fires, and then depositing the ashes in pots which were hidden in caves. A year after the funeral, they would remove the ashes from their cave, mix a portion of the ash with water and a hallucinogenic leaf, and then drink the mixture, in a ceremony in which the soul of the deceased would return to life and communicate with the living. The urns were decorated with human and animal motifs.
Dr Kilhuth’s sojourn among the Yururoa had ended under a cloud. After he had witnessed one burial ritual, which was held far from the Indians’ village to escape the attention of the missionaries, Dr Kilhuth returned to the cave where the newly-cremated remains were stored, and took the urn, and hid it in his hut. His theft was discovered by a Yururoa boy who was rummaging among his belongings. That night, he was expelled from the village by a dozen men with machetes, spears and poison-tipped arrows.
The urn was recovered, but when the Indians returned to the burial cave to replace it, they noticed that six recently-deposited urns were missing. Dr Kilhuth had left the village with them in a sealed specimen box. Through the missionaries, the Indians reported the theft to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Dr Kilhuth was on his way back to America by the time the police were informed, but his name was put on a blacklist by the government of Brazil, denying him future permits to conduct research in Indian areas. Dr Kilhuth was now in Brazil on a tourist visa.
Two years later, Dr Kilhuth received a suspended sentence and a fine for stealing five watches from a branch of J.C. Penney at a shopping mall outside Boston. This led to a disciplinary suspension from the university: he couldn’t be fired because by this time he was a tenured professor. A psychiatric report concluded that he had unresolved issues of episodic kleptomania.
As for the Yururoa, their ancient burial practice was ended by the missionaries of the Sovereign Church of the Holy Ghost Baptism, who insisted on a Christian ceremony for every Yururoa who died.

Jacinth Kilhuth had felt one of his episodes brewing ever since he came on the ship. The living quarters resembled a college dorm, crammed with knickknacks: books, posters, pictures in little frames, clocks, radios, jewelry. The temptation was becoming impossible to resist.
After supper one night, Dr Kilhuth returned to his cabin. Luckily, Murdo was elsewhere, so the cabin was empty. He sat very still on his bunk, with his shoulders clenched tightly together. He took off his glasses and laid them carefully on the bed, then rubbed his temples, as if he were suffering a severe headache. The moral distress one of these episodes provoked was greater than the madness itself. Kilhuth recognized he was about to do something that would overwhelm him with shame and remorse later, and cause him no end of trouble, but he was unable to do anything about it. He kept thinking that to allow himself one final theft would purge the unwelcome desire from his system, clear the air, and let him breathe deeply again, see straight, return to normal. Only this thought – the only thought that appeared in his mind in verbal form – gave him any sense of orientation. Because it was verbal, it seemed to make sense, even though, later, in his right mind, he would know it was an illusion.
“It’s time to do something rather out of character,” he thought, slipping into the cabin across the narrow corridor. He pushed the door shut, holding the handle down so there was no audible click, then carefully released the handle so it slid silently into place. Then he turned the bolt on the door. Dr Kilhuth turned and scanned the room, and felt a vertiginous, transgressive thrill. He gently opened a shallow steel drawer that didn’t work easily; he had to lift it off its runners to avoid making a noise. He knew that a person always keeps their most precious things in the top drawer. Here he saw roughly laundered t-shirts and underwear, a tangle of worn cotton, and a little colony of jewelry huddling together underneath, towards the front of the drawer. There were some small gold earrings, delicate loops each with a little gold spur as thin as wire for hooking through pierced ears. He held them up to examine them, then put them back. There was also a tiny watch with an iridescent turquoise face and a black leather strap. He took that.
He looked down at the vent in the door, which admitted light from the corridor. He focused his eyes to listen harder. Hearing nothing for a long moment, he opened the door, closed it silently with a lingering turn of the handle, and walked slowly and carefully, heel to toe, back to his cabin. He carried the watch in his pocket during the journey across the corridor, holding it tightly in his hand. Back in his cabin, he removed the padlock from his locker, and opened the door. He took the jewelry box from the top shelf, and put the watch into it. Then he snapped it shut, closed the locker door with a slam, and fumbled once again with the padlock.
A meeting was going on upstairs; it would go on for at least another hour. He washed his hands in the small stainless steel sink, and dried his hands on his towel. Rapidly assessing his situation, he decided he needed something to establish an alibi. If the theft should be suspected, he needed people to have seen him somewhere else at the time it happened. He left the cabin, and climbed a ladder to the upper deck.
Murdo and Zezinho were there, smoking cigarettes at the railing.
“Aren’t you going to the meeting, Dr Kilhuth?” Zezinho said.
“There’s no need for me to be there. I’m surplus to requirements,” he said, forcing a smile. He self-consciously wrapped his hands around the railing on the deck, aware of the crewmen’s ignorance, their separateness from himself. He wished he could tell them what he had just done. It would have helped to make a confession. But that would have been madness. Who knows what it might lead to?

Half an hour later, a twenty-year-old deckhand called Nina entered the cabin that Dr Kilhuth had lately visited. She noticed a funny smell in the air, but there were always funny smells in the air on this ship, so she disregarded it. Alone in her cabin, she sat on her bunk and stared disconsolately on the bedside clock. In fifteen minutes exactly she would have to go on watch, a prospect she dreaded. Nina had never been to sea before; she was on the ship because she was a friend of Donna's. She and Donna shared this cabin.
Being on watch meant mopping floors. She didn't want to do this and was trying very hard to think of how to duck out of it. But every time she presented herself with an idea for a way out, and began exploring how to put it into practice, the idea not only seemed too well-worn and unconvincing, but an opposing voice answered, arguing that it was now too late. Any excuse she offered would look too obviously like what it was – a cheap excuse to avoid work. She didn’t want to make trouble, and she didn’t want to give anyone the chance to say that if she didn’t want to do the work that she had originally agreed to do when she signed up for the cruise she should go home. There were plenty of other people who wanted to come on this mission, but were turned down. She imagined Donna's steely blue eyes boring angrily into her.
She looked over at the chest of drawers, and opened the top drawer to have a final reassuring look at her plane ticket. There it was: the blue and white colours of Varig, the Brazilian airline. Open return: Belém, Sao Paolo, New York. She could use it whenever she wanted: it was a very expensive ticket. It was carefully tucked into her American passport, a stitched blue booklet made of a warm, grainy imitation leather. She looked at the photograph of herself, staring vacantly into the lens of the camera, looking like all the essence of self had been drained out of her. Joan of Arc probably had just such an expression on her face immediately before they burned her at the stake, she thought. On the next page was a request by the Secretary of State himself, requesting all whom it may concern to let her out of Brazil as soon as possible, and without any hassle, and if it’s not too much trouble to upgrade her to business class, given how much her ticket had cost her. He even wrote it in French as well underneath, for good measure – although Portuguese would have been a bit more relevant.
With two minutes to go before she had to face the music, she decided to put on her watch so that she could at least amuse herself by counting the hours and minutes as they passed, and calculating how long remained before her four-hour shift was at an end. Because it was a very special watch she didn’t always wear it, in case she scratched the face, so she usually kept it in this drawer, under the ticket and passport. She reached around for it, didn’t immediately feel it, stood up, looked in the drawer, still didn’t find it, pulled the drawer out as far as it would go, and still didn’t see it.
It wasn’t there.
“Shit,” she said aloud. There wasn’t time to look for it. She slammed the drawer shut and went upstairs to work, feeling all the more miserable. She hadn’t begun to think rationally yet about how the watch might have disappeared.
As she expected, Desmond told her to get a mop and bucket and go to work. Just under four hours of this lay ahead of her, and then it would be time to go to bed. But now she had no watch to count off the time.
Nina would work for half and hour, then go and have a rest, either in her cabin or in the main lounge, go and work for a bit, have another rest, and so on until the shift ended. She kept her eye on the clock, and she thought about her watch.

That night, after work, Nina and Donna sat alone on the aft deck on a rope locker. The night was cloudy and starless, and they sat under a light bulb that attracted moths. The dust from their wings as they immolated themselves against the hot glass fell onto the two women as they spoke. The air was warm and silky and smelled of earth.
“Something really strange happened today,” Nina said.
“What is it?” Donna said.
“I have a little blue watch that my mother gave me, you know? I think it’s been stolen.”
“Stolen? What are you talking about?” Donna said. She was beginning to find Nina a bit needy.
“Well, I don’t know, but I usually keep it in the top drawer of the dresser in the cabin, and it’s not there any more.”
Donna’s cheekbones reddened. This was a hell of a thing to say about the people on the Narwhal. Nobody stole things here; this wasn’t a public place, like some crappy Greyhound bus terminal where you have to keep your eyes on your property every second, in case some vagrant comes and takes it.
“Do you have any idea who might have done it?” Donna said.
“No,” Nina said.
“I have an idea,” Donna said.
“Who do you think it was then?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Tell me now.”
She thought for a moment, and told her.
Nina thought about it. “Where did he come from?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Did anybody know him before he came on board?”
“He knew Tom,” Donna said. She wanted to believe it, though she had her doubts.
“He didn’t exactly know him, he met him in a bar.”
Donna fretted. After a moment she said, “I think he’s lying about what happened to him before he got here, and that he’s hiding something, or running away from something. I think he’s going to steal a few things and then disappear, and that he was the one who stole your watch.”
“Running away from what?”
“How should I know? Something about his story doesn’t make sense, it sounds made up. All that stuff about losing his memory. No one knows anything about him. Remember, he just turned up on the docks at Belém, where there are criminals everywhere, looking like he’d just been in a knife fight.”
“He doesn’t look like a criminal,” Nina said. “He just looks stupid.”
“I think he does,” Donna said.
“Why?”
“He never talks.”
“Yes he does.”
“Well, he doesn’t say very much.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. He’s never met people like you before. This is not exactly a typical crew on a typical ship, you know, especially for someone who’s worked on grubby old merchant ships all his life. He doesn’t know what to make of it.”
Donna thought there was something wrong with not talking very much, and she couldn’t accept the idea that what they did on the Narwhal would not be completely clear and comprehensible and looked upon with favour and approval by anyone, anywhere in the world.
Nina said, “I want to go home.”
Donna said, “You can’t go home.” Then, “You are home.” A movement in the river caught her attention: the sleek backs of a pod of dolphins breaking the surface of the water.
“Come on, we’ve got to go back in. It's time for bed.”

Now it was midnight, and the master was alone on the bridge, and the ship was sailing south on the Rio Tocantins. The ship hugged the river’s eastern shore: the Narwhal was sailing upstream, and the opposing current was less powerful the further you were from the centre of river. Every ten kilometers or so a buoy appeared along the waterway, guiding ships away from invisible islands and sandbanks.
There wasn’t much to see. The western bank of the river was almost invisible – marked only by an irregular and barely perceptible line of flickering yellow lights. It was so far away it might as well have been the edge of the world. The water was smooth and black, and its ripples twinkled with the light of reflected stars.
On the nearer eastern shore, black against black, the master could see tangled vegetation, a treeline of monotonous, uniform height, and now and then the lights of a caboclo’s shack, the dirt-poor, mixed race people that lived on the river, subsisting on fishing and occasional work in the gold mines.
Like a sentinel keeping watch on a rampart for an invisible, the master stood in his dark bridge, with all the lights extinguished except the tiny red and white glows of the navigation equipment. The windows of the bridge were dark eye-sockets, behind which the master stood like the animate consciousness in a skull that looks out on the world and makes sense of the patterns of light that enter it. It was mariner’s practice to let the night flood the bridge, so that blackness could scan blackness for the faintest light on the water. He had to maintain a careful watch for the buoys, which more often than not were not where the chart said they would be, or were overgrown with weeds, or had no functioning light to identify them. Not only did darkening the bridge increase visibility, it eliminated distractions. Long ago, he had taken a path in life that was the wrong path, and had never really got used to the path he was now on. His distracted air was due to the fact that his consciousness – or most of it, anyway – remained on the path he hadn’t taken. If that was the case, then no one was really piloting this ship.
The ship glided through the darkness. Its corona of blinking running lights made strange reflections on the calm water. The river was still so wide at this point that none of the forest’s cacophony of birds, insects and animals could be heard from the ship.
Four hours later, when it was still dark, the ship reached the mouth of the Rio Tapajos. The ship was heading south.

Chapter 4

Murdo had retreated once again to his bunk. He found he preferred it there. It kept him off work, and out of the way, though not so much out of the way that he was cut off from what was going on. All he had to do to achieve this status was to inform Desmond that his fever had returned, and that it would hasten his recovery if he continued his convalescence in bed. Desmond agreed to this, without any resistance or cross-examination. Indeed, they discussed the possibility of malaria. It was pleasant to look out his porthole and watch the river landscape glide by; every now and then something interesting would appear for a moment, and then be gone -- a wooden passenger boat; a man in a canoe; the deck of a rusty freighter carrying construction machinery. The porthole was too small to allow him to see a complete picture: he only caught brief glimpses of things. Even in this there was a kind of consolation: it seemed to absolve him from the responsibility of trying to make sense of his surroundings. Not enough information was available.
No one in the crew seemed to mind that Murdo spent his days in bed. Indeed, the arrangement seemed to suit everyone. A couple of times a day someone would bring him food and check on his health. Seb must have countenanced this activity, because it took place quite regularly, morning and evening. As Murdo’s physical condition remained stable -- his temperature was a constant 102 degrees F -- there was little to worry about or do. Instead, his visitors would use the occasion to tell Murdo about what had been happening on board every day, and about their own private concerns, matters that were hard to talk about in the course of the normal life of the ship. His cabin became a kind of floating confessional, a confined space for the imparting of confidences.
Desmond appeared one morning with a bowl of porridge. He wore his usual blue overalls and was so tall he nearly touched the ceiling of the cabin. There were red nicks in his scalp where the razor had not been accurate. Seriousness of purpose hardened his features; he radiated a perilous severity and self-control. After handing Murdo his breakfast, he lingered awkwardly with his hand on the door handle. He turned the handle down, but did not open the door; he was using it like a walking stick, to steady himself.
“I’m really worried about this cruise,” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?” Murdo said. He didn’t know what to say.
“This crew is all wrong.”
“I don’t get it. What’s wrong with them?”
“Evidently you don’t get it either,” Desmond said, releasing the handle.
“What don’t I get?”
“No one on this ship has any commitment,” he said.
 “They seem pretty committed to me,” Murdo said.
“No they don’t,” Desmond said. Murdo was surprised by the bitterness in his voice. “Look. Look at that kid. What’s her name. Nina. Never set foot on a ship in her life, let alone worked on one. She wanders around here in her big brown Chanel sunglasses, looking like she’s on the Queen Mary and she’s trying to find the first class lounge for a cocktail before lunch. She doesn’t belong here. Do you know why she’s here?”
“I guess I don’t,” Murdo said.
“She’s here because she’s running away from an ex-boyfriend. Did you know that? It’s true. She broke up with him, and he started stalking her, phoning her at all hours, hanging around outside her apartment, calling to her from the street. She got scared. When she heard that her friend Donna was coming on this cruise, she begged Donna to let her come too. They were old friends. Donna couldn’t bear to say no to her. And because Donna wanted it, Seb agreed.”
Desmond’s face was by now red with anger. His upper lip quivered.
“Did you know that?”
“Well, no, I didn’t know that,” Murdo said. “How could I know that?”
This provoked a pause in Desmond’s testimony.
“Do you know how long I’ve worked on these boats?”
“No, I don’t know,” Murdo said.
“A long time,” he said. “Five years.”
Five years of sharing cabins with people who snored. Of not having a girlfriend. Of barely having the money to buy a bottle of beer. Of standing every day in a tiny shower stall, with water that was either boiling hot or freezing cold, surrounded by strange soaps and shampoo bottles. Of the permanent smell of diesel in your nostrils. It was more than he could bear to talk about. Donna and her friend were the last straw.
“I’ve got to go,” Desmond said, leaving a vacuum behind him.
Once Desmond had gone, Murdo settled back into bed to watch the activity on the river through his porthole. It was a beautiful day; sharply defined snow-white clouds rested in a clean blue sky. The sunlight off the water was almost blinding. This was a relaxing way to pass the time, but he would have preferred to read. Unfortunately, and unusually, there were no books in the cabin. In all other ships he had known, a cabin would contain a shelf of well-worn copies of trashy novels like this one.
He reached up to the shelf where the books would have been and felt for the coin he had found under the mattress when he first arrived. Looking at it in the light, he couldn’t work out what country it came from. It was clearly a coin of low value, of thin, light metal. Around the circumference were letters of an unfamiliar alphabet -- not Cyrillic, as he had thought at first. These letters surrounded the profile of a man he supposed to be the country’s dictator. He wore a military officer’s cap, had a bushy moustache, and was smoking a cigarette. The same figure was depicted on horseback on the reverse of the coin, atop a hill, looking into the distance. Murdo guessed this might have represented a military episode in the country’s independence struggle, which the dictator had led. How grandiose to be represented on both sides, he thought: a violation of the historical conventions of coinage. But the dictator was unknown, the country was unknown, and the independence struggle was unknown. Even the alphabet was unknown.
There was a knock at the door, and Donna came in. This was a surprise, as Desmond had only lately brought him his breakfast. It was too soon for another meal.
Her mood was different from usual. Once frosty and suspicious, she now seemed subdued and wanting confidence.
“Can I sit down?” she said. Previously she would have stood, to enable her to look down on Murdo from on high.
“Go ahead,” he said. She sat on a chair at the foot of Murdo’s bunk, the only one available.
“Was Desmond here?” she said.
“Sure. He brought me my breakfast.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing.”
“OK.”
“It’s just that I know he isn’t happy about something, and I thought he might have said so,” she said.
“What isn’t he happy about?” Murdo said.
“I don’t think he’s happy about this cruise. He’s burnt out and depressed: he’s been doing this kind of thing for a long time.”
“I know. He told me that.”
“I think he’s wrong for this cruise. I don’t think he should be here.”
“OK.”
“He’s also unhappy because he used to be very close to Seb, and he thinks Seb has frozen him out on this campaign. He was very unhappy about Seb letting you stay.”
“I got that impression.”
“No, it’s more than that. Seb likes you. He has plans for you.”
“What plans?”
“Even I don’t know that,” she said.
Then she frowned. She simmered. She was about to give birth to something.
“You know,” Donna said, “I’ve known Seb for a long time too.”
“I think I knew that,” Murdo said.
“It usually takes a long time for him to decide he likes you. You’re lucky. You’re very lucky, Mr Murdo, or whatever your name is.”
“I am?”
“Yes. You are. And it’s not fair. I want to tell you something about how long it took me to get Seb to like me.”
“Go on,” Murdo said.



Chapter

She was a freshman at St. Clement’s College, sitting on the granite steps of the Library, looking through the list of classes. Yellow New England autumn light filtered through the trees of the college square. She had drawn a circle in red pen around a course in English Modernist Poetry, 1914 to 945, and was reading the description of the course below it, on American women poets, when she began to overhear a pair of students sitting on the step below her. Like her, they were choosing courses from the catalogue. Unlike her, their ideas were all over the map, and they were amusing themselves by looking for the most obscure courses they could find. Two young female heads, leaning together, digging into the mirthfulness of things.
“I’m serious now,” said the one, changing tone. “Have you heard about this one? Strategy and Tactics of Green Revolution.”
“That sounds pretty serious. What is it?” said the other.
“It is serious. He’s famous.”
“Who is?”
“This professor. You’ll never get into this course, though it sounds amazing. Listen. EC2001. Prof. Sebastian Cardew. An intensive course in the theory and practice of revolutionary ecology, preparing activists and commissars of the Green movement, covering the rise of environmentalism in American culture, eco-apocalyptic visions, ecocide, shamanism, animal liberation, optimum human population, the moral status of ecosystems, civil disobedience, and the politics of past and future environmental campaigns. Major readings: Cardew, S., Green Shiva: Shamanism and Ecology, others to be announced. Prerequisites: loads of courses in biology, religion, literature and politics. That’s what I mean about never getting into it. He keeps the class small by making the entry requirements almost impossible to meet. Additional requirements: written permission from a physician. That’s in case you get chained to a redwood for a week. Written permission from parent or guardian. That’s in case you try to sue the college if you get arrested.”
What she heard was intriguing, but distracting; to get away from their voices, she went back to her room. There, with her unpacked bags around her and the catalogue spread out on her desk, she continued to study the list of courses, with literature uppermost in her mind. She had arrived here with her head full of poetry and a trunk full of books. Expensive books, assiduously collected: slim volumes of poetry in hardback, blue-covered volumes from Oxford University Press, City Lights Pocket Poets. She unpacked a few of these and put them on the shelf above her desk.
Then she hunted in the catalogue for the entry on EC2001 and read it thoroughly.
As she read and re-read it, the thought of making a big shift took root in her. The more she thought about the idea, the more she liked it: taking a completely radical step. She thought, This is the kind of thing I do.

Seb was the star attraction at St. Clement’s. He walked around the campus enfolded in the aura of recent travels in India and Nepal and Siberia. Even when he was doing mundane things like taking books out of the library, there was a knowing, enchanted twinkle in his eye, a sense of exalted purpose.
As she had promised herself, she talked her way into a place on the course. There was a lot about magic, a lot about mysticism, a lot about Buddhism. There was a kind of cult around him. A group of students would sit in the front row of his classes, his core devotees. She became determined that not only would she join them, she would be the most devoted devotee of all, his favourite student.
The course was built around Seb’s own experiences. She had never heard anyone talk for so long about himself. His lectures were long dramatic monologues, based on episodes in his travels around the world. He would pace back and forth at the front of the room, never using notes, never writing anything on the blackboard, while all the students scribbled away furiously in their notebooks, trying to get down everything he said. People were always wanting to record his lectures on tape, but he forbade tape recorders. He would talk very loudly in his high-pitched, nasal, Midwestern accent, repeating the important points several times, each time with a different intonation, which had the effect of bringing out different nuances of meaning. He was a master of long pauses. After making an important point, he would fall silent, as if stunned by the profundity of what he had just said, and gaze around the room, looking into each face to make sure that everyone had realized the significance of his words. Each lecture was a kind of hellfire sermon, with the difference that the sacred being at the centre of his narrative was always himself. He was the prophet in his own scriptures, telling parables about himself, and also offering the commentary on them. Seb’s big idea was that shamanism was the key to renewing the relationship between humankind and nature.
The course was structured around one central episode, which he constantly returned to. There was always something new to say about it. It was a moment of transformation, and judging by the way he talked about it, and the awe in which he still held it, it was the most important thing that ever happened to him.
He had been bitten by a snake during a shamanistic ritual in Nepal.

Chapter 7
GREEN SHIVA

From Green Shiva, by Sebastian Cardew:

I had heard about the ceremony of the naga mantra from a Nepali friend at Kathmandu University, a folklorist. The naga mantra is the snake spell of the Kathmandu valley, a traditional procedure which is believed to immunise the subject to snake-bite and to give him shakti -- healing power. I wanted to experience it myself because I have always loved and honored snakes and wanted to partake of their unique wisdom.
We visited a village in the mountains overlooking the city of Kathmandu. My friend and I conducted lengthy negotiations in order to set up the ceremony: we visited a succession of small, smoky houses, sitting in the dark, drinking tea with one person after another to arrange the location of the ceremony, and to procure the snake itself. A chain of introductions was made, following an elaborate social protocol. Everyone in the village knew the man who performed the naga mantra -- he owned a small grocery store -- but he had to be approached formally and very discreetly. To approach him directly would have meant immediate failure of the project. When we met at last in the appropriate setting we agreed that I would pay him about ten dollars for the snake, a mature hooded cobra, which he would find in the forests above the village, and another ten dollars for the ceremony itself.
When the day of the ceremony arrived, we gathered in a room at the back of the shaman’s shop and sat on the ground around the cardboard box that contained the snake. The shaman began pronouncing the naga mantra over me. He recited it from memory, sitting very still with his eyes closed. The prayer was a long, low, monotonous murmur that went on for a long time. At last, on the shaman’s instruction, I reached into the box to handle the snake. The instant I did so, it reared up and bit me. The skin around the bite immediately turned blue. The shaman sucked out most of the poison, but I could feel the paralysis creeping up my arm. He knew enough about the treatment of snake bite to tie a tourniquet around my arm to slow down the circulation around the wound, and that probably saved my life.
My Nepali friend and another man carried me two miles to a clinic in the next village. I learned later that there was no appropriate anti-venom serum at the clinic, and that there would be a long delay in obtaining it. Until the serum arrived, all they could do was disinfect the wound. Normally, cobra venom kills in about sixty-five minutes. I waited four hours for treatment. I went into a coma.
While I was in a coma, I had visions in which I was given the power to heal the earth. I also believed myself to have a secret spiritual identity as the Nagaraja, and to have kinship with all snakes, particularly poisonous ones.
I was in a coma for a month. I might as well have been dead. All around me was void, welter and darkness.
After a while – and I have no idea of how long this was after I arrived at the clinic – I became aware of myself lying sick and motionless on a straw mattress on the floor. I could not see, but I had the sense of being in a vast, deep space of total darkness, like being at the bottom of a cavern far underground. The awareness that returned to me seemed to come after a long time, but after a period of time far longer than a human lifespan. I felt I knew this with absolute certainty. With this knowledge, I concluded that not only was I dead, but that I had died thousands of years ago. Looking at it now after the fact, these thoughts were either the beginning of a dream, or the mental activity of the comatose patient on the frontier between life and death.
I lay in that state for another eon. I was aware of a new perception of time, one of vast durations, a perception that the normal living person is incapable of because of the limited span of a human life. I was granted a direct understanding of truth: that time is not one-dimensional, but extends across a broad spectrum of simultaneous epochs, similar to geological time, where the different ages of the earth can exist at a single moment of the earth’s history. I lay in a kind of vigil, unable to hear, but listening all the same for any kind of sound that might enable me to orient myself. I was unable to see, but I was looking out for any glimmer of light.
This period of anticipation ended when I heard a voice calling me, a barely audible voice that seemed composed of the sounds of wind. It told me to get up and walk, and to follow the direction it indicated. I rose from my mattress, aware that I had no sensation in my body, no feeling of weight or motion, and was still unable to see anything. I could still hear the voice, and felt obliged to do what it told me. At first it was difficult to tell where it was coming from: it was the sound of a wind, or a storm, and it seemed to be emanating from everywhere at once, from no single point. But by listening carefully, I got a sense of a direction, and I followed that and went towards it. I felt very hesitant, and afraid of getting lost, or of tripping over something and falling, and being unable to get up, and unable to continue.
The voice summoned me outside. I could feel a fierce cold wind around me, and the tread of stones underfoot. They were large round stones that made walking difficult, and I could feel them hurting my bare feet. The stones had teeth: some had the teeth of wolves, and some had the teeth of bears. But I was still in total darkness.
Eventually I saw a flickering red light, like fire, just a glow. Still following the voice, I stumbled towards it, and found myself entering another cave. Now, in the firelight, I could see, although the space was still very dark, and my eyesight was still very weak. Inside the cave I could see the Nepali shaman who had conducted the ceremony with the cobra. The light in the cave was coming from a primitive furnace, above which hung an enormous cauldron.
The shaman told me to lie on a straw mattress, similar to the one on which I had been lying in the place I had come from. I was happy to see him, but was still unable to talk.
I lay down on the mattress. There was another being in the cave, whom I could see only as a shadow. This turned out to be the mother shaman, the mother of all shamans, who had the form of a giant bird, sitting with folded wings. The shaman took an iron axe out of the furnace. It was red hot. He raised the axe above his head and chopped off my right hand. I laughed. Then he raised the axe again and chopped off my left hand, and again I laughed. One by one he severed my limbs with his axe, with clean, single blows, and every time I laughed. He cleaned the bones, scraped the flesh off them, and the blood drained away.
He cut off my jawbone, and cut my eyes out of their sockets. He tore the heart out of my chest and threw it into the cauldron, and then did the same with my lungs and my liver. He poured salt into my skull which dissolved my brain.
In this form, with my body dismembered, I could see myself from a point outside my body. I saw myself as a vast skeleton, shining a brilliant white in the darkness, with flames spurting out of it. The light I gave off illuminated the earth, which I could see as a blue-green sphere below me. Beyond the earth I could see demons feasting on the organs and blood that the shaman had stripped from me.
Then the shaman and the shaman mother put me back together. They put a hooded cobra, the kind that had bitten me, into the cavity where my organs had been. Using his blacksmiths’ tools, the shaman reattached my limbs, fastening them in place with bolts of molten iron. He put red hot coals in my eye sockets to replace my eyes, and red hot stones into my ribcage to replace my organs.
Once I had been re-assembled, the shaman told me to get up and go on my way. I could feel a celestial light emanating from me, flashing like lightning. Outside the cave, a storm was raging, and I could feel myself rising upward on the clouds. Below me I could see trees torn from their roots, and stones pulled out of the earth. I could hear the trees and stones screaming as they flew past me. I strode through the storm until I came to a mountain, which I found I could ascend with ease.
At the summit I found the shaman mother, sitting at the top of a tree, looking like an enormous bird of prey in a nest. She gave me a new soul, telling me that I was now a shaman, and that I could perform miracles.
I flew through an underworld of water and crystal as the Nagaraja, the snake-god.

Chapter 8
NARWHAL SPIRIT

“Do you know what he did before that?” Donna said.
“No,” Murdo said.
“Wait a second. I want to show you something,” she said.
Donna sprang out of the cabin and came back a few minutes later with an old vinyl LP with a scuffed cover. She handed it to Murdo.
“I bet you’ve never heard this,” she said.
Indeed, he hadn’t. It was a record by a band called Narwhal. On the front cover the band’s name and the title of the album were spelled out in weird, molten letters, above a psychedelic image of a narwhal, radiating multicoloured beams of light, and swimming over what looked like a Mayan temple partly buried on the ocean floor. The title of the album was ‘Anthems and Legends of the Spiral Palace.’
Murdo turned it over and looked at the picture on the back: a black and white photo of four young men in outlandish costumes, representing the height of the counter-cultural carnival of the late sixties. They had long, wild hair and stoned, defiant expressions. Each wore a costume that reflected a distinct manic personality. One was dressed in a toga made of American flags; another was dressed like a Mexican bandit or revolutionary, with a black sombrero and crossed bandoliers across his chest and a straggly moustache; another, his face all but hidden in a great bushy beard and long hair parted in the middle, wore a long blue wizard’s cloak. That was Seb. Murdo could see his face hidden beneath the beard, younger and more callow, but the eyes were unmistakable: dark and enchanted and purposeful. Sitting on the ground, thinner, but with a full head of hair, was a man dressed all in black. He held a pineapple in his lap.
“Can you recognize Seb?” Donna said.
“Yes. I see him. They all look pretty heavy,” Murdo said.
“They were heavy. Seb was the heaviest of all.”
Heavy: the psychedelic sublime. It meant deep, scary, strange, dangerous; but also darkly serious and unapproachable.
“Why was it called Narwhal?” Murdo said.
Donna didn’t hear him. She wanted him to listen, not talk.
“That album you’re holding was released in 1971. It’s rare now; I don’t think they made very many copies, and they sold even less. The sleeve notes don’t tell you very much: it’s crazy hippy nonsense. I think Seb himself might have written it.
“Narwhal were a bunch of rich kids who were all at college together in Oregon. They all lived in a big house, and took a lot of drugs, and jammed day and night and never did any work. They played gigs at parties and in bars.
“I think I’ve listened to it once. Once was enough. It’s probably one of the worst psychedelic records ever made. I guess that makes it interesting, in a way: people never stop looking for the worst psychedelic album ever made. Well, this is it. Believe it or not, they managed to make two albums. That one is the second. The first album was better, supposedly. It was a heavy rock album, a bit like Iron Butterfly, if it was like anything. The album you’ve got there represents what one might call their hallucinogenic phase. They moved into the country and took phenomenal amounts of acid. They recorded this album, and then they broke up.”
“Why did they break up?” Murdo said.
“It all got too crazy. The whole thing was Seb’s idea. He was the one who rented the house, and persuaded the rest of them to come and live in it. The house was miles from anywhere. Seb insisted they all do nothing but rehearse and take drugs. Only one person was allowed to leave the house at a time, and only to get food. He was afraid that if more than one person left the house, they would never come back. Seb made sure there was only one car, and he kept the keys, so if you wanted to use the car you had to ask him. The nearest town was fifty miles away. He wouldn’t allow anyone to cook, because he thought that cooking took up too much time. So they all lived on cereal and Twinkies and junk like that. Seb was seriously into magic at this time, or “the craft,” as he called it. He was a devotee of Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn and that sort of thing. Do you see that cloak he’s wearing on the cover? He used to wear that all the time. It made him look like a wizard. He must have been a strange sight in the green hills of Oregon, dressed like that.”
“It sounds like he was going nuts. Was he?” Murdo said.
“Well, he was and he wasn’t, and this is the important thing to know about Seb. He never personally suffered from his huge drug intake. He could stop when it suited him. He never got addicted to anything himself, although the other two guys in the band did. Jess, the drummer, died of a heroin overdose about a year after the album came out, and Ron, the bass player, was last seen years ago begging on the streets in Portland, drunk and psychotic. Seb was never crazy; he was just an extreme personality. But he had an instinct for protecting himself. It was always others who got hurt. Never him. He was always the one at the still center of the cyclone. While others at the edge got drawn in and were destroyed, Seb himself always remained safe.”
She took the album from Murdo’s hands.
“Look at the titles of the tracks,” Donna said. “‘Blazing sun of chaos,’ ‘Great Serpent of the Ages,’ ‘The Eye Enthroned,’ ‘The Black Thorn.’ And wait till you hear the lyrics – when you can hear them. It’s a very muddy recording. I don’t even think it’s in stereo. Anyway, once they finished the album, everyone but Seb decided they’d had enough, and the band broke up.
“Seb stayed in Oregon. After the band broke up he got involved in a campaign to protect some old growth forest which a logging company wanted to get their hands on and cut down. Thousands of acres of giant sequoia trees: some of them were thousands of years old. The company wanted to clear-cut the whole area, turn it into a waste land. The problem was that they had bought the land; you couldn’t fight them on that: it wasn’t a national forest. So Seb used other means. He was the first to introduce the tactic of tree squatting. He would get kids to abseil up these hundred foot trees, build a treehouse and just stay there until the loggers came and cut them down. A lot of people were getting arrested.
“Seb had a talent for getting people to do what he wanted. He could make them go further, do more than they thought possible. It was like a party in the forest: he and these volunteers -- these kids who would just appear every day from all over -- would stay up all night, and during the day take incredible risks to protect the trees. It sounded like a lot of fun. The campaign got a lot of publicity in the local press, and finally the logging company backed down. Seb and his followers won a magnificent victory. At one point, a TV news crew arrived. The TV people asked Seb what the name of his organization was. Until that time he had never thought of giving it a name; it was just a group of people who had come together for this campaign.
“He was stuck for an answer. The whole thing had happened spontaneously; there was no organization. There was just Seb and his ideas. They had never thought of giving a name to what they were doing. But the moment they asked him, he realized he had to come up with something if people were to remember them. So without missing a beat or needing to stop and think he said the first thing that came into his head. He said, ‘We’re called Narwhal.’” They said, ‘Narwhal? What does that mean? What’s that got to do with trees?’ It was metaphorical, Seb said. The narwhal was a whale with a tusk like a unicorn’s horn: he said it represented the magical power of nature.

It took Donna three years to make Seb recognize that she wasn’t just another adoring face in the crowd. She attended every class, and read every book on his reading lists. She practically memorized his book, which she believed was one of the most important books on ecology since On Walden Pond. She believed in what she was doing.
Donna was always the last to leave the classroom after Seb’s lectures, always the one at the core of the group of students who lingered behind afterwards to discuss what had come up in the class, hanging on Seb’s words, writing down his epigrammatic remarks in her notebook as he said them.
Seb had a house at the edge of the campus, a faculty bungalow hidden behind a tangled yew tree and shaded by elms. Here Donna played hostess for the parties Seb held for students, organizing the food, the glasses, the drinks, the ice. People talked: it was assumed they were having an affair, but they weren’t: Donna was too earnest for that.
Seb exploited Donna’s devotion, tormented her for it. He enjoyed making her squirm with discomfort by flaunting before her the details of his sexual adventures. He liked her to see an unfamiliar young woman wandering around the bungalow on mid-week mid-mornings sleepily finding coffee when Donna appeared for a supervision, carrying a bundle of books and papers.
She graduated, and she enrolled in the PhD programme, and Seb was her supervisor. She chose as her dissertation topic the effects on the environment in the Amazon basin of the mercury used by miners in gold extraction. Donna was the first PhD student Seb had ever taught. At first the responsibility bored him. He would fidget in his chair as Donna worked through her piles of data, spreadsheets, official reports and statistics on Amazonian topsoil chemistry. It seemed so prosaic to him: there was no magic in her thinking. The world would not be changed by crunching numbers.
But her work planted a seed in his mind. Towards the end of her first year as a graduate student, Seb announced that he was taking a leave of absence from the college. He wanted to return to ecological activism, to lead a new Narwhal campaign, after ten years away from the organization. Donna’s work had given him the idea that he could put into practice his ideas of saving the earth in the part of the world where the struggle between the rights of nature and the greed of mankind was in its most critical phase. By this time, Narwhal had grown into a big national organization, with thousands of paid-up members, an office, a permanent staff, and a board of directors. Seb persuaded the board of the Narwhal Foundation to let him lead a campaign in Amazonia. He asked Donna to come with him as his deputy. Still in thrall to Seb, she agreed, even though she had never taken part in an ecological campaign before, and even though it meant that her studies would be disrupted.
“So what I’m saying is, be careful,” Donna said. “Don’t let him get his fangs into you.”
“I’ll be careful,” Murdo said.

Eventually he picked up the record and read the sleeve notes.

This is the sound of Narwhal. They are here in this world -- touring, making music. Alive. Looking at the world through your eyes. This sad world. Your sad eyes.
Before they came to earth to form this band, they lay asleep at the four corners of the universe, latent, mindful. Bob, lead guitar, in the west. Jess, drums, in the east. Ron, bass, in the north. Seb, organ, in the south.
Each member of Narwhal is the ruler of a world of essences, spirits, and elements.
Bob is lord of stone, starlight, long journeys and homecomings. He was born under Capricorn, with Mercury rising.
Jess – Virgo with Moon sesquiquadrate -- is the lord of fire, sun, earthquakes and shimmering rain. His symbol is the prism.
Ron, Pisces, is master of spells and invocations, of leaf shadows and frost.
Seb, Taurus, governs mountains, memories and visions. He wears a midnight blue cloak, and wild animals feed from the palms of his hands.
This is their second album. After their first album, Welcome to the Electric Sound of Narwhal, they moved to the country, and lived together in a farmhouse. It was a period of introspection. They read philosophy and magic, and grew vegetables, and recorded this album of new music. Now they are back. Come where they lead you.


PIRARUCU SPIRIT


Zezinho was watching a Brazilian telenovela on the big-screen TV at the far end of the lounge, sitting deep in a leather recliner with his feet up.
Zezinho was a very polite and well-brought up young man. His father was a professor of French literature at the University of Salvador; his mother was a psychoanalyst of the Lacanian tendency, which was very big in Bahia. She had studied in Paris with Lacan himself.
On the screen, a man drove a two-seater Mercedes convertible very fast up the driveway of a villa covered in purple blossom and walked up to the door. The man on the television wore a white suit of Italian design over a black T-shirt and a chunky gold necklace, and when he removed his large green sunglasses you could see that he was in a state of aflição emocional considerável.
Donna came rushing in, urgently calling out his name.
“I’m here,” Zezinho said, without taking his eyes off the telenovela, regretting that his moment of peace and quiet had been interrupted. On the screen, the man rang the doorbell and waited impatiently. A beautiful woman wearing a long, bright red evening gown opened the door. When she saw the man, her expression changed from anticipación alegre to hostilidade fria.
“Seb wants to talk to you,” Donna said.
“Merda,” Zezinho said, swinging his legs onto the floor. On the screen, the man and the woman exchanged glances in silence, and then the commercials started.
“Where?”
“In his cabin.”
“What this about?” Zezinho said.
“I don’t know. I guess you’ll find out.”
Then she went to fetch Murdo. She found him in his cabin, as usual, in bed, and playing cards with a Brazilian crewman named Florian.
“Murdo,” Donna said. “Seb wants you. Now. In his cabin.”
“Me? Why?” Murdo said.
“I ask myself the same question. You better hurry. It’s important.”
Murdo and Florian looked at each other, as if one of them could tell what this was about.
Donna stood over them with her arms folded as Murdo put his cards down and slowly got up.
“We’ll finish this game later,” Murdo said.
“OK, Murdo,” Florian said. “Good luck with whatever it is.”
“Whatever it is,” Murdo said.
Murdo followed Donna to Seb’s cabin.
Florian rubbed his chin and looked at his cards. Then he looked at Murdo’s, since he could, and he might as well.


Murdo entered Seb’s cabin. He had never been in here before. Seb and Zezinho were there already, sitting close together, Seb at his desk, Zezinho in a low chair beside it, with his knee juddering up and down. Murdo still had no idea why he had been summoned for this private meeting with Seb. Despite what Donna had just said to him, the fear persisted in his mind that he would be found out, thrown off the ship and handed over to the Brazilian police.
“Close the door, please, Murdo,” Seb said. “Find yourself somewhere to sit.” Murdo pushed the door, and it swung closed with a very loud, fine click, conspicuously sealing in this conclave from the corridor outside, and from rest of the ship’s company, and from the rest of the world. Performing this action made him feel responsible for what followed.
Murdo sat on Seb’s bunk, which was the only place left to sit. The bunk was covered by an antique Navajo rug. He was sitting on Seb’s bunk, the place where Seb slept. It seemed improper to be putting his bum here; accordingly, he sat on the edge of the narrow bed, which was less soft, and less private, and compelled him to lean forward, into the company.
Seb began to talk very fast.
They were approaching the Yururoa Reserve, he said, one of the largest indigenous reservations in Brazil. On its border lay a vast illegal gold mining operation, a large and well-established settlement called Nestoropolis. There were hundreds of gold miners at Nestoropolis. The mercury they used to extract gold from the soil poisoned the rivers and everything in them. Not only were the miners destroying the forest around them, they were starting to move into the Yururoa Reserve. The Brazilian authorities were ineffective in preventing any of this. Narwhal’s mission was to witness this devastation and hopefully end it. We will enter the camp and document this illegal activity and broadcast it to the world.
Seb’s eyes were closed as he spoke; occasionally his eyelids fluttered, as if his attention were directed inward rather than towards those whom he was addressing.
Then he opened his eyes and looked at Murdo.
“Reconnaissance is one of the most important elements in any campaign,” he said. “Another is infiltration. This is where you fit into this campaign. You’re a chancer, Murdo. You know how to find your way around. I want you and Zezinho to go to Nestoropolis, find out what you can about the place and then report back.”
“How long will this take?” Murdo said.
“Take as much time as you need,” Seb said.
“When do we go?”
“As soon as you can.”
Donna was furious at having been kept in the dark, but she kept her feelings to herself.


Chapter 9
DEATH’S HEAD RING

Posing as tourists, Zezinho and Murdo traveled from Gurupa to Santarem by passenger boat. The journey took five days. It was a creaky old wooden ship with open sides, painted white, with the ornate seal of the Republica Federativa do Brasil painted on the front to enhance its creaky dignity. They slept in hammocks on the upper deck, open to the breeze, and twice a day ate stew, beans and rice cooked by the pilot’s wife in a little galley in the forward part of the ship and handed out by her on chipped plates through the top half of a dutch door. They carried nylon hold-all bags which they held tightly during the day and used as pillows at night. The bags contained, among other things, a GPS receiver, a satellite telephone, and $10,000 in cash, half in US dollars and half in Brazilian reals. The money was to equip them for their mission and to cover them for any emergency, even chartering aircraft, if the need should arise. By day they read fat novels, squinting occasionally at the unchanging riverine vista that drifted by, and kept themselves to themselves.
They disembarked in Santarem early one misty morning, soon after sunrise, when the sky was yellow and white. Santarem is the nearest town of any size in the region to the gold fields of central Amazônia. It lies at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Tapajos, which branches to the south. Santarem is where garimperos -- gold miners -- come to equip themselves for their months of hard, muddy work in the jungle.
Zezinho and Murdo walked up the town’s main street, which ran alongside the river, and blended in with the garimperos promenading up and down. The miners walked in small groups, taking their time and enjoying the air, as if they were on some grand old European boulevard. Some were in town for the first time, preparing themselves for their first sojourn in the garimpo. Others were taking a break from the mines, and had come to town to sell their gold, to spend some money, and to drink in better bars where there were colder beers and better-looking prostitutes. Zezinho and Murdo were hungry and on the lookout for breakfast.
The miners strolled through the town, leaning on the counters of gold-buyers’ stalls, gossiping, learning about movements in the price of gold. It was on the streets of Santarem that one accessed the information network known as radio peão – peasant radio, bush telegraph, miners’ gossip. It was via radio peão that one learned where the newest mines were opening up, how much gold they were producing, who was working them, the state of demand for labour, who was in town squandering his money after a big gold strike, and who was broke and limping home in defeat.
It was here that you came to get a pump motor repaired; here that you would buy in bulk your food for the months ahead – sacks of rice, manioc flour, salt, beans, cooking oil, sugar, coffee, cases of beer and cachaça – and here that you would bargain for the credit with which to buy it. You could see men carrying the great sacks on their shoulders, and hefting them into the backs of pickup trucks. The shops sold cooking utensils, hammocks, kerosene, gas cylinders, radios, machetes, and pure mercury in one-litre flasks. The shiny, heavy liquid was highly toxic. It could kill you if you breathed in its fumes; it poisoned the rivers, it killed the fish and caused brain damage in Indian babies, because it entered the rivers and streams and contaminated drinking water. Of all the effects of garimpagem on the wilderness of Amazônia, this was the worst. Some mine bosses forbade the use of mercury, but gold mining society allows no absolute law about anything, and most miners ignored the rule. Mercury enabled miners to squeeze enough extra gold from the dirt to make the all the consequences of using it, to themselves and to everything and everyone around them, worthwhile.
Here, in the chemist’s shops, the pharmacists would inject you with a cocktail of vitamins for one real. Miners believed this would protect them from the diseases of the jungle. If it didn’t work, they would say, at least it didn’t do any harm.
After walking around for a while, Zezinho and Murdo entered a small waterfront cantina and ordered some food. Zezinho paid from a wad of grubby bills of small denominations; the big bills would attract too much attention. They sat at a wooden table to eat. Their table overlooked the main street; it was a good place to see what was going on. They studied the faces of the men that walked by, what they wore, how they walked. They needed to know how to blend in.
After breakfast, they bought what they felt they needed. Each bought a new set of clothing: jeans, boots, cheap t-shirts and baseball caps. Then Zezinho spotted a jewellery store and suggested they go inside.
“Miners all wear big flashy watches,” he said. The merchandise glittered behind steel mesh. Amidst the imitation Rolexes, gold medallions and bracelets, Murdo saw a chunky gold skull ring with ruby eyes. “A death’s head ring,” he said.
“That’s what I need. I’m going to buy it.” He asked the shopkeeper the price.
Zezinho thought it was an odd thing to want to buy.
“Three hundred reals.”
“That’s OK. I’ll take it. It’s a business expense.” Murdo put three one hundred real notes on the counter, and the shopkeeper placed the ring beside it. He gave Murdo a serious look, as if the transaction were not quite complete. Murdo thought that the shopkeeper was making sure he was serious about buying the ring, that he meant to say, It’s now or never. Make your mind up. But in fact he was waiting for silence so he could say something serious and important.
“The man who owned this ring was a diver at a garimpo. He drowned when a riverbank fell on him,” he told them. “He was my friend. He left a wife and four children.”
“What was his name?” Murdo asked.
“They called him Machado.”
“I will take good care of it,” Murdo said. “It will give me good luck.” He took the ring, and put it on the ring finger of his left hand. It was an ugly ring, but somehow it suited Murdo.
“Well, now at least we no longer look like tourists,” Zezinho said. “We look like garimperos.”

Then they got into a taxi and asked the driver to take them to the best hotel in Santarem. He drove them to the Hotel Tropical, a resort hotel some way out of town, with a swimming pool, cable TV and mini-bar in the rooms, a Chinese restaurant and an outdoor bar. They checked in and paid for their rooms in cash.
Their plan was to rest for a couple of hours, and then go back into town. Murdo opened the door of his room with his key-card and flung himself onto one of the room’s two double beds. The luxury was intoxicating, like a lungful of oxygen: he was alone for the first time in months. He took a bath and ordered a steak and a bottle of red wine from room service. It came in on a round wheeled table with a rose in a little vase. He watched CNN while he ate, finished the bottle of wine, and then took a nap.
When Zezinho came to his room in the evening, Murdo opened the door wearing a fluffy white toweling bathrobe with a towel wrapped around his head like a turban.
“Are you having a manicure too?” Zezinho said.
While it was still light, they headed back into town. The taxi left them on the riverfront promenade, and they joined the evening crowd.
At the opposite end of the promenade, Zezinho and Murdo found a beer garden. The sun had set, but the place was still empty. The owner was getting ready for the evening’s business as they entered. He swept the broken glass off the concrete floor, scraped it up and dumped it in a trash can, then turned on the string of coloured lights over the entrance.
“This place looks promising,” Zezinho said. They sat down, ordered beer, and waited. They wanted to meet people who could tell them about Nestoropolis.
As expected, the place soon filled up with groups of men. The volume steadily increased the more they drank. Zezinho and Murdo were the only ones sitting quietly; they were being careful not to drink too much. Eventually, a large, noisy group of four men colonized the table next to theirs and began to talk animatedly.
“Let’s listen,” Zezinho said.
Murdo heard someone mention “ouro,” the Portuguese word for gold.
“OK, as I suspected, they’re definitely miners. Let’s ask them about Nestoropolis.” Zezinho said after a while. “Let’s go.”
They went over to the table. They had just arrived in town, they said, and were looking for work in the mines, and asked if they could join them. The men were friendly, and unsurprised by the approach: that was how things worked. They invited them to sit down. Zezinho and Murdo took chairs, and squeezed in. Zezinho ordered a round of drinks and they began to talk.
There was plenty of work for diaristas, they said: the goldfields were booming. Some guys were making a kilo of gold a week (this was probably an exaggeration). A diarista was the bottom rung of gold mining. It meant a day-labourer: someone who worked for a daily wage, which didn’t change, regardless of how much gold was found. A diarista did the hardest and most monotonous kind of work, digging and hauling. If you did that for long enough, and showed some skill, and got on with the right people, you could become a porcentista. A porcentista worked for a percentage of the gold that was found. This meant that although you made much better money than a diarista, sometimes you didn’t make any money at all. You had to commit yourself to the mine for longer as a porcentista. A diarista could come and go as he pleased, and when he went he could be certain that he could at least leave with a little money in his pocket.
They knew about Nestoropolis. Zezinho said they were aiming to go there.
“Who do we talk to there?” Zezinho asked.
“You’ll have to see Rei Nestor,” the man beside him said, after draining his beer. “If he likes the look of you, he’ll take you. If he doesn’t, you haven’t got a cat’s chance.”
“Who’s Rei Nestor?” Murdo said.
“My friend, if you go to Nestoropolis, you’ll find out pretty quickly who Rei Nestor is. He’s the dono. He runs the place. Nothing happens in Nestoropolis unless Rei Nestor wants it to happen. That’s why he’s called rei – he’s the king of Nestoropolis. It’s called Nestoropolis because he is the king of it.”
“The dictator,” someone else said.

They flopped into bed in their hotel at two a.m., with the ceiling spinning around them.
“I don’t remember how we got back here last night,” Murdo said the next morning, hosting a pounding hangover. They ordered enormous breakfasts to fortify themselves for the journey that lay in store for them later that morning.
“You’d better eat,” Zezinho said, as Murdo listlessly picked at his food. “We don’t know when we’re going to eat again.”

Chapter 10
NESTOROPOLIS

They sat in the last two seats of an eight-seater Cessna propellor plane, gripping their cheap hold-all bags on their laps, posing now as gold miners. They were dressed more or less like the other men on the plane, which meant that no one paid any attention to them, other than to make sure, when they boarded the plane, that the strangers got in first and took the most uncomfortable seats at the back. The other passengers all knew each other; they were garimperos returning to Nestoropolis after a trip to town. They too were wearing new, or at least clean clothing. There was one woman on board, probably someone’s wife or girlfriend. She had big, bushy, piled up curly brown hair tied up with plastic trinkets. She had red lips and long, elaborately manicured nails.
It was a long, uncomfortable flight: three hours of roller-coaster flying from Santarem over monotonous expanses of green. Everyone was carrying a lot of luggage: it occupied all the available space, so that no one had room to extend his legs. A large radio CD player still in its box and with string for a handle was jammed between the two rear seats. The plane was dangerously overloaded. It heaved off the runway and into the air like an overweight Canada goose.
Zezinho and Murdo had agreed to talk as little as possible during the flight. They didn’t want to draw attention to their foreign sounding accents: Zezinho’s from the Bahia upper class, Murdo’s from God knows where, but not from Brazil. What business did a foreigner have in Nestoropolis? This at least allowed Murdo the solace of his own thoughts.
He looked with dread through the small window at his knee, and gazed down through the cracked plexiglass window at wispy clouds over featureless expanses of vegetation. It extended to the horizon in every direction. As they approached the Nestoropolis airstrip, the plane crossed a wide river. The water was pale green except where a pale sandbank swelled up and broke the surface. Beyond, and in all directions to the horizon lay an even, flat expanse of scrubby green forest.
He felt a sick thrill in his stomach as the plane tilted sharply to the left and spiraled downward towards the airstrip. From his window he could see directly below him, like a wound on the earth, a morass of poisonous orange ponds amidst patches of dead brown earth and burned trees. This was Murdo’s first glimpse of a gold mine.
The pilot, in his crisp white shirt, exchanged a burst of radio chatter with someone on the ground, confirming permission to land. Then the airstrip came into view, blindingly bright, rushing towards them – a wide strip of dirt within wider margins of cleared forest. There were wooden buildings at the side of the airstrip, and puddles of muddy water. The wheels hit the runway, and the plane slowed and stopped.
The passengers readied themselves to disembark, mentally adjusting themselves to returning to the hardscrabble life of the garimpo, to the malaria, the snakes and the fumes.

Rei Nestor had come to Amazônia twenty years earlier, fleeing from police in his home state of Acre where he was wanted in connection with a murder. He had stumbled upon panning for gold as a means of subsistence in the forest, and within a few years, through ruthlessness, skill, energy and good luck, had turned himself into the dono of one of the biggest garimpos in the region. Nestoropolis was now a small town. Rei Nestor imposed his will on the miners who worked there by a mixture of shrewdness, commercial acumen, physical energy, and intimidation. He was a copper-haired cafuso, a mix of African and Indian blood, six foot three inches tall. He was reputed to have killed four people. The first was a man from his own village he suspected was cheating him; the next two were Indians. The fourth was a mistress who had left him for another miner. Rei Nestor never denied any of this.
He was also one of the richest garimperos in Brazilian Amazonia. Although he rarely left Nestoropolis, rumour held that he had a house in Rio, a house in Sao Paolo, and a family in each, and a private plane with its own bar, a round double bed, and gold-plated taps in the toilet.
Rei Nestor was eating his lunch when the plane landed. He saw it descend to the treeline and then disappear below it.
The plane came once a week, and Rei Nestor always knew exactly who would be on the plane and what it would be carrying. Nothing happened in Nestoropolis that he didn’t know about. He knew that today, besides bringing a box of explosives and detonators for clearing forest, the plane carried two newcomers. They were greenhorns looking for work. Rei Nestor knew this before the plane even took off. The other passengers were old hands returning from leave and one bar girl who had been visiting her family up in Manaus. This woman, Marilene, was also the town’s representative for Avon cosmetics: Rei Nestor had set her up in business with a loan. He had received the information about the passenger list by radio telephone through the courtesy of a friend at the airstrip at Santarem.
He was sitting where he usually sat at this hour, at the head of a long wooden table in his garden. The garden was a patch of swept dirt beside his house, shaded by papaya trees, with a huge smoking churrasco some distance away, a barbecue stove made from a halved oil drum on welded steel legs. Every day, Rei Nestor would sit here and have his lunch, which was cooked for him and served by Raimundo, his cook.
Today Rei Nestor was eating barbecued monkey. It was unusual for a garimpero to like game. In his early years in the forest, before he made his first gold find and became a miner, Nestor had made a living hunting jaguars for their skins. He had to shoot whatever meat he ate, and he had retained a taste for it, especially monkey. He had a freezer full of them: mostly capuchin monkeys, in their frozen state looking like little black mummies, with bared teeth and their delicate human-looking hands folded politely under their chins in the attitude of prayer. When he wasn’t able to go out into the bush with a group of hunters he would send someone else instead to get the monkeys for him. He also liked sloth, peccary and caiman when he could get them, though the growth of the mine in recent years had scared the game further into the forest.
He ate beans and rice with his monkey, and farinha, and a mug of chichi, an Indian drink made of maize that was something between soup and beer. Like his fondness for bush meat, this was considered an eccentricity in a gold miner. The usual attitude among garimperos was to despise anything to do with the Indians, and in particular to consider anything Indians ate or drank to be particularly disgusting and unfit for human consumption. These tastes reflected Rei Nestor’s Indian background, and his years living in the forest as a lone fur trapper. Aware of the miners’ attitudes, he preferred to eat this kind of food alone. On Sundays, when he invited his foremen to lunch at this table, Raimundo would cook beef on the churrasco, and they would drink beer. Rei Nestor knew what they would eat and what they would not, and he did not impose his preferences on them. While his liking for Indian food was no secret, he never told anyone what he used to eat when he was unable to find game: like the Indians, in lean times he would eat grasshoppers, tree grubs and spiders. But he had no need to eat that kind of food any more, now that he was rich.
When Rei Nestor had finished eating, Raimundo took away his plate. Rei Nestor sat and waited. His head was shaded by the waxy dark green leaves of the papaya trees that overlooked his table; occasionally a beam of warm sunlight illuminated his woolly brick-red hair. (Its colour was the result of childhood malnutrition. As a child in an impoverished settlement in Acre he had been given the nickname “Vermelhito,” meaning “little red.”)
Rei Nestor got up earlier than everyone else. He knew more than anyone else. He made sure he was the first to know about any development, and he used that knowledge to his own advantage, for the sole purpose of remaining the unchallenged ruler of Nestoropolis. (The name of the place arose first as a joke among the garimperos, a joke which Rei Nestor did nothing to discourage. It soon stuck, to the extent that it now appeared on official maps.) Rei Nestor wanted to make sure that he was the first person the newcomers met on their arrival. Getting to them first ensured that they came under his influence from the start, that they should see no one else a source of aid or advancement. They would be convinced beyond doubt that Rei Nestor was their true friend and protector, and also the man to fear more than any other. Rei Nestor was always alert to the possibility that a rival might emerge from among his unruly men, and build up his own group of supporters. That was one thing that Rei Nestor was determined to avoid. As boss of the mine, he did not actually own it, in the normal sense of legal ownership of property: the land they were turning into a mass of poisoned, mosquito-infested pits belonged to the state -- on paper, at least. There were very few men working here that he even directly employed.
His pre-eminence was due to a small number of tightly connected factors: first, he had a certain historic authority as the founder of the mine, the man who had made the first gold strike while panning for gold in a stream, while living alone in the forest like an Indian. This was the sort of respect one gave to the oldest building in a town: no one dared to tear it down, even if its existence had no material value on its own. This certainly gave him an advantage, but he knew that it could be swept away in a moment if conditions changed. Having been poor once, he did not want to be poor again.
It was to Rei Nestor that the miners turned for loans of money and spare parts, and on him that they depended to settle disputes, although Rei Nestor also knew when not to intervene, to let men sort themselves out. Rei Nestor made sure there was meat to eat at the end of the day, even though it was outrageously over-priced, and that the canteen had adequate stocks of rice, beans and cachaça. This was ‘a lei do garimpo,’ the law of the garimpo -- which was another way of saying organized anarchy.

“Raimundo, bring me my satellite phone. It’s on the passenger seat of the pickup,” Rei Nestor said.
When the satellite phone arrived, Rei Nestor opened it up on the table in front of him, entered a number, and waited for the connection. He was calling the pilot of the plane, which had now come to a stop in the middle of the dirt runway.
“Hey, Arturo, how are you? How was the flight? Listen, those two new boys on the plane. I want you to send them over to me right away. Tell them I want to see them before they fall in with any bad company, you know? I’m at the house. OK. No, wait a minute. Arturo? You still there? Tell them to wait with you by the plane. Don’t let them go anywhere. I’ll send Raimundo in the truck to pick them up. OK.”
Foremost in Rei Nestor’s mind when he summoned Murdo and Zezinho for an audience, having barely set their feet on the ground, would be to see how, if at all, they would fit in. It would take him only a minute to make his judgement. If he thought they were nitwits, he would make sure that they were on the next plane back to Santarem before anyone had even noticed they had been here.
By now, the plane had landed. Zezinho and Murdo had disembarked and were standing on the hard, level ground of the airstrip looking around at their new surroundings. There was a line of low buildings at the edge of the airstrip, behind a barrier of scrubby trees: that was downtown Nestoropolis. A throng that had gathered around the door of the plane welcomed the returning passengers while the captain and another man unloaded the luggage and cargo from the plane. Murdo noticed that one of the boxes was marked ‘explosives.’ Then a battered white Toyota pickup arrived, crazily driven, caked in red dust, no license plate. It braked sharply, skidded to a halt, and a man jumped out, waving to the two newcomers towards him.

The white pickup bounced along the rutted road of dried mud, kicking up a cloud of brown dust behind it, and then stopped at Rei Nestor’s porch. Rei Nestor studied the two newcomers as they got out of the truck. Both were looking around warily. They’re shit scared, Rei Nestor thought. Well, that’s not such a bad thing.
Raimundo brought them over to the house, and then waited in the driver’s seat for nothing in particular, staring blankly into the middle distance.
Still sitting at his dining table, Rei Nestor waved them towards him. He didn’t invite them to sit down. He stretched his legs under the table and slumped down comfortably in his chair while they remained standing. He drilled thoughtfully into his left ear with his index finger and looked with a discerning frown at the result. After discarding the deposit on his fingertip, he glanced over at Murdo and Zezinho.
“What are you boys doing here?” Rei Nestor asked.
“We want to work in the mine,” Zezinho said. “Can you give us work?”
He studied them with a suspicious squint.
“You guys don’t look like you have ever worked in a mine before. Have you?”
“No.”
“What about your friend?”
“No,” Murdo said.
Rei Nestor chortled sourly to himself.
“Where are you from?” A polygraph test would show they were now lying. Murdo could feel the explosion of sweat inside his shirt, which instantly became prickly in the heat.
“We’re from Manaus,” Zezinho said. “We were working at the Coca-Cola bottling plant, and got laid off. We thought we’d try our hands at mining. Find some gold. Make some money.”
Rei Nestor looked at them. He could tell without much difficulty that they were lying, though that didn’t necessarily disqualify them. He judged them to be chancers of some sort: maybe thieves or drug addicts; he couldn’t tell. One of them had an accent he could not identify, while the other one could hardly speak Portuguese. Still, they looked smart enough, though not too smart, and physically fit. If they stole anything, he wouldn’t get involved; he’d let the men take care of them. They would do, he thought, but it was best not to make things too easy for them right from the start. Maintaining a formidable demeanour now would keep them in line, and make them grateful to him later when he eased up on them. In the long run, he depended on the good will of the men who worked here.
“No vacancies,” he said, after a while, and then stood up heavily. This was not what they were expecting to hear, although they feared it might happen. He ambled slowly into the house, leaving them alone.
“What’s he doing? Where’s he going?” Murdo said.
“God knows. What the fuck do we do now?” Zezinho said.
A dismal panorama of failure unfolded in Murdo’s imagination. How were they going to carry out their assignment now? Did this mean that they had been dismissed, that they would have to get back on the plane to Santarem? The plane they had come in was beginning to load passengers when Raimundo had arrived to pick them up; it would probably be gone by now. When was the next one? Next week? In two weeks? What would they say when they got back to the ship?
They heard a toilet flush inside. Then Rei Nestor returned. He stood in the doorway buckling the belt on his trousers, then put his hands on his hips.
“Hey, Raimundo,” he called. “Come over here.”
Raimundo swung his legs out of the pickup and approached, with a mystified look on his face.
“The new barranco. They don’t need anyone there, do they?”
Raimundo had no idea, and he said nothing. He knew this was an act, but he couldn’t tell what part he was supposed to be playing in it.
Then he addressed Zezinho and Murdo. “There is no work in the mine, but I need some men to build a bridge. If you two want to work as diaristas, I can try you out for a while. But that means you’re on a wage, you don’t get a percentage. Ten reals a day. If you fuck up, you’re out of here. There’s only one rule here: if you steal, you are dead. There are murderers at a garimpo, but no thieves.”
He paused for effect.
“OK, let’s show you around. Raimundo will drive. Raimundo!”

Nestoropolis had grown so much over the years since Rei Nestor began to expand his gold mining operations that it now had a population of about three hundred people. Although everyone who came here was attracted by the expectation of making a fortune out of gold, not everyone who lived here was a gold miner. There was a general store, a hotel, a mechanic, half a dozen bars, even a police station.
The presence of a policeman was Rei Nestor’s concession to the state. He had resisted the pressure for as long as he could, but once the population grew to a certain size, the state government had insisted. So now Luiz, a lone officer of the state police, lived here with his family. He worked out of a one-storey shack on the town’s single main street that contained a radio telephone, a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet and not much else, and zipped around on a small Honda motorcycle. There was a faded map of the world tacked onto the wall, O Mundo, which helped put the fight against crime in Nestoropolis into a global perspective. Next to the office was a crude jail: a single windowless room with a padlock on the door. Here Luiz would put people who were guilty of breaking the law. In Nestoropolis, this meant being drunk and disorderly in the street or in a bar, fighting, stealing from the store, or dealing drugs in a particularly indiscreet way. Anything more serious was dealt with by the miners themselves, either by arbitration, which in severe cases was conducted by Rei Nestor himself, or by beating the accused to within an inch of his life. The presence of Luiz had resulted in a reduction in the level of petty crime; Rei Nestor was so pleased with the positive contribution Luiz was making to the quality of life in Nestoropolis that he had recently begun to pay the officer’s salary.
They drove from Rei Nestor’s house towards the main street of Nestoropolis, a distance of a few kilometers. The center of town was a strip of ramshackle single-storey wooden buildings joined together by an overhead tangle of power cables, connected to haphazardly functioning electricity generators. The pickup splashed through deep, mud-filled potholes in the dirt road. Signs painted in big capital letters hung off the storefronts: Hotel Ouro, Bar Ouro, Bar Rio. There were a couple of stalls where miners would sell their quantities of raw gold. Rei Nestor ordered Raimundo to stop outside the general store. It had a long counter facing the street, and behind the counter, wooden shelves stocked with goods.
“This is where you get everything you need, food, tools, cigarettes, coffee, you name it. Booze. Cold beer.” He gestured towards it proudly. “You can come back here later. OK, Raimundo. Let’s go to the river,” Rei Nestor said, as if they were in a great rush. He always seemed to be in a hurry, even when there was no obviously imminent deadline. It was a habit he had developed; he couldn’t sit still; there was too much to do, too much to keep track of. The truck sped forward, barely missing a skinny brown dog that was lying in the middle of the road. Raimundo’s manic driving was a response to Rei Nestor’s restlessness.
The road came to an end where the trees stopped and the river came into view.
Raimundo stopped, and they walked to the bank.
“This is where you will work. I am building a bridge across the river here. There is a small group working on this. Nothing special, just logs across the river, but they have to be anchored in sand at each end. You can start tomorrow. Be here at six o’clock. Now let’s find you somewhere to sleep. Let’s see if there’s an empty cabin you can use.”
A row of wooden cabins with palm branch roofs stood some distance back from the road. “One of these was vacated earlier this week,” Rei Nestor said as they walked towards it across ground that had been churned up by heavy machinery.
“Watch your step.”
He pushed open the door. It was a one room cabin with a porch, and screens on the windows. Inside were two narrow wooden beds, a table with a faded tablecloth and two chairs. There were hooks on the wall for hanging hammocks.
“You can probably mess with the guys next door,” Rei Nestor said.
“Enchanting,” Zezinho murmured. He had come a long way from his parents’ gated compound in Salvador.
Rei Nestor gave them a missing-bicuspid smile, and then he was gone, hurtling off in his pickup back into town.

“What do you think?” Zezinho said.
“I’d like to say that I’ve stayed in worse places, but then I’d be lying,” Murdo said, watching a line of large black ants queue across the cabin’s wooden floor.
They went outside to look around. The landscape was flat and bare and the sun was fierce and oppressive. The harsh brightness hurt Zezinho’s eyes; he had forgotten to bring sunglasses or a hat. On the horizon, a white haze blurred the boundary between land and sky. Here and there in the distance a line of green showed what was left of the forest that surrounded them: a wide, irregular circle that had been expanded further and further in the twenty years since the area had been claimed by settlers.
Across the river, a long way away, the forest resumed. If you went into the forest and kept going in that direction for a long time, you would eventually enter the Yururoa reserve. Its boundary was unmarked except on maps.
There was nobody else around. The men who occupied the other cabins were at work in the barrancos that surrounded the town. They came home in the evenings to eat and sleep, and left for work before sunrise.
With the rest of the afternoon to kill, Murdo and Zezinho decided to go into town to buy supplies. They walked back along the road on which they had ridden in Rei Nestor’s pickup. They walked quickly and in silence. An uneasy mood hung over them, a nervous feeling that someone was watching them, that they would be found out, and unmasked as impostors.
“God, what a dump,” Zezinho said, before immersing himself in a long brooding silence.
At last he broke out of it and said, “Do we have any anti-malaria drugs? We’re bound to get malaria out here.”
This irritated Murdo. “No, we don’t,” he said. “Anyway, it’s snakes you have to worry about.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Now Zezinho was irritated. Neither spoke again until they reached the town.
A few people were walking around. The tables outside the bars were empty, and the police station (Delegacia de policio) was closed. They found the general store: a long wide counter open to the street under a wooden awning.
Here a miner was buying supplies. “Cigarettes,” he said, and the weary young man behind the counter silently fetched a carton from the shelf behind him. “Sugar. Two flasks of mercury. A machete.” After setting these things on the counter, the young man looked at him awaiting further orders.
“That’s it.” The clerk made a calculation, and stated the price. The miner pulled a twist of brown paper out of his pocket, and poured some gold dust onto the pan of the scales on the counter. The clerk checked the weight and gave the miner a worn banknote as change. The miner shot a sideways glance at the two new customers, and left.
The clerk turned his attention to Murdo and Zezinho.
“Yes?” he said curtly.
He looked at them with a blank expression, neither greeting them nor showing any curiosity, although in a small place like this he was bound to notice that they were new faces. They asked for some biscuits, some bars of chocolate, two large bottles of water, and eight tins of sardines. The clerk took their money and gave them their change without a word, with a mute economy of movement. The transaction could not have been more anonymous if they had been buying from a vendor at a railway station in a huge metropolis.
“People mind their own business here,” Murdo said.
“Good,” Zezinho said.
They returned to their cabin and ate their meager supper. They lay in their hammocks as night fell, listening to the return of their neighbours from work. Cooking fires were lit in the darkness, and the savoury smell of grilling meat wafted into their cabin. The smell made them hungry.
Their first night in Nestoropolis was long and uncomfortable. Every noise awoke them, and was followed by a long wakeful wait as they listened for the footsteps of intruders emerging from the infinite raging of nocturnal insects: some expected, imaginary bandit who would rob and murder them. A wheezy coughing coming from a neighbouring cabin seemed to go on all night. The coughing only stopped an hour before dawn.

The next morning, they showed up for work at the river bank, joining a gang of six others and a foreman.
“Do you have tools?” the foreman said. He was disgusted when they said they did not, but one of the men lent them shovels. “You have to buy your own tools,” he said sternly.
They spent the day hacking into the river bank, cutting a notch for the logs that would form the bridge.
The bridge was part of Rei Nestor’s plan to move into the Yururoa reservation. Just over the border, the soil was gold bearing, while the yields from the mines around Nestoropolis had been declining in recent months. If the gold gave out completely, Nestoropolis would be finished. The garimperos would leave, and he would be left as the king of a ghost town. He wanted to get started at the new site as quickly as possible. It was illegal, of course, but they were a long way from anywhere out here, and he knew that the Indians who lived in the reservation would do what Indians always did when mining began in virgin forest: they would move away and stay away. Also, the presence of gold bearing ground didn’t remain secret for long out here. Rei Nestor was determined to get in there first, and to be in control of the area by the time the inevitable gold rush began. He didn’t want a fofoca – a gold rush -- to happen that he wasn’t involved in.
His strategy had two parts. First, build a road from Nestoropolis into the reserve. Second, set up a small mining operation inside the reserve. Rei Nestor would equip a small group of men and supply them with air drops. When the road was ready, he could move in on a larger scale.
Rei Nestor told them none of this. Although they didn’t know it yet, Zezinho and Murdo were now a part of Rei Nestor’s plan. But Rei Nestor did not know that he was now part of Narwhal’s plan. Zezinho and Murdo had now successfully infiltrated Nestoropolis. When the time came, they would contact the ship and the action would begin.

At the end of the day, the men in their work gang invited Murdo and Zezinho to share dinner with them. They sat on the porch of one of the neighbouring cabins and ate beans, rice and stew, which one of the men cooked on an outdoor stove.
“We take turns cooking,” a man called Caetano said. “And everybody buys food. You can get some meat tomorrow.”
Murdo was eating out of an enamel dish; he was famished. While he was wolfing down his stew, Caetano noticed the ring on his finger, the death’s head ring.
“I recognize that ring,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“I bought it in Santarem,” Murdo said.
“You bought it? Where did you buy it?” Caetano said suspiciously.
“From a gold dealer.”
He grabbed Murdo’s hand to look at the ring, to make sure it was the one. Murdo pulled his hand away.
“That was my brother’s ring. He was murdered,” Caetano said.
“No, he wasn’t, Caetano,” someone said. “Leave him alone.”
Two months ago, Caetano’s brother had died in an accident at a mining operation far north of here, on a branch of the Tapajos river. It was a raft-based operation known as a balsa, used for removing the soil from the river bed. It was dangerous work: men would work underwater, gripping a plastic hose in their teeth which fed them air as they hacked free the potentially gold-bearing soil which would be sucked up and put through a sifter. Machado, Caetano’s brother, had been digging into a riverbank when it fell on him. The men on the raft tried to pull him out, but could not without risking their own lives. The body was found by Indians a week later, ten miles downstream, wedged into rocks. It was negligence, but it wasn’t murder. Another man took Machado’s place and the mining continued.
Caetano was a thin, sinewy, worn-out man in his fifties, much older than the average miner. He had been working in the gold fields of Amazônia for thirty years, on and off, and had spent every cent he had ever made. All he had to show for his years of labour was a mouthful of gold teeth, and even with them he still looked like he could use a visit to a dentist.
“That ring was made from the first fifty grams of gold my brother found in Amazônia. He had it made himself, it was his own design.”
“Why did he want a skull?” Murdo said.
“He knew garimpagem was dangerous.”
Murdo pulled the ring off his finger and gave it to Caetano. He didn’t need any more bad luck.
Caetano accepted it with a nod, but said nothing. It was better to say nothing.

From then on, Caetano made an effort to help Murdo and Zezinho every way he could. He took it upon himself to offer them a continuous explanation of how Nestoropolis worked: who to avoid because of a bad temper, who wouldn’t turn you down if you asked him to lend you money, what kinds of fruit you could eat from the trees, what kind to avoid. It was mostly useless information, but it was kindly meant. He always took their side when the foreman yelled at one of them when he made an honest mistake, or spent too much time leaning on his shovel.
One night after supper, Caetano explained to them why they were building the bridge.
“They say that there is a lot of gold on the other side, way into the forest in the Indian reservation. Rei Nestor is going in there as soon as he can. If he does that, I am going with him. He has promised me I can work as a porcentista soon, but he won’t tell me when. Whenever I ask him, he says, It will be very soon, Caetano, I promise you, I won’t let you down. He keeps saying that, but he never says any more. I think as soon as this road is built, we’ll be in there, and we can start making some money. I’ll make sure you’re in there with me. You helped me, I’ll help you. That’s how it works out here.”
Alone in their cabin that night, lying in their hammocks, Murdo and Zezinho discussed what Caetano had told them.
“He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about,” Zezinho said.
“He’s been here a long time. He seems to be pretty close to Rei Nestor,” Murdo said.
“You know what this means, don’t you? It won’t take long to finish that bridge. They’re bringing the logs tomorrow. There can’t be more than a day’s work after that until you can drive trucks across it. Once the bridge is made, Rei Nestor can move in,” Zezinho said.
“You’re right,” Murdo said. “I think it’s time to call the ship.”


DOLPHIN SPIRIT

Back on the NV Narwhal, a caboclo paddled up alongside the ship in a little wooden canoe. This brought a number of spectators to the rail, looking down at the shirtless brown-skinned man and his tiny boat, which he propelled through the water with a large wooden paddle shaped like a leaf. He was carrying an enormous bony-headed grey fish about five feet long. It was so heavy it weighed the boat down dangerously close to the waterline. With a broad smile he made it clear that he wanted the people on the Narwhal to buy this magnificent fish.
Seb was keen to buy it, and after some haggling over the price, threw a rope ladder over the side for him to climb. With the fish bagged up in a net that he slung over his shoulder, the man climbed up and heaved the fish onto the deck. It must have weighed a hundred pounds. With a wave and a blessing, he dropped back into his little boat, having stuffed a wad of fifty reals into the back pocket of his shorts, and paddled back to his house on the riverbank, singing a prayer of thanks to the Virgin for enabling him to command such an outrageous price for a fish.
Seb was delighted too. It was a pirarucu, an absolute monster of an Amazônian fish. With its bony head and vise-like jaws, it looked ancient and chthonic, like some creature from the time of the dinosaurs. It had big, coarse, stony scales that were covered in slime, and a flat shovel nose. They were fairly common fish, even in the larger waterways, although there were people still alive who remembered when they were twice the size.
“Roberta? Where’s Roberta?” Seb called out.
“Here I am,” she replied reluctantly. Roberta was the ship’s cook. She had joined the throng that gathered to see the fisherman and his catch. She was, as ever, wearing her apron. She was so devoted to her work that she rarely ventured out of the galley.
“Here, help me carry this into the kitchen. Can you cook it?”
“What? That? I’m not cooking that. I’m not even touching it. I’m a vegetarian!” she screamed. She was frozen and furious, and stood with her arms tightly clenched around her, indignant at the request.
“Roberta, this is one of the great delicacies of the Amazon. It will feed the whole crew. We can have a feast! We have rice, don’t we? That’s what you have with it. I know it looks ugly, but it has the most wonderful delicate flavour. You marinate it for a couple of hours in lemon juice and tomatoes and onions. It’s delicious!”
Her refusal was absolute, though Seb hadn’t yet noticed, hoping to win her over by the sheer force of his enthusiasm. She had cooked vegetarian food on ecological expeditions all over the world for ten years. Even on a base in Antarctica, where she had to know how to cut a squelchy tomato into twelve exactly equal portions. She wasn’t about to compromise her principles now. She was shocked that Seb had dared to ask her.
“I’m not touching it, Seb. Don’t even ask me. You know I don’t eat anything with a face.” The fish had a face of sorts.
Seb looked around for someone else to help him, and a pair of willing crewman’s hands appeared. Roberta anxiously followed the fish as it was carried into the galley, her galley, violating its vegetarian sanctity. They dropped it on the chopping block in the middle of the tiny space. Its head and tail hung precariously over the edges. It looked like it was about to flop onto the floor. It smelled wet and muddy and alive, even though it was obviously dead.
“I don’t like killing things!” she protested again.
But Seb wasn’t going to back down from his insistence that she do what he asked her to do.
“Look, what is your problem, Roberta? You’re supposed to be the cook on this cruise. So cook!”
“I’ve told you. If you want to eat it, you cook it. I don’t even know what to do with it. I haven’t ever cooked a fish, and this thing doesn’t even look like a fish!”
Seb’s face went red. There was a pause, and then he exploded. “Roberta, do you know what you are? You’re a bluestocking. You’re like some kind of uptight nun who blushes if somebody so much as farts in your holy presence. If you don’t rethink your attitude, you’re going to have a rebellion on your hands. We can’t eat salad and tofu every fucking day. Look, here’s a knife. I’ll show you how to scale it.”
“Don’t touch my knives!” She had a row of good knives on a magnetic strip on the wall.
“Come on, look. This is how you do it. Get out of the way. I’ll do it if you won’t.”
Without saying a word more, Roberta tore off her apron and stomped out, ending the argument. Doing his best to look as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened, Seb set about scaling the fish, which turned out to be harder work than he expected. He cut the thumb on his left hand quite badly while gutting it, and had to get a bandage. Then he threw the guts overboard, and watched as they were devoured in seconds by piranhas.

For the first time on the cruise, that night’s supper was not prepared by Roberta. Once Seb had cleaned the fish, he prepared the marinade, cut the fish into thick steaks, and soaked it in the marinade in large stainless steel bowls. He made a huge pot of rice, and when it was six o’clock everyone sat down to a feast. No one wanted to say so, out of loyalty to Roberta, but everyone enjoyed the change of menu. The mood was festive, and the tables in the mess were littered with large bottles of Antarctica beer.
“I feel like we’re finally in Brazil at last,” Seb said, and there was general agreement. There were compliments about the marinade, and about the flavour of the fish, which was snowy white, and tasted a bit like cod.
Roberta was the only member of the crew who was not present. She remained sulking in her cabin, eating a large bag of Japanese rice crackers, and only appeared again later in the evening once she knew that all the pots and dishes had been washed and put away.
After dinner, in the lounge, Donna said, “Let’s write a poem.”
People were surprised. They hadn’t done this kind of thing for a long time on a Narwhal campaign.
“What do we write a poem about, Donna?”
“Write a poem about someone in the crew. It will help us to communicate with each other, get things out in open that need to be in the open. Everyone writes a poem, and then we’ll read them out.” She tore pages from a pad and handed the sheets of paper around. They cast about for pencils and pens; then they concentrated on their writing and silence fell again.
After ten minutes, Roberta indicated she was ready to share her composition with the group.
“Roberta, who have you written a poem about?”
“My poem is about Seb.”
Donna looked up warily. “Would you like to read it?”
“OK. Here it is.

Seb is a friend of mine
Although you wouldn’t think so.
He looks at me in disgust
Even when he is not looking at me.

When I go to sleep at night
In my noisy bunk, even with my eyes closed,
I see Seb’s gaze drilling into me
As if I were a piece of wood clamped to a workbench
And he was making an ashtray out of me.”

Roberta folded up the piece of paper, stood up and put it into the back pocket of her jeans and then sat down again. No one said anything for a moment.
“Like Sylvia Plath,” said a little piping voice, trying to be helpful.
Everyone seemed a bit embarrassed by the poem, except Donna, who was determined to keep the ball rolling.
Florian, who was rolling a cigarette, snorted derisively into the little ball of tobacco he was stretching out along a folded cigarette paper cantilevered in his left hand.
“Wouldn’t it catch fire if it was made out of wood?” he said, with a smirk, as if talking to himself, but loud enough for all to hear.
Donna ignored the interruption. Or rather, her face hardened, determined to show without saying so that that kind of intervention was uncalled for.
“Why did you choose to write it in blank verse?”
“Because I couldn’t think of any rhymes,” Roberta said. “It’s not very good, is it?”
“What do you think it tells us about us, and about our mission?” Donna said. “What do you think we can learn from it?”
A long pause followed. Roberta sat hunched forward, with her forearms jammed between her knees, looking at the floor. Another silence.
“OK, well, what do you think it tells us about her feelings about Seb?”
“I think it’s pretty damn clear,” Florian said.


When Desmond came off watch early the next morning he went down to the lounge, hoping to get a cold drink from the refrigerator before he went to bed. Then he would sleep until lunchtime. To his surprise, he saw a slightly built caboclo of about thirty years of age asleep in an armchair. He wore a faded Lula t shirt and a pair of swimming trunks and flipflops, and there was a piece of orange coloured string around his neck. His skin had the warm colour of wood. Genetically, he was Indian. Fifty years ago, a man like this would have been wearing feather arm bands and speaking an incomprehensible Indian language; in the intervening generations he had lost all his Indian vocabulary and acquired a European language. He woke up with a start when Desmond appeared. Desmond recognized him as the man who had sold them the big fish the previous day.
He said something to Desmond which Desmond could not understand.
“Sorry, pal, I don’t understand you,” Desmond said.
The man grunted and rolled his eyes. Forgetting about the refrigerator, and wondering what this visitor might want, Desmond went down to the galley and made a cup of instant coffee, which he carefully carried upstairs and gave to the man. The caboclo thanked Desmond, took a sip and discreetly put the cup aside. He had silently climbed the side of the ship from a canoe as the sun was rising, and found his way in.
The visitor sat in restrained dignity on the edge of his chair while Desmond left to find Florian, who would be able to understand him.
Murdo came back with Florian, Donna and Seb, who were curious about this visitor. Florian sat beside him, and listened to what he had to say. He was requesting something in a tone of urgency.
As always, Donna was suspicious of unexpected visitors. But she found this one interesting.
“I can’t understand everything he says,” Florian said. “He says he lives in a village near here, and his daughter is sick. She’s been sick for a long time, and they don’t know what to do with her. He asks if someone can go and have a look at her.”
“It seems like a reasonable enough request,” Seb said. “Tell him that we have no doctor on board, but we have a first aid kit and some medicines. We’ll come and take a look and do what we can. What’s his name?”
“His name is Dionesio.”
Dionesio was grateful and relieved when Florian told him they would do what they could to help him. He clasped Florian’s hand and held it for a long time. Florian extracted himself from the man’s grasp, and told him that they would do what they could to help.
Dr Kilhuth was the only person on board who had experience of forest medicine, so he, Donna, and Florian (who operated the inflatable) rode out to the man’s village. Donna held the first aid kit tightly as the boat bounced over the water.
From the river, all they could see of the village was a wooden boardwalk with a shack on it. They tied the boat to a log piling and climbed onto the dock. From there a path led into the forest. They crossed a stream by walking over a log and found themselves in a circle of small wooden houses in a clearing.
Dionesio’s house was surrounded by a kitchen garden and shaded by guava and mango trees. A mangy brown dog, tethered by a rope to a tree trunk, lay on a patch of worn dirt. It opened its eyes as the visitors arrived, judged them as presenting no cause for action, and went back to sleep. Inside the one-room house, a large crucifix hung on the wall, surrounded by faded colour prints of saints in ornate frames. A chest of drawers supported a collection of religious objects: thick candles, a statue of St Lazarus on crutches, his bare legs covered in wounds and sores, a framed image of a weeping Jesus exposing a bleeding Sacred Heart. An old shotgun lay propped up against the wall, beside a neat pile of cooking pots and an oil lamp. A machete with a wooden handle hung from a nail on the wall.
At the far end of the room, a dark glow of colour in the gloom, a little girl in a dirty red dress lay in a hammock. Her dark brown eyes were open; she stared at the wooden boards of the ceiling. Dionesio held her hand, and spoke to her gently, then beckoned the party of visitors to approach.
Dr Kilhuth ventured forward; the others looked on from behind him. Her right leg was white and swollen below the knee. Her foot looked like an ugly balloon. She was silently enduring her pain and her fear, too weak to cry or whimper.
“What happened to her?” Dr Kilhuth said.
Dionesio muttered an answer.
“She was bitten by a stingray,” Florian said.
Dr Kilhuth was astonished. Stingray bites were common in the forest. Treating them was something that every caboclo knew how to do.
“Have you given her anything?”
“He says they prayed over her.”
“Prayed over her?” Dr Kilhuth saw the religious objects on the chest of drawers, but an indoor shrine was typical. You could find this in any caboclo house. It was strange not to attempt any kind of treatment, not even a traditional remedy.
He said to Donna, “They should have soaked the leg in hot water immediately. Now they’ve let it get infected. This is crazy.”
“Ask him if he tried jergón sacha. He’ll know what that is.”
“He says they are forbidden to use herbal medicine.”
“Forbidden? Who forbids them?”
“He says his prophet forbids him.”
Dionesio stood by the sick girl’s hammock with an expression of glassy-eyed, abstract dignity, expecting nothing of the visitors, it seemed, other than that they should witness the grim miracle of the child’s sickness. Why was she wearing what looked like her best dress?
“Tell him his daughter is going to die if we don’t do something now. I’m not a doctor, but it’s clear that we can drain the wound and put a dressing on it and give her some antibiotics, and that will at least give her a chance. How old is she?”
“He says she’s six years old.”
“Where’s her mother?”
“He says she died. He looks after her on his own. They had other children, but they all died too. There’s just the two of them.”
“Florian, take him outside and talk to him. Try to explain to him what we have to do. Just keep him out of here for ten minutes. Tell him we’ll pray over the girl or whatever the hell he wants. Just give us enough time to do something.” Dr Kilhuth spoke in a quiet and deliberately expressionless tone, so that Dionesio could not detect the urgency.
Florian took Dionesio by the arm and led him outside. Dionesio accepted the request without protest.
“Is there something with a blade in that box?” he asked Donna. She opened it and found a scalpel.
“I don’t know where to cut,” Dr Kilhuth said. “I don’t want to cut any blood vessels.”
“Don’t,” Donna said. “You can’t just cut into her. You might kill her.”
“Do you have a better idea? I’ll kill her if I don’t cut into her.” He held the blade over the leg, hovering indecisively. The girl flinched, and started to cry.
“That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have let her see it. Donna, hold her legs and try to calm her down.”
Donna held the girl’s feet and tried to speak soothingly to her, although the words that came out sounded abrupt and peremptory.
Dr Kilhuth pressed the blade against the calf, where the bulge was biggest. The blade was razor sharp. It cut the taut skin like rubber. A jet of yellow pus spurted out of the wound, and blood poured out and dripped through the hammock onto the dirt floor. Dr Kilhuth kept cutting, with his hand covered in blood and pus. The wound gaped open as the cut lengthened. Blood and pus gushed over her leg, and then the flow stopped.
The girl stopped whimpering. Surprised by the absence of pain, she observed the process curiously. The pus gave off an earthy smell.
“I think that’s it,” Dr Kilhuth said. “It’s done. Now let’s clean it up and put a bandage on it.”
They wound a bandage around the little leg, which had resumed its normal size. Donna pushed a tablet of penicillin out of a plastic blister pack and placed it between the girl’s lips, imploring her to swallow it, which she did. Then she sat up. Donna found a jerry can of water, poured some into a metal cup, and gave it to the girl to drink. She sipped it, and then drank the whole thing.
Donna and Dr Kilhuth left the girl in her hammock, and went outside to look for Dionesio. They found him, Florian and another man sitting on the porch of a neighbouring house. Dionesio was looking down at the ground.
“I’ve found out more about what’s going on here,” Florian said. “This is Dionesio’s brother. His name is Bartolomeu. He’s been telling me.”
Bartolomeu wore a tattered straw hat and had a wispy beard. You could see in his features a family resemblance to Dionesio, the same Indian-looking flat face and high cheekbones, but he had a noticeable presence of mind and air of capability that his brother lacked. Dionesio immediately deferred to him when Bartolomeu started speaking, and remained silent, suggesting that Bartolomeu was the responsible one in the family, although by the look of him he was probably younger.
“He says that Dionesio’s wife died three years ago, and Dionesio had what we would call a kind of breakdown. He went a couple of times to a crazy church in a neighbouring village. The preacher calls himself a prophet, and imposes on his members all sorts of crazy rules. It’s more like a cult. No one else in this village belongs to it, and people think he has become very strange.”
The church that Dionesio belonged to was called the União do Espírito Ethereal, a cult that drew together elements of Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, the African Umbada religion of north-eastern Brazil and the original mystical ideas of the cult’s founder, an illiterate rubber tapper who assumed the title Master Amos. Master Amos had a series of visions that convinced him that he was the bearer of an original divine revelation that had been given to the Amazônian Indians ten thousand years ago, but had been forgotten until it was partially revived in the teachings of Jesus. He travelled throughout Amazônia to spread his message, and developed a following among the rubber tappers and other impoverished caboclos of Amazônia. His preaching taught a vision of heavenly plenty that lay in store for those who followed the rules he set down, which included abstinence from medicines of any kind apart from a single hallucinogenic plant, an arduous prohibition in a land where sickness was a daily fact of life for most people. After he died, his followers organized themselves into individual churches, each presided over by a preacher who called himself prophet, and carried on the teachings of Master Amos. The cult was a cry of pain for the hardship and isolation endured by most of those who live in the forests of Amazônia.
“Anyway,” Florian said, “Bartolomeu says that they are very grateful for what you have done for the girl. We’ve told them that we’re ambientalistas, and about Narwhal, and about our mission in Amazônia, and they think it’s a great idea, and they support us 100 percent. He says that a few of the men in the village have worked in the garimpos at one time or another, so they know what we’re up against. They all had bad experiences, or came away broke. He says that there is a big dance here tonight, and we’re all invited to it, the whole crew. He really wants us to come.”

Seb liked the idea of the party and thought it would be a good idea for everyone to go, so Donna went around the ship telling people the plan. Desmond and Florian prepared two inflatables, so that there would be enough room on a boat for everyone who wanted to go without having to make two trips. Everyone was delighted to be going ashore. It would be good to have a break. There was an atmosphere of excitement on the ship as people got ready, took showers, put on clean clothes. At one point the hot water ran out, and Desmond had to reset the hot water heater to replenish the supply.
Donna went into the galley to persuade Roberta to come to the party. She knew Roberta wouldn’t agree at first, and that she would need special handling. She preferred to hide in the kitchen on occasions like this, and pretend that she had pressing culinary chores to perform. She liked being on her own when everyone else was away, and would use the hours of quiet to re-impose order in the galley, which she saw as her private realm, and which was constantly under threat of being overrun by the forces of chaos in the course of its daily use and abuse by members of the crew, who always made a mess, never cleaned up after themselves properly, as they were supposed to according to the rules of the ship, despite her regular testy reminders, always left the tops off things, never put things back in the right place, always ate things they weren’t supposed to eat, and always left knives lying around, which was both dangerous and bad for the knives.
“So, Roberta, are you coming to the party? There’s going to be music, and dancing.” Donna said.
“No, I’m not coming,” Roberta said, as if that were the end of it.
“Oh come on, Roberta. It’ll be fun. When did you last have a beer? It will do you good to get out of the kitchen for a while.”
Roberta fidgeted with the knot on her apron, then grabbed a cloth and began wiping the surfaces. She didn’t look Donna in the eye.
“I can’t,” Roberta said. “I’ve got things to do.”
“What have you got to do? Come on!”
“I have to clean the extractor fan.” she said. The extractor fan was caked in greasy black grime. It was very high up, right below the ceiling, and she would have to stand on something to reach it. It was a job she had been saving for a moment like this. It would be too distracting to do something like that with people coming in and out all the time. It was a dirty job, but if she were left alone to do it slowly and quietly and in her own way, without anybody telling her how she ought to do it, it could be almost soothing. She really was looking forward to it.
“Oh, shush, Roberta. Can’t that wait? You’re always stuck in this galley. Don’t you think you deserve a break? You have to stop being so hard on yourself. You’re making yourself miserable.” Donna was trying to be kind, but this sounded harsh and accusing.
“You don’t understand!” Roberta flared up. Her face went red, and now she was staring at Donna with wide-open eyes glassy with fury. “You don’t know what I go through every day in here. You don’t know how much there is to do, all by myself, with no help. You try being me, just for one day! Try it!”
“OK, OK, Roberta, I’m sorry. Look.” She now spoke in a gentler tone. “If you come to the party, I’ll stay with you, I won’t let you be left alone. If you want to come home early, I’ll come with you. Two inflatables are going, so it will be easy to leave whenever you want to.”
Roberta relented, pouted, and resisted no more, and when the time came to assemble on the deck to board the inflatables, she was there with the others, hanging back but definitely there, ready and at least nominally willing, wearing a clean t-shirt from one of the past Narwhal campaigns. It depicted a rare species of freshwater fish, whose survival was endangered by plans to build a dam on the river that was one of its few remaining habitats.
The night was beautiful. The reflection of the few pale electric lights of the village played on the peacefully moving water, and a cool breeze blew. The mosquitoes had not yet come out, and the clouds of small invisible flying insects that charged the air of day had disappeared. The ship lay at anchor. Only the captain would remain on board, playing chess on his laptop computer while he kept vigil on the bridge.
Bartolomeu was standing on the dock when the two inflatables from the MV Narwhal arrived. He was waiting for them with his arms folded across his chest, listening patiently for the sound of their engines to come around the bend in the river. He helped them climb up onto the dock one by one, and when everyone was ashore and the boats were tied up he led them into the village. They walked in single file through the trees, in darkness.
They could see coloured lights through the forest, and hear the rhythm of a generator. The village had one diesel-powered generator that produced electricity for a couple of hours in the evenings. Then the hundred or so people that lived here would turn on their radios and televisions and an electronic cacophony would fill the air, competing with the birds and monkeys and invisible insects. Tonight, because of the dance, the generator would run all night.
The dance took place at a school, although there was little to suggest as much, as the building they filed into had no walls, so the spirit of school that was baked under the pitched roof during the day had had time to evaporate into the cool air. Coloured lights hung from the eaves. The generator, which stood beside the building, also powered a refrigerator. Bartolomeu opened it and took out bottles of cold beer – estupidamente gelado – mind-numbingly cold – and passed them around to the guests.
People began to appear from out of the darkness, like moths to the light. Florian spotted Dionesio, and they shook hands, although Dionesio’s mood was as somber as it had been earlier in the day. Then a man with an accordion entered – it was a huge, ornate instrument – and began to play noodling notes, and on that signal two other musicians came and stood on either side of him, one with a round drum held vertically in front of his chest on a strap around his neck, and another with a triangle. With a nod from the accordionist, they let loose a flood of music, a kind of foxtrot, but nothing like any of the crew had ever heard. Suddenly the party started. The forest disappeared, the village disappeared, the hardship disappeared, memory disappeared, and it was as if everyone had jumped on a vast swirling carousel that wheeled through the warm night on a wave of joy. The sound created an instant bond between the hips and the heart. It was impossible not to want to dance to it.
A cluster of rickety tables and chairs had been set up beside the building, and the Narwhal people set up base here. Florian was content to sit with his beer and watch the throng multiply. It seemed strange that so many people had materialized. Where had they come from? It was only a tiny settlement. Soon he noticed that a steady trickle of people were arriving on the path. Somehow word of the party had spread up and down the river, and people were arriving in boats and canoes, tying them up in a tangled mass to the village dock.
The dance floor had a magnetic force which drew people into it. Those who had not yet been sucked in hovered on the edge, poised to fall at any moment. Donna and Roberta stood shoulder to shoulder on the fringes of this force field. Donnna was keeping her promise to stay close to her. Donna noticed that Roberta had tied her hair back into a pony tail with a purple velvet band, which surprised Donna: she had never seen her wearing such a thing. Usually she used a rubber band. Neither of them spoke as they watched the dancing partygoers and absorbed the hypnotic, bubbly music.
So far so good, Donna thought, noticing that Roberta was even swaying slightly to the beat: I think she’s enjoying herself.
“Do you want a beer?” Donna said.
“OK,” Roberta said.
“I’ll be right back.” That was a good sign too.
Roberta nodded, but did not speak. Her attention was elsewhere.
Among the figures in the dancing crowd, there was a tall man wearing a white suit and a wide-brimmed hat. He was right in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by people, but he stood out because he was taller than everyone else, and he was the only one wearing white.
Roberta studied him, at first only so she could assemble a mental picture of the whole person that she saw only in fragments and flashes between the dancing bodies. His face wasn’t visible because it was covered by the brim of his hat. But she began to notice that he was subtly, but entrancingly handsome, and he danced beautifully, like an angel. She looked at him and looked away, but her gaze always returned to him, until at last she clearly realised two things, which gripped her like a predicament -- sudden, disorienting, and frightening. The first was the sensation that his beauty had soaked deep through her body; and the second was that she wanted to dance with him, even though she hardly knew how to dance at all.

When Donna re-appeared with the beers she was amazed to see Roberta in the thick of the dance floor, dancing with a tall, thin man in a white suit. He was holding her right hand and twirling her around.
“Well, I’ll be darned,” Donna said.
Feeling that she had done her duty, and that she could now leave Roberta on her own to enjoy herself, she joined the Narwhal group at their table. Bartolomeu was with them, sitting beside Florian.
“Have you seen Roberta?” she asked Florian. “Look, she’s dancing.”
“Yeah, I see,” Florian said.
“Who is that guy?” Donna said.
“I have no idea. He’s strange looking, isn’t he? Bartolomeu, do you know that man over there who’s dancing with our friend?”
Bartolomeu stood up and looked.
“I’ve never seen him before,” Bartolomeu said, sitting down again. “But I know one thing about him.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s not a man. I mean, not a man in the normal sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“She should be careful,” he said thoughtfully.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“He is a Dolphin.”
“What do you mean, a dolphin? I just see a guy in a white suit.”
Bartolomeu closed his eyes, and rubbed them, took a deep breath and let it out, while he thought about what he was going to say.
“You know, you hear a lot of stories out here on the river. Some of them are just superstitions, stories that people tell at night. I don’t believe them myself, because I am not superstitious. My brother, Dionesio, is completely superstitious. He’ll believe anything, which is how he got mixed up with that crazy church. But I’m not. But I think what they say about the Dolphin is real.”
By now Roberta and the Dolphin had disappeared into the crowd, although now and then they could see his white hat bobbing among the heads of the dancers.
“What do you mean, Bartolomeu?” Florian said.
Bartolomeu spoke with hesitation, as if he had never explained this to anyone before.
“You look at that wide, brown river, and what do you see? How deep can you see into it? Sure, you can see fish, but they’re near the surface. You see, the river is very deep, and where it is deepest and widest there is another world, and that is where the Dolphin lives. The Dolphin is an enchanted being, an encande. He looks like a fish, but he is part man. Don’t ask me how or why he became enchanted, because I don’t know.
“All I know is that although he lives in a beautiful world under the river, he is not happy. He wants to become a man, and live on the land like we do. For this reason, he is attracted to mortal women. He can’t help falling in love with them. It is his weakness. He comes to dances like this to find a woman – he is attracted by the music, he can hear it as he swims in the river – and when he comes ashore he changes from a fish into a man. Then he finds a woman, and seduces her.
“The Dolphin is always an amazing dancer. He begs her to come with him to his enchanted world at the bottom of the river, and describes its splendour to her, so that she wants to go with him as much as he wants to go with her, because by this time she has fallen in love with him too. But it is not real love, you know, it is television love, the kind of love you see on television. For not only is the Dolphin handsome, but the pockets of his suit are stuffed with dollars. They rush down to the river together, and dive in. The Dolphin’s clothes melt away from him and he turns back into a fish. He expects that the same will happen to the woman, that she will turn into a Dolphin too, and join him at the bottom of the river, but she doesn’t, because she is not enchanted. And she drowns.”
“That’s a fantastic story,” Florian said.
Bartolomeu bristled at this.
“You don’t understand, Florian. It is not a story. I told you, I am not superstitious. This is a fact. Let me tell you something. Last year, a young woman from this village disappeared after a dance. The next day, her body was found ten kilometers down the river, trapped under a submerged log, naked. She had been seduced by a Dolphin.”
“How do you know it was a Dolphin?” Florian said.
“People saw him at the dance. My own brother saw him. He was wearing a white suit, just like this one is wearing now.”
Bartolomeu had more to say.
“If you don’t believe me, why do you think he is wearing a hat? You watch him. See if he ever takes off his hat. If your friend over there who is dancing with that man were to take off his hat, he would disappear in a flash and she would never see him again. You know that Dolphins have a blow hole in the top of their heads that enables them to breathe, right? Well, when the Dolphin is in human form he still has the blow hole. He wears the hat to hide it. If you were to take off his hat – and he will do all he can to protect his secret, to protect his identity – you would see the blow hole in the top of his head – here,” he said, and he touched the top of his head, at the fontanelle.
“What about the place at the bottom of the river?” Florian said.
“It is the most beautiful place on earth,” Bartolomeu said. “People live in mansions, with marble floors and chandeliers. There are beautiful pictures on the walls, in gold frames, and the rooms are full of elegant furniture from France and England. And everyone is extremely well-dressed. The men wear finely tailored suits, and expensive watches, and the women wear jewellery and gowns, and exclusive perfumes. They eat at dining tables with silverware and linen tablecloths and napkins. They don’t eat their fish from a single pot on a dirt floor, as we do here.
“It is a world of plenty and luxury. There are servants who carry around silver plates of fruit. Nobody has to work. They have every comfort you could think of: videos, washing machines. The men drive fast cars and the women sit on sofas all day, eating chocolates and watching television.
“But they are prisoners down there. They have no freedom. The Dolphin must always return to that place. And so, despite their riches, they envy us.”
“So your friend should be careful. You should keep an eye on her, and don’t let her leave,” Bartolomeu said.
“I’m going to wait fifteen minutes, and then I’m going to go up to him and grab his hat,” Donna said emphatically, and took a swig of her beer. “If he’s really what you say he is, he’ll run away.”
“What if he isn’t?” Florian said.
“If he isn’t, then I won’t believe the story,” Donna said.
“How do you know what this enchanted city looks like?” Florian asked Bartolomeu.
“Some people have been there and come back to tell about it. For instance, there is a man in a village upriver from here who has been there. He is a sacaca. Do you know what that is? He is a man who can cure people by treating their spirit. He has spiritual power that other people do not have. He met a female Dolphin, and she brought him to the enchanted city, and he saw it. He didn’t drown because he is a good swimmer and can hold his breath for long periods. One night he disappeared at a dance. No one could find him. The next day they found him asleep on the river bank. He had spent the night in the enchanted city with the Dolphin.”
“But he escaped.”
“Yes, that’s right. But he was very sick for a long time after that.”
After fifteen minutes had passed, Donna got up and resolutely approached the dance floor to look for Roberta and the Dolphin. She spotted them at the centre of the crowded area, closely surrounded by people. She pushed her way through, until she could see them. They were dancing very close together: the Dolphin held her right hand in his and held her tightly around the waist with his left. Roberta’s forehead was resting tenderly against his chest. I hate to break this up, she thought. She also wanted to have a good look at this so-called Dolphin.
His back was to her, and she was now so close that she could see the material of his suit, which was shiny and translucent, with a kind of mother-of-pearl lustre. It seemed more like a natural skin than a man-made fabric. The hat was of the same material.
“Roberta – hey, Roberta,” she said, reaching for her shoulder. “We’re going home.” Roberta’s expression changed from dreamy contentment to fright, as if she had been woken roughly from a deep sleep. Donna saw the Dolphin’s face for the first time: it was as white as his suit. His features were boyish and delicate, and he looked at her in wounded surprise with penetrating blue eyes.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Donna said to the man, as politely as she could, considering what she was about to do. “But would you mind taking off your hat?”
Just as she was reaching up to grab the hat, she hesitated. At that moment, a huge and very drunk man barged into her and grabbed her by the arm, in a clumsy and noisy attempt to get her to dance with him. He implored her in slurred Portuguese while Donna did her best to shake him off. While Donna’s attention was distracted, Roberta and the Dolphin vanished through the crowd, into the turbulent darkness, like a blob of mercury.
She lost them. Bearing in mind that she had not seen which way Roberta and the Dolphin man had gone, and that the sweaty oaf who had sought a place on her dance card was still visible, looking at her lustfully and probably preparing himself for a fresh attempt, she saw no other option but to retreat.
She went back to the Narwhal table, and sat down beside Florian.
“I don’t know where they’ve gone,” Donna said, in defeat.
“Don’t worry,” Florian said. “Let’s wait for a bit. She’ll be back.”
“I suppose so. I nearly got his hat,” Donna said.
“You think he was going to take her to the underwater city?” Florian said.
“No, I guess I didn’t. But he looked very sinister.”
At midnight exactly, Roberta emerged from the darkness behind them, alone.
“Where have you been?” Donna said. “We were so worried!”
“I’m all right,” Roberta said, collapsing into a chair, catching her breath. The music was still pounding. Her face was flushed, and she had lost the little purple velvet band that held her pony tail in place. Her hair was disheveled; she pulled leaves out of it, and plucked bits of grass from her tongue.
“What have you been doing?” Donna demanded.
“Never you mind,” Roberta said, smiling to herself. Then she said, “I’ll tell you later. Not now.”
Donna gave Roberta a puzzled look. “Did he try to take you down to the river?”
“No,” Roberta said. “I don’t think so. He didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Portuguese.”
They rode back to the ship, while the party was still in full swing. Roberta sat beside Donna in the inflatable, not speaking, gazing wistfully back at the lights of the village.
That night, Roberta dreamed of a dolphin swimming through the water. It looked like an ordinary dolphin, but it was wearing a red silk sash with her name on it in gold letters. Waking at sunrise, she thought, He is trying to contact me.
Roberta was usually the first person on the ship to get up in the morning. She would go straight to the galley to prepare breakfast. But today, she stayed in bed, remembering her dream, and the events of the night before. Breakfast that day was chaos. Without Roberta’s oversight, everyone fended for themselves, and made a terrible mess. At ten o’clock, Donna went to Roberta’s cabin to check on her. She heard her tumble out of bed, fumble across the floor and turn the lock on the door.
Donna shouted through the door. “Roberta, are you all right?”
“Go away!” Roberta shouted back. “Leave me alone.”
Everyone assumed Roberta had a hangover, so they let her be. She emerged at noon, rousing herself from her bed to prepare lunch. She was still wearing the same t-shirt and jeans she had worn to the dance, having evidently slept in them. Ignoring the mess in the kitchen, she threw together a bizarre meal in about ten minutes, and then retreated to her cabin, again locking the door.
The crew assembled for lunch and found an array of pots and tins laid out in the galley: an enormous can of corn, and a large bowl of salad made of leftover okra, lime jell-o, and cold macaroni.
“What’s wrong with Roberta?” Seb asked, confronting this weird meal. He was speaking for everybody.
“She’s sick,” Donna said, pushing the stuff around her plate. She couldn’t bring herself to eat any of it. Nor could anyone else. A stunned silence prevailed, and the meal concluded in about five minutes.
After lunch, Donna went back to Roberta’s cabin, and once again found the door locked. Through the door she told Roberta that she could stay in bed for as long as she needed to, and that the crew would share out the cooking until she felt well enough to resume her duties. Donna waited for a reply, but no reply came. I’ll check up on her later, Donna thought.
That night’s supper was prepared by a committee of crew members. They explored the freezer, and found a cache of frozen chicken pieces and some ancient bags of french fries. A gallon jar of barbecue sauce was discovered. Florian and Desmond cooked it, making a great show of their culinary talent. Everyone judged the meal a great success.
When Roberta emerged two days later, she was ravenously hungry. She dashed to the refrigerator, pulled out the large metal bowl of leftover salad and devoured all of it, shoveling it into her mouth with a salad spoon. She found a one-kilo tin of baked beans, and ate the entire contents, straight from the can, cold. At the back of the refrigerator was a birthday cake that someone had taken from the freezer to defrost. It was covered with pink frosting and chocolate sprinkles. Although it had not completely thawed, she ate that too, crushing the frozen lumps of cake with her molars. Then she took a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola that she found on the shelf in the door of the refrigerator and emptied the bottle in a few long gulps. Finally, she made a loud burp.
She still had not changed out of the clothes she had worn to the dance; nor had she washed or taken a shower or even brushed her hair. Still, she seemed to have recovered sufficiently from her illness, whatever it was, to resume the preparation of meals, although with a feral gleam in her eye, and with a noticable drop in attention to cleanliness and culinary hygiene. She didn’t bother to keep the galley clean and tidy any more, and it became a mess.
The style of her cooking changed too. She seemed to have reverted to the style of cooking that she had known before she became a vegetarian, as if a part of her brain that had lain dormant for many years had suddenly come back to life. The conscientious, high-fibre regimen that had formerly guided her cooking, making each meal a kind of lecture in high-minded self-sacrifice, now gave way to white trash cooking, high in tempting cholesterols, rich in meat and junk food sauces, and so hot and spicy with weapons-grade chilli that it made your eyes water and steam come out of your ears. On her first night back at the stove, she cooked chicken-fried steak with fried eggs and mashed potatoes, drinking straight from a bottle of vodka as she worked.
While the crew tucked into this unexpected feast, she stood in the doorway of the galley, with her hand on her hip, taking swigs from the bottle of vodka, retreating occasionally to eat mashed potato (with butter and Velveeta cheese) out of the pot, and spoonfuls of grease from the pan.
“Way to go, Roberta! Bravo!” someone shouted from the mess, and a great cheer went up. Roberta laughed, and brushed the sweaty hair from her eyes.

The change in Roberta was no temporary aberration, no flash in the pan. It went on for days. Her return to the white trash cooking of her pre-vegetarian youth continued, but now took a further turn in the form of a craving for fish. It was spurred on by the appearance alongside the ship of a caboclo in a canoe offering for sale a basket of live catfish. Roberta rushed to the side of the ship and bought the lot, and impatiently hauled it aboard. She lugged the basket of wriggling, slimy, translucent gray fish – all with gawping mouths and waving barbels -- into the galley and began to gut and clean them with frantic speed. With her biggest knife, she sliced open their squirming bellies. Soon she was covered in the blood and guts of catfish. The guts piled up on the counter and spilled out onto the floor, which became so slippery and red that no one dared enter the galley. She no longer cleaned up after herself as she cooked; the galley began to attract flies, but Roberta seemed not to even notice them. But the meal that night was terrific: catfish fillets fried in cornmeal with hush puppies and cole slaw. It was as if they were sailing the Mississippi and not the Amazon. The state of the kitchen was becoming a cause for concern, but no one was complaining because of the change in her cooking.
She began to stink of fish. When she was not cooking or eating fish, she was at the side of the ship, gazing into the muddy brown water, looking for more fish. Even in the middle of the night, those who were on watch would notice that Roberta was always there, leaning over the rail, staring into the water, watching the surface, as if she were waiting for something to appear.
She was keeping vigil there because strange dreams kept her awake. As soon as she fell asleep, the same dream came back: a white dolphin swimming through the water, wearing a red silk sash with her name on it in gold letters. She could read the letters clearly through the water.
The message of the dream was always clear, though wordless, and always the same: the call of the lover trying to make contact again with the beloved. The dream caused her such distress that she feared to sleep. By day, she was a wreck. Then she cut herself deeply on the thumb of her left hand with a knife while furiously gutting fish. Her hand had to be bandaged, and the bandage soon grew damp and filthy, and then of course she developed an infection, which had to be treated with antibiotics. Once again, she took to her bed, incapacitated and unable to cook and running a high temperature. The catfish nights were over.
Seb seemed as interested in the Dolphin as Donna was, Donna thought: the spirits of the Amazon were invading the ship. He could tell that Roberta was under some kind of spell, a condition that he accepted as familiar and normal. He was especially interested in the possibility of Roberta’s visiting the Dolphin’s underwater city, and wanted to encourage it. He couldn’t say this to Roberta directly, however, because despite her state of enchantment she was still refusing to talk to Seb, or even be in the same room as him, because of the episode with the pirurucu, even despite her conversion to the eating of fish.
Seb said to Donna, “What you should do is keep your eye out for dolphins. We’re bound to see some in this part of the river at some point. They’re a common species. There are two types: white ones and pink ones, which are smaller. If you feed them regularly, they will learn to stay close to the boat. Then you take her out in an inflatable, and see if you can get close to one of them, and see what happens. Can she swim?”
“What do you mean?” Donna said. “In case she sees a Dolphin and jumps in after it?”
“Sure,” Seb said with a shrug.
“What if she drowns?” Donna said.
“She won’t drown,” Seb said.
Donna thought this was a callous thing to say, but she didn’t say anything.
Sure enough, by keeping an eye on the river they soon noticed the shiny white of a dolphin’s back just below the surface of the water, and then several more, until it was clear they were being accompanied by a complete pod.
Desmond and Florian launched an inflatable, and carefully loaded Roberta, limp and feverish and barely able to climb down the ladder, into it, along with a bucket of fish. Then they motored out into the water and got as close to the centre of the pod as they could. The dolphins were unafraid of humans, just like in the TV programs. They were smaller than everyone expected, about four feet long. Roberta lay listlessly in the bottom of the boat as Florian threw fish into the water. The dolphins snapped them up. Soon the boat was surrounded by dolphins, raising their heads out of the water and opening their mouths. Now all you had to do was toss the fish into their mouths. Pretty quickly the dolphins worked out that all they had to do was rear up out of the water, hold their mouths open, and wait for one of the humans to throw a fish into it.
“Look at this,” Florian said. “They’re so intelligent. Roberta, do you want to try this?”
Roberta slowly sat up, and looked at the dolphin heads that were bobbing out of the water, opening and snapping shut their mouths. They seemed to be smiling, with clever, ironic, cheeky expressions on their faces. She could see the blowholes on the tops of their heads.
“They’re cute,” she said. But there was something eerily human about them too: their glossy white skin was the soft, pinkish white of a white person’s flesh.
She reached into the bucket and picked up a fish by the tail. It was a piranha: its powerful jaw was set in an ugly frowning grimace. (They were easy to catch.) One of the dolphins rose up out of the water and opened its mouth, hovering in place, waiting to be fed. She leaned over the side of the boat to get a good look at it. She wanted to get as close to the dolphin as she could. Just when their two heads were only about two feet apart, the dolphin belched. The belch was deep and human-sounding, and smelt incredibly foul. The gust of its disgusting odor made Roberta retch. She tossed the fish into the dolphin’s mouth, and it disappeared below the surface.
“Phew, that stank,” Roberta said, sinking back in her seat.
“Yeah, they’re known to have acute halitosis. Didn’t you know that?” Florian said.
“I didn’t, but I guess I do now. Yuck!” Roberta said.
When all the fish had been eaten, the dolphins swam away, and they saw no more of them. By the time they returned to the ship, Roberta’s enchantment seemed for the moment to have been broken.

Back on the ship, Nina decided that she had had enough of being an environmentalist, and wanted to go home. Seb took the news calmly. She wouldn’t be missed, he thought. He even gave her a signed copy of Green Shiva, and arranged for Florian to take her to Itaituba, where she would get a charter flight to Manaus, and then a Varig flight home.
She spent her remaining hours on the Narwhal in her cabin, packing very slowly. She stayed away from supper. While she was gathering together her clothes and other belongings and packing them into her backpack, she opened the drawer where she kept her underwear. There it was. Her watch. She gasped with relief and put it on.
When Donna came in, Nina said, “Look,” and held up her wrist.
“You found it,” Donna said.
“I don’t think I found it exactly,” she said. “I think it came back.”
“Hm,” Donna said. “I still don’t understand that.”
Florian and Nina were up and ready before sunrise, while all but the captain were still asleep in their bunks. Nina drank a cup of sweet milky coffee in the galley, washed her cup for the last time, dried it and hung it carefully on its hook. Then she climbed down the ladder into the damp inflatable, and Florian pulled the cord to start the engine. The sun rose and raised an orange mist on the calm water. Nina listened to the sounds of the jungle for the last time, a deep, rhythmic musical universe that she would forever associate with remorse.

Chapter 11
KILHUTH’S IDEA

Dr Kilhuth had come to his senses a few days after taking the watch, in a spasm of guilt and anxiety, and discreetly put it back where he had found it. He was convinced that Murdo had seen him.
Indeed, some days before, Murdo had seen Kilhuth entering Nina and Donna’s cabin. He was coming off watch that night and had seen Kilhuth at the end of the corridor, slowly turning the door handle. Having seen Kilhuth’s treasure chest, he knew what Kilhuth was up to.
Murdo had felt from as soon as he came onto this ship that there was something more than just a little strange about Dr Kilhuth. Now he knew why, though his instinct told him to keep it to himself. For now. His mistrust of Kilhuth increased to the extent that he felt sure that if anything bad happened on this strange ship, Kilhuth would be at the root of it.

Months earlier, alone with Seb in Seb’s campus bungalow, with a map of the Amazon basin spread open on the table between them, Dr Kilhuth said, wagging his index finger over a wedge of green, “This area, for instance, is interesting.” He was pointing to a region of hundreds of square kilometers in size to the east of a southern branch of the Amazon.
“It is highly unstable. On one side you’ve got an enormous indigenous reserve, nominally protected by the federal government. On the other, dotted throughout the forest, are countless gold mining settlements, some big, some small. They are all illegal, although nothing has ever been done to control them. Each one is like a pirate ship: a group of men who live to plunder their immediate surroundings for gold. They are lawless, but governed by their own code, usually under the command of a single strong leader. Bands of outlaws working for a common cause. Politically, they can be seen as perfect anarchist collectives.”
He knew Seb would find that last fact interesting.
“One of the largest settlements we know about is called Nestoropolis. It is a little town of about two hundred people. It is right on the border of the Yururoa Indigenous Reserve. We have long feared that Nestoropolis might be planning to extend its operations into the reserve. If this were to happen, the result would be catastrophic. Gold mining kills everything it comes into contact with. The miners clear huge areas of forest, kill and disrupt wildlife, and maintain hostile relations with the Indians. They poison the rivers with mercury and other toxic wastes. This poisons the fish, which in turn poison the Indians who eat them. Already there are alarming rates of birth defects among indigenous children.
“So let’s go after Nestoropolis,” Seb said. “Great idea.”
But Dr Kilhuth had another thought in mind that he didn’t share with Seb. He wanted to return to the Yururoa reserve with an ardour that was unbearable. From the moment Seb put to him the outline of a campaign in Amazonia, the thought of returning seized him like a virus, invading him and commanding him to act. He lay awake every night with sweaty hands as the notion turned him over and over in bed, elaborating itself in his mind, demanding his submission.
“Not only is this reserve one of the largest in Brazil, it is one of the most interesting, from an anthropological point of view. It is inhabited by an Indian people -- the Yururoa -- who have had very little contact with outsiders. It is thought that there are a number of groups that have never been contacted. We only know of them by hearsay.
“I know of a settlement in the Yururoa reserve that we might visit. It’s called Jepewe-teri, which is also the name of the people who live there. Levi-Strauss refers to them, though he was there in the 1940s, and their numbers are believed to have greatly decreased since then, mostly through disease, malnutrition and resettlement. I mention it because a former colleague of mine was working on his dissertation there at the same time I was working on mine. I believe he may still be there. He would certainly help us.
“His name is Frank Taylor. He probably knows more about the Yururoa than anyone on the planet. He’s a specialist in Indian religion and magic. He came to Amazonia to research the Yururoa for his PhD. He was supposed to spend eighteen months on his fieldwork and then come back to write his dissertation. He never finished it, and that was ten years ago. We haven’t been in touch for many years, but if he’s still there, we’re in luck. I know he’d sympathise with our cause, because it’s quite compatible with the one to which he has dedicated his life.”
“What are they like, these people?” Seb said.
“Normally, they’re not very friendly.”
“Why not?”
“They haven’t had very good experiences with outsiders -- apart from Frank, of course, but it took him a very long time to get them to trust him. By the time he arrived they had been decimated by European diseases, to which they have no natural resistance. The only useful thing as far as the Jepewi-teri are concerned to come out of contact with the white man has been that they now have guns, which they are now very keen on. They had a reputation as very good shots, I recall, and have pretty much abandoned bows and arrows. This has meant that most of their traditional hunting land has been depleted by over-hunting with guns.”
Seb listened carefully as Dr Kilhuth spoke. When he had finished, Seb said, “Jac, this is a terrific idea too. But I need to think about it.”
That was good enough for Dr Kilhuth, for now. He was confident that he had won this round.

Chapter 12
LUISAO

On the day they set off for Nestoropolis, the Narwhal activists rose at four, an hour before sunrise. The air was silky and warm. Seb led the group in lowering the two Zodiac inflatable boats from their davits on the deck into the water. Then they climbed down a rope ladder with their supplies: jerry cans of fuel, tents, food, camping equipment. Once they had stowed this in the boats they covered them with a plastic sheet. The heavily-laden boats floated close to the waterline.
Desmond sat at the stern of the lead boat and operated the outboard motor. He was happy to be out of the engine room, and to be out in the field of action at last. He still felt a grievance against Seb for choosing the newcomer Murdo for the reconnaissance job, but chose to repress it for the sake of the campaign. In the excitement of their pre-dawn departure he realized that he had forgotten to go to the toilet before getting into the boat, and that he needed to go now.
With an unpleasant buzz-saw scream the boat heaved across the water towards the shadowy mass of forest on the shore. Desmond left the choke on, which made the engine loud and throaty. No one even tried to speak; the noise drowned out their voices.
The journey was long, noisy and bumpy, and everyone was wet by the time they reached the muddy riverbank of the Yururoa reservation. Desmond gave the boat a final surge of power to send it onto the shore; it came to a jolting stop with its prow lodged firmly against a fallen tree trunk. The force nearly threw everyone out of the boat. Desmond had not intended to use the log as a brake but it had that effect.
Desmond cut the engine and stepped out of the boat. His foot sank past the ankle into soft, glossy, black mud. He pulled off his shoes and squelched through the mud up the bank, and dragged a thick branch alongside the boat for the others to use as a bridge onto relatively dry ground.
A streak of flame-coloured cloud opened up in the sky, pushing back the darkness and revealing a path of pale blue sky: it was like the parting of the Red Sea. The sun seemed to be rising directly over the river, while the forest remained covered in shadow.
The group stood on the bank looking down at the boat. As the light increased they could take in their surroundings: before them, the broad waters of the Rio Tocantins, where the MV Narwhal lay at anchor in the distance; behind them, thick, low, dense vegetation. Desmond stomped off and urinated against a root.
“Is this it?” Florian said, shivering and looking around.
“Is this what?” Desmond said.
“The rain forest. I don’t see anything.”
Indeed, the forest was silent and there were no birds to be seen, or monkeys.
“You probably have to go in deeper for that,” Desmond said.
While the others explored, looking for a way into the forest, Seb fiddled with the controls of a brand-new hand-held GPS receiver. “This will fix our location to within ten square meters,” Seb said. It took him some time to establish the connection with the satellite, but it worked.
Seb’s concentration was interrupted when Florian yelped in pain. “You were wondering where all the wildlife was? Well, I think it’s here, and trying to devour me,” he said. There was a red rash the size of a small coin on his forearm where he had been stung, though no sign of the insect that had bitten him.
Seb showed no interest in Florian’s discomfort. He unfolded a map on top of a backpack and studied their route. After a few minutes, he said, “We’re somewhat off target, but it’s all right. OK. This is what we do.”
They would take the boat back onto the river, and head north hugging the shore until they got to a small creek. They would turn down this and follow it for as far as it went. Then they would portage their gear and the boat overland for a short distance until they got to a small branch river, the Rio Moju. Nestoropolis was on this river. The journey was straightforward enough; the only wild card was the length of the creek and the distance they would have to carry their gear. They would have to camp for one or maybe two nights.
They climbed back into their boat, with Desmond once again in charge of the motor. By now the sun was up, and had dissolved into a cloudy white sky. The Amazon was more featureless, less colourful than Desmond had thought it would be.

The Narwhal Zodiacs headed north, bouncing along the water, hugging the shore, dodging floating clumps of water hyacinth, until they came to a muddy inlet. Seb signaled to Desmond to turn into it. This was their way into the forest. Desmond eased the throttle, and the boat’s speed and noise dropped as it skidded into a turn, splashing the opposite bank. Now they were in a dark green world. The creek was narrow, and the wake of the Zodiac, putt-putting slowly and cautiously forward, lapped at both banks. Everyone in the boat looked out anxiously for obstacles in the water: the density of fallen and rotting trees and branches spilling over from the forest broke up the boundary between the water and the land. This made progress hazardous.
If there was anything to see in this place, it couldn’t be seen through the tangled growth. The horizon around them was now drastically foreshortened: the furthest they could see ahead was the next bend in the creek. The air smelt of earth and rotting vegetation, and if you let your gaze linger in the middle distance you saw that the air was a kind of agitated gas, a rarefied speckled cloud of tiny flying insects.
“Sand flies,” Seb said. “They bite.”
Soon the occasional sounds of hands slapping exposed flesh, which at first simply blended in with the sounds around them, massed into an irregular percussion that claimed the foreground of everyone’s attention.
“These things are devouring me,” Florian said. The sand flies were devouring everybody.
They traveled all day, moving more slowly than they would have liked. The water looked like stewed black tea. Every few yards someone would have to get out of the boat to clear a way through the fallen branches; often they were travelling under the branches, ducking their heads. Once it was clear that everyone was too hungry and exhausted to go any further, Seb called it quits and they stopped at the nearest piece of elevated dry ground that was big enough to camp on, and hauled their gear ashore.
They were still a long way from their target, and it was a long time until dark, but stopping seemed the right thing to do. Without talking much, they ate lunch, sitting on the leafy ground: peanut butter sandwiches and bananas. When he had eaten, Desmond threw the last piece of his banana into the water. Before it had time to sink beneath the surface, an invisible mouth grabbed it. He tried the experiment again with a piece of banana: it seemed to vanish as soon is it touched the surface of the water. It seemed that from every direction unseen creatures were feeding off them.
At sunset, the sand flies made way for mosquitoes, which were worse because they were smaller, subtler in their tactics and more frightening because of the threat of malaria they carried. The most effective defense against them was to get into one’s sleeping bag and zip it all the way up. Even in a lightweight sleeping bag this was uncomfortably hot and made breathing difficult, but it worked. The trick was to leave just enough of an opening by one’s head to let air in. That night as they slept, or tried to sleep, the crew in their scattered sleeping bags looked like a collection of giant eyeless grubs on the forest floor, a treat for some enormous Amazônian bird that might find them where they helplessly lay and gobble them up once and for all.
The fauna they could not see by day they could hear at great volume by night. They lay surrounded by a deep, pulsing din of distinct sounds, a multi-layered soundscape of rhythms and monotonously repeated themes that extended infinitely around them. Desmond found that if he picked out one voice from the mix, and focused on it, it helped to make every other sound and everything else around it recede into oblivion, and thereby allow sleep.
But at one point in the middle of the night, just as everyone had finally gone the same way, Florian had a nightmare and began shouting loudly, waking up everyone except himself.
There was no boundary between the preceding day, the night and the morning that followed. They all flowed together into an uncomfortable unrelenting bad dream. By sunrise there was no point trying to sleep any longer, so with stinging eyes and rumpled hair they staggered about the campsite, packing things up. According to Seb’s plan, they were now going to set off on foot for Nestoropolis.
Seb turned on the GPS receiver to establish their location. After studying the screen for a few minutes, he announced the direction they should take through the forest. Desmond and Florian exchanged glum looks: neither relished bushwhacking through this dense vegetation. But they soon found a path, and began to crash their way through it, stomping down the branches with their boots.
They came out onto a straight dirt road, which was unexpected but made walking much easier. They walked in single file. The sun grew hotter. They hiked all day.

In the afternoon, they saw a building of some kind in the distance. As they approached it they could see it was a small wooden shack with a generator beside it and a wooden table and some rickety chairs on a patch of dirt. A string of coloured light bulbs over the door gave it a wearily festive air.
A short distance further on the road, where the road petered out, they came to a clearing. Beside a stand of banana trees Desmond saw a large heap of earth; a gasoline-powered pump; a large wooden sieve on four legs, like a table; a length of hose leading down to a stream. They looked around; there was no one there. Suddenly from behind them they heard the barking of an angry dog; it was sprinting towards them. Seb spun around to see a large light brown mutt charging towards him with its teeth bared. Seb stood his ground and just stared at the dog.
Florian grabbed a branch from the ground and was about to smack the dog on the head with it when its master called sharply to the dog, ordering it to stop. It did so, with a grudging growl, and sloped off, with the ridge of fur on its back still raised. Florian reluctantly put down the wood, but not before he had taken a look at the man who was approaching them.
“The dog likes you,” Florian said.
“All animals like me,” Seb said.
“You’re St Francis of Asissi,” Florian said, insolently.
Trotting down the path to the camp after the dog came a short, dark-skinned, sinewy man in tattered shorts, flip-flops and a faded T shirt. He took one look at the group of visitors and slowed down. They were strangers, but since they were clearly foreigners they were probably not enemies. Still, he gave them a very puzzled and suspicious look.
As the dog fell into place at the man’s side, its owner warily approached the group.
“Welcome to the asshole of the world,” the man said.
“Is this your mine?” Seb asked him.
“Si! You are welcome. We don’t get many visitors around here, he said. You must be lost. Where did you say you were from?”
“We are environmentalists from the environmental group Narwhal,” Seb said.
“Ambientalistas?”
He found this extraordinary, and he laughed as he thought about it for a bit. He took off his glasses, which were held together at both corners with tape, and wiped them on his shirt. Putting them back on brought his laughter to an end.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said bluntly.
Seb repeated that they were from the environmental group Narwhal, and added that they were doing research on gold mining in Amazônia.
His expression of amusement and genuine puzzlement was easy enough to read. He shook his head, as if to say, That beats all. Trying to rise to what he saw as the humorous spirit of the occasion, he announced, in a tone of mock declamation, “You’re too late! This mine’s finished! Blefado!” he said.
“Blefado?” Seb said.
“Si, blefado.” Busted, broke, buggered. Down the creek, up the grand wazoo, whatever you want to call it.
Seb asked him to explain.
“Look, we worked here for six months, and found so little gold we are all now poorer than when we started. There were six of us here, and the rest have all gone off to work on a federal mine where at least you get paid regularly. I’m only still here because I am the owner of this concession and I owe money to the patrão.”
“Who’s the patrão?”
“Did you see the cantina on your way in here? He owns that. My friend, that is how garimpagem works in Amazônia. You need to eat, you need supplies. You need gasoline and mercury. Where do you get it when you’re out here, miles from anywhere? You get it from the patrão, who overcharges you but lets you have it on credit. In our case we owe him over 2,000 reals. So now I work for the patrao. Come on, tell your friends to come up to the cantina. We’ll have a few beers. It’s time for a celebration.”

His name was Luisão, and he clearly hadn’t had much company out here. It was impossible to get him to stop talking once he got started. He arranged everyone around the table in front of the cantina, and went in to get drinks, emerging with a tray of ice-cold bottles of Antarctica beer. Once everyone was settled, he leaned back in his chair and began to talk.
“Basically, he said, in the kind of mining we do, what you do is, you pump the silt, the alluvium, out of the river bed and put it through a big sieve, and keep an eye out for lumps as it runs down a chute. Anything that looks promising you burn over a kind of open furnace. When the lumps go red you pour in mercury, and that isolates the gold by binding with it. It turns into crumbly lumps. Then you take the lumps and burn them – he pointed to the gas cylinders inside the cantina. The mercury burns off as smoke, and you are left with the gold.
“It’s pretty crappy work most of the time,” he said. “You can sift dirt for weeks without finding anything, and the smoke from the mercury stinks and you have to be careful not to breathe it. It rips your lungs to pieces. There’s nothing to do at the end of the day except drink, and there’s nothing to eat except what you bring with you or buy at inflated prices from the patrao, unless you are a good shot and like eating roasted monkey, which I ate once and then vowed never to touch again. The Indians eat monkey whenever they can, by the way. They shoot it down from the trees with poisoned arrows like this – he mimed a blow-pipe – and then they roast it, fur, guts and all, over the fire until it’s black. They won’t eat meat unless it’s practically turned to charcoal: they think meat is disgusting unless it’s well done. If you ask me, it would be less disgusting without the guts or the fur or the head, but no one’s asking me.”
At one point he seemed to have an idea. He interrupted himself mid-flow, and ran into the cantina. He came out with a large photograph album, bound in pink plastic, which he gave to Seb. Seb and those on either side of him passed the time by looking at photographs of Luisão’s wedding.
Seb asked Luisao why they chose this particular spot, especially since it turned out so unsuccessful.
Luisão gave a remorseful shrug.
“It was stupid, I can see that now. I used to think I was a pretty good judge of soil. If you know what to look for, you can tell just by scratching the surface of the soil with your boot in a few places what kind of mineral content the earth underneath will have. A guy from one of the big mining companies came down here – a North American – to find out how we worked. He told me that they had no better luck with all their fancy equipment in finding gold-bearing soil than I had with my boot. Anyway, instead of believing the evidence of our senses, we came to this spot because we – my partner and I – we believed this guy that we met in a bar in Manaus who told us he had found a five-kilogram nugget of gold in this region. Well, my partner believed him more than I did, and now he’s gone and I’m still here. The guy wouldn’t tell us the exact location, of course. He was so rich he had his own private jet. He used to fly it from Manaus to Sao Paulo, and even to New York and Paris. I shouldn’t have listened to him. I should have gone with my own instincts. You can tell by looking at the soil there’s no gold here. There’s some, but not much. And now there’s nothing. And I’m broke.”
He burped.
“Hell,” he said, “I heard about a guy once who made so much money digging gold in Amazonas, when he came to Manaus, they said, he used to hire two taxis for the day: one for himself and another one just for his hat.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Seb said.
“I’ll go and work another mine. I know it’s a terrible life, but it’s not a bad life. I mean, what else is there? I used to unload boats on the docks at Manaus. Do you think I want to go back to that?”
“Why don’t you come with us?” Seb said, after thinking for a while.
“Where are you going?”
“Nestoropolis,” Seb said.
“Why are you going there?”
“We are going to make a report. They are poisoning the forest.”
Luisao looked at Seb uncomprehendingly. He had never heard of such a thing.
“Well, whatever you say. I hate that guy. If you’re going there to fuck him up, I’ll gladly help you. He fired me once, and he still owes me money. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I can drive you there, or some of the way there, at least.”
Luisão drove them a few miles down the road in his rusty old Toyota pickup truck, even though he was quite drunk, and nearly ran the truck off the road several times.

Chapter 13
THE BRIDGE

They stood in a circle around the perimeter of a disused mining pit on the fringe of Nestoropolis. It was Seb’s idea that they should invoke the spirits of the forest to help them in what they were about to do. Their feet were clodded with mud from the deep, muddy tire tracks along which they had walked to get here. Mosquitoes hovered on the pit’s artificial-looking red water. The sun had just come up. The pit was poisoned. Nothing lived in it or around it. The colour green had been voided from the scene for hundreds of metres around, leaving only a grim ground-zero landscape of grey, black and red blasted out of the midst of the jungle.
Some miners were sleeping in a shack nearby. One of them staggered out, squinting into the raw sunlight, to relieve himself on the parched ground. He scratched around inside his shorts, glanced over at the group of strangers, wondered why someone had chosen this of all places to hold a funeral, made the sign of the cross, and then went back to sleep.

Meanwhile, at Nestoropolis, with Caetano’s help, Murdo and Zezinho had obtained the explosives they would need to destroy the bridge and the airstrip. This was their idea; Seb knew nothing about it. The usual protocol for storing explosives anywhere else in the world was to keep them in a strongbox with two, and sometimes even three padlocks, whose keys were held by different people, one of whom would be a police officer. In Nestoropolis, blasting explosive and detonators could be purchased at the company store, where they were stored in a lidded wooden box on a shelf beside boxes containing litre bottles of mercury and engine oil.
Caetano did not ask his friends why they wanted the explosives, but saw it as his duty to help them obtain them, if that was what they wanted. Since Murdo had given Caetano his friend’s death’s head ring, Caetano had been their greatest ally in Nestoropolis, helping them in every way he could. Realizing the value of his local knowledge, Murdo and Zezinho did all they could to help him in return, buying him cigarettes and food, and always making sure he had a beer in front of him when they went to the cantina, giving him the respect which an old man needed but which was not automatically given in this rough place.
This banding together for mutual assistance was a recognized technique for living in the garimpo. The other miners acknowledged the little group they had formed, and respected it. They knew that if you crossed Caetano, you would not only have to deal with Caetano, but also with Murdo and Zezinho.
When the three of them approached the wooden counter of the general store and asked for six sticks of cyclonite and some detonators, the shopkeeper did not ask them what they were intending to do with it. It was normal for miners to use it. He was no more curious about this than he was about the names or any other personal information about this trio of customers, although he did note to himself that the two younger ones were new in town and that he had seen them before, probably just after their arrival, when they had bought sardines and crackers.

Late that night, after midnight, when everyone in Nestoropolis was asleep, Murdo and Zezinho rose from their bunks. They put on their boots in the dark, and fumbled for their bags. Each had packed a small shoulder bag of essentials: money, a satellite telephone, a bottle of water, a packet of biscuits, a hat.
Zezinho closed the screen door quietly behind him, and they stepped into the night. The distant din of the surrounding forest camouflaged the sound of their movements, though they trod carefully. As their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, they were aware that the ground was lit by dim, silvery starlight.
Murdo had cached the explosives in a trash can beside their cabin, wrapped in a plastic rice sack. He slowly pulled it out, and they made their way down to the bridge, leaving the garimperos’ cabins of Nestoropolis behind them.
“Is the jeep there?” Zezinho said.
“Yes. I made sure Caetano left it there last night. I said we wanted to use it in the morning,” Murdo said.
“Do we have the key?” Zezinho said.
“It doesn’t need a key, you just start it with the starter button,” Murdo said.
“How much is it worth?” Zezinho said.
“How should I know?” Murdo said. “It’s not worth anything. It’s a piece of junk.”
“It’s worth something out here,” Zezinho said.
“How much would he pay for a new one?”
“God knows. Two hundred?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“So why don’t we give him five hundred?”
“I guess we owe him something for the inconvenience.”
“Oh shit, let’s not be misers. We’ve still got a lot of money left. Let’s give him a thousand. He helped us.”
“You’re right. We might as well. He might be able to quit this place and go home.”
They were approaching Caetano’s cabin, which was on the side of the road.
“I don’t want to wake him up,” Zezinho said, finding the money from his shoulder bag and counting the notes.
“Where are you going to put it?”
Zezinho studied the cabin warily.
“I’ll put it in the window frame. How about that?”
“Someone will see it. Can’t you put it inside?”
“I don’t want to open the door. It will make a noise.”
“Just open it a crack and slip it in. I’ll stay here.”
Zezinho walked slowly towards the door. He could hear Caetano snoring. He listened to every beat of the rhythm, alert for any variation. Squatting at the threshold, he pushed open the door at the level of the floor and reached in, with the money crushed in his fist. He felt a worn leather boot, and put the notes inside. Then he closed the door without letting it make a sound. The snoring continued.
They walked faster as they left the cabins behind them. They were now under open sky, walking on the dirt road that led out away from Nestoropolis and towards the river that separated the mining camp from the Yururoa reserve.
A shape appeared on the road in front of them, too far away to be seen clearly.
“What’s that thing in the road?” Zezinho said.
“It looks like a tyre,” Murdo said.
“It’s moving,” Zezinho said.
Murdo tried to focus on it. A dark, flattened oval seemed to be creeping across the road.
“It looks like an armadillo -- or something like that,” Murdo said.
“Pangolin,” Zezinho said. He had once seen one in a book.
“It must be lost,” Murdo said. “The forest is a long way away.”
“It doesn’t look very healthy.”
“It’s limping. See?”
“It doesn’t know where the hell it’s going. It’s dying.”

Work on the bridge was nearly finished. Six straight tree trunks, about twenty metres long, had been placed across the water, and anchored at each end in deep notches in the soil of the riverbank that had been filled in with sand. Their plan was to place the explosive charge under the logs so that on ignition they would be thrown around. It wouldn’t be an act of devastation; the bridge could be rebuilt in about a week. The attack would be mainly symbolic, intended to show that Narwhal was more than just a protest group, and that they could and would seriously disrupt work in the garimpo, and Rei Nestor’s plan to invade the Yururoa reserve.
While Murdo kept watch, Zezinho clambered down the bank with the rice sack of explosives, a flash light and a roll of duct tape. He disappeared under the logs while Murdo hovered nearby.
Zezinho was down there for a long time, and Murdo grew anxious. Eventually Zezinho called out, “It’s not sticking.”
“Just leave it then,” Murdo said. He was getting impatient. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, for Christ’s sake. As long as the remote is connected, it will work. Just don’t break any wires.”
“OK, OK.”
Zezinho climbed out, muddy from the knees down.
“What the hell are we doing?” he said.
“We’re doing our jobs,” Murdo said.
“Right. Let’s get out of here,” Zezinho said.
Caetano’s jeep stood back from the riverbank. They climbed into it, and Murdo pushed the starter button. The jeep rumbled and shook. Murdo turned the big steering while and clunked the gear stick into reverse. The wheels dug into the mud, and then he sent the truck lurching forward towards the bridge. He drove with the lights off, and bumped slowly over the bridge, gripping the wheel tight as it slid over the slippery logs.
At last it hit the sand on the other bank. They turned up onto the road that led into the reserve and were gone.

Later, as the clerk was opening his shop for the day, Luiz the policeman stopped by on his regular rounds. The clerk told him that the old man Caetano had been there, accompanied by the two newcomers, one of whom was a northamerican, and that they had bought a substantial quantity of explosives and detonators.
“Did they say what they wanted the stuff for?” Luiz said.
“It’s not my business to inquire,” the clerk said. “That’s your job. I’m running a business. People trust me not to ask questions. That’s how I stay out of trouble in this place.”
“OK. Thanks,” Luiz said, and he mounted his motorbike, revved the engine, and turned back down the main street of Nestoropolis.
In the one-room police station, Luiz put out the word on the Civil Police radio that he had some suspicious foreigners in town, and asked if anyone knew anything about them. He tried Santarem, Manaus, Itacoatiara and Itaituba, and got negative responses, and then thought to call Belem, which was in another state, and therefore not in his jurisdiction, but Belem was the usual port of entry for Northamericans into Amazônia and it was a large, well-staffed post with good intelligence. He thought it was worth a try.
At last, a positive response crackled over the airwaves. “Good day, Nestoropolis, yes, this is of interest to us. We are looking for a Northamerican. Can you give us a description?”
“He doesn’t look like much. Young. White. Answers to Mondo, Moro, something like that. About 25 years, slightly built, about 1.7 metres. He’s just the usual riffraff, we thought. We get a lot of that here. But he speaks Portuguese.”
“Did you say he speaks Portuguese?”
“Yes.”
“We’re definitely interested in him. Can you pull him in for us? Ask for his papers: if it’s the one we’re after, he won’t have a passport. You can hold him for travelling without papers. Keep him there for us until we can get there. He’s a suspect in a piracy-related murder.” A Filipino crewman had been killed in the raid on the Neroli, and the Civil Police were seeking a scapegoat. The American escapee was the obvious candidate.
“Piracy related murder? Right. OK. That’s funny, you know, we get a lot of murderers here, and he doesn’t look the type,” Luiz said. It wasn’t every day that he got the chance to chat with officers in Belem.
“They never do. Thank you, Nestoropolis, and good day. Over and out.”
“OK, Belem, over and out.” He turned off the receiver and stroked his chin and let all this information turn over in his mind. He didn’t know that Murdo and Zezinho had already left.

Chapter 14
REI NESTOR

At first light, Seb and his group of activists walked down the rutted dirt road that led into Nestoropolis. They passed through a monochrome forest of ash: the land on either side of the road had been cleared by fire. The charred trunks of trees protruded like spikes through the gray and blackened ground. There was no sound of insects, no sound of birds. The ash covered their feet and made them cough.
Soon they could see the buildings of Nestoropolis in front of them, then miners on the road on their way to work, carrying tools on their shoulders. The day was already hot, and the sun was a pale yellow disc in a hazy, overcast sky.
They approached the miners’ cabins on the outskirts of the town. Faces in shadow appeared at the windows, scrutinizing them silently.
On the main street of Nestoropolis, they saw the line of bars and shops, not yet open for business. Outside a shopfront with a big wooden sign on the roof that read BAR OURO, a dog urinated against a stack of empty beer crates.
A man was striding towards them in haste down the middle of the road. He was tall, brown and athletic, and wore a faded T shirt and shorts, and was squinting into the sunlight.
“I think that’s the boss,” Seb said. “Rei Nestor. Have you got the camera ready?”
Donna was beside him, holding a small video camera to her chest.
“I’ve got it running,” she said.
They came face to face near the stacked folding chairs and the beer crates outside the Bar Ouro.
“Bom dia,” Rei Nestor said. “Who are you people?” He stood with his hands on his hips. He was more curious than suspicious.
Donna held up the camera to record the encounter.
“Bom dia,” Seb said. “We are from the environmental group Narwhal. We are here to document illegal gold mining and the violation of state and federal environmental regulations.”
Rei Nestor looked at them in astonishment.
He put the palms of his hands against his cheeks.
“Is this a practical joke?”
“No.”
Rei Nestor saw a handful of young Nordamericanos in new clothes and new hiking boots. Some had pink skin, some had brown skin. They were sweaty and tired, covered in insect bites, with earnest, sunken eyes looking out from under cotton hats. Their hands were empty, their arms were bare, and their palms were visible.
People began to gather around Rei Nestor to hear him confront the strangers. A youth who came down the road on a loud motorbike cut the engine and rested astride it to hear what was going on.
Rei Nestor’s face turned hard.
“So what do you want?” Rei Nestor said. He had a stony expression that he used when he wanted to frighten someone. He used it now. Seb disregarded it.
“We have legal documentation,” Seb said. He beckoned Donna. She came forward with a plastic folder, and pulled out a paper and gave it to Seb. “You are on illegally occupied federal land. There are violations of state and federal environmental regulations here, which we intend to publish,” Seb said. He held out the paper.
Rei Nestor looked at the document as if it were a large and revolting Amazonian insect: he had seen plenty of such things before, knew that some people found them interesting, but had seen enough of such things himself, even if he had never seen this particular example.
He looked into Seb’s eyes, waiting for something more. He still couldn’t take the measure of what he saw in the stranger’s blue eyes.
Seb was still holding out the paper, as if he were serving a subpoena. Rei Nestor waved it away.
“Listen,” Rei Nestor said, looking upwards at the treetops. I know about you people. Why don’t you leave us in peace? Look at us,” he said, turning his hand to the crowd of garimperos that were gathering behind him.
“These are poor men. When we came here, there was nothing. We threw food packages down from airplanes. There was no runway. There was absolutely nothing here -- just bush. Just jungle, full of snakes. Nothing. Now people are making money, and we are developing this place. Look, I know there are problems with mercury. I can’t do anything about that. Miners are lazy. I keep telling them you can concentrate gold without mercury, but they don’t listen. I can’t stop them. You don’t know nothing.
“So get out of here,” Rei Nestor said. “And get that thing out of my face.”
Donna didn’t budge, but kept the camera pointed at Rei Nestor. He grabbed the camera from her hands and threw it on the ground.
“Get out of here. If you come back here, we’ll shoot you, OK? Don’t bother us.”
Rei Nestor turned his back on them and walked away. He wanted to convey the message that he found the whole thing nothing more than a minor irritation. The crowd that had gathered around him parted to let him through. Some of them drifted away once they had heard enough and could see, to their disappointment, that there was not going to be a fight.
Donna picked up the broken camera.
“I hope the memory card still works,” she said.
“It will be OK,” Seb said. “Make sure you put that last part into the film, where he grabbed the camera. It will make him look like a psychopath. OK, let’s go. That’s enough for now. Let’s head back to the boats.”
Rei Nestor and the miners were still standing in the road, chatting and laughing about the encounter with the strangers, when they heard the boom. The explosion threw the logs of the bridge upward in a fountain of dirt, and scattered them on the banks and in the river bed.
“What was that?” Rei Nestor said.

Seb heard it too. He asked Murdo about it as they rode the inflatables back to the ship. Murdo told him. They had even used a timer, he said, so that the explosion would happen after they had left the settlement.
Seb went quiet for a long time. The information shocked him.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said softly. No one had ever taken a reckless initiative like that on one of his earlier campaigns. He felt weakened momentarily, as if something were slipping away from him, but he couldn’t tell what it was at first.
He said no more until they reached the ship.

Chapter 15
THE YURUROA

There were flashes in the sky on the morning they left the MV Narwhal for Jepewi-teri – bolts of lightning that seemed to descend vertically from the clouds, and set bursts of pale green light pulsing through the trees. Strange weather; but with no thunder and little wind, so there was no imminent threat of rain.
Seb’s group sat in the first of two inflatables; the second, towed behind, carried their supplies, covered with a sheet of canvas that was lashed to the gunwales with plastic rope. They brought as much as they could load into this boat, mostly food. There were cartons of canned tuna and sardines, peanut butter, rice, sugar, instant coffee, powdered orange juice, a box of detergent, water. There was an oil drum of gasoline, tents, batteries, rolls of plastic sheeting, whatever they could think of in their hurried preparations. Amongst all this, a pile of scruffy backpacks containing a bare minimum of essential personal belongings.
“This feels like going into exile,” Donna said, sitting beside Murdo as he throttled the engine. The boat surged through the still brown water, a road that wound through a tunnel of forest.
“Like Captain Bligh leaving the Bounty,” he said.
Seb sat in the front with the GPS receiver.
They rode up river until noon, and then turned into a narrow creek. Here the vegetation was denser, and vines hung over the water, slowing them down. No breeze blew here, and the air was hot and stagnant and they were soon soaked with sweat. Clouds of gnats surrounded them, featureless black specks that stung more sharply than a mosquito, and attacked the dampest parts of the body they could find. Murdo soaked his cap in the water to cool himself, but it had no effect. They drifted through a penumbra of gray light. They only wildlife they could see was biting them; they could see the movements of fish disturbing the surface of the water, but no fish.
By late afternoon it was clear they were still far from the village, so they anxiously scanned the banks for a place to camp, but the vegetation was so uniformly, monotonously dense that finding a patch of flat, dry ground seemed impossible. By twilight they had still not found anything, so they settled on a wide strip of mud that was separated from the water by a waterlogged tree trunk.
“If we pull the boats onto it, we can sleep in the boats,” Dr Kilhuth suggested. It was far from ideal, but there was no alternative. They sloshed into the muddy water and dragged the boats ashore. Each person looked around gloomily for a patch of personal space in which to attempt to sleep; there was no room to lie down, so they would have to sleep sitting up, squashed together uncomfortably like passengers in a long-distance bus.
Dr Kilhuth relieved the crowding somewhat by rigging a hammock between two branches directly over the boats. He slept in it coccooned in mosquito netting.
They ate canned tuna and crackers for supper, and drank bottled water from their limited supply.
Seb said that he expected they would reach the village the next day. There was no doubt about its location, as they had a precise GPS fix for it. The only question lay in the kind of reception they would get: although they had brought a satellite telephone, they had no way of contacting the settlement.
That night, the sounds of the forest kept them awake. They could hear an infinite universe of individual sounds, some close, some far away, some mere pinpoints of sound that persisted in the night at the threshold of audibility. Half asleep, half awake, Murdo’s dreaming mind merged with this sound world, giving a visual appearance to every squawk, rhythmic peep, sawtooth cry, waveform and croak. The rhythms went in and out of phase, like pairs of flashing lights. He would focus on one sound for a while, until he fell asleep, only to be awoken an instant later by a new sound breaking the rhythm that had briefly lulled him. Some sounds seemed completely unnatural: a pure peal that emerged from nowhere with no attack, and then fell with a pure glissando, for example. They were abstract sounds that he could not be identify with any type of animal. He could not tell if a single sound was made by a bird, a frog, a mammal or an insect. He fully slept only for about an hour before dawn. When he awoke, feeling sticky and stupefied, the universe of night song had disappeared. He became acquainted with a stinging rash on his neck.

That morning, as they resumed their journey, the rain started. Surly, uncomfortable and sleep-starved, they launched the boats into the sluggish water, feeling the intense humidity and a turbulent breeze. It was hot and their sweat-soaked clothing clung uncomfortably to their bodies.
They could hear the rain before they saw or felt it: a sizzling in the trees that grew louder until they felt the first drops. Isolated from the sky by the impermeable tree cover, they first saw the rain splashing on the water in big drops that percolated through the leaves. Then, with a hissing surge in the tree canopy, the downpour began. It poured in thick runnels down the vines, and agitated the surface of the water, exciting the fish and attracting them to the surface, as if the river and the air above it were merging.
Murdo gripped the throttle with determination, his wet hand slipping on the plastic handle, willing the boats forward. Seb sat at the front and navigated, with his sullen gaze fixed on the readout of the GPS in its waterproof plastic case and on a square of map that was also protected in plastic. The motor plied ahead with a nagging sound, irregular enervating bursts of whining drone, spluttering occasionally, causing Murdo to fear that the water might get into it and make it fail, but he didn’t want to stop and it kept going. The clouds of gnats stung them ceaselessly, and their faces and hands grew swollen.
Now and then Murdo dozed for an instant, nodding forward and then jerking up with a start, fearful of what might happen if he really did fall asleep at the wheel (envisaging the boats crashing into the bank and capsizing, throwing all their gear into the river, and someone drowning). At one of these moments he even had a dream: a single, split-second image of himself riding a giant tortoise through the river. He blinked himself awake and pushed on.
No one spoke for hour after hour. Donna and Roberta were asleep most of the time. Seb and Dr. Kilhuth would push aside vines and other obstacles, but otherwise sat still, with their heads lowered, silently enduring the rain and the clouds of insects. Everyone was soaked to the skin. A pool of water filled the bottom of the boat, and Murdo noticed a tangle of long, thin worms writhing about in it. Around noon, the rain stopped. The river curved around to the right, and then straightened out. Here the trees stopped abruptly and a patch of grey sky appeared, and below it an expanse of open land, above a high and steeply sloping bank of muddy red earth. Murdo cut the engine, and the sudden absence of noise woke with a start those who were asleep. Donna gasped at what she saw.
Up on the bank, a line of men stood watching them approach. Backlit by glaring grey sky, they were hard to see, and Murdo squinted up at them. A score of Indians, all young men, stared down at the convoy of boats as it drifted towards the bank. They stood still, with patient expressions, as if they were expecting these strangers and had been waiting a long time for them to arrive. They were not traditional Indians, as one might have imagined them – in body paint and feathers, holding spears – and they were not acculturated Indians, the kind who wore shorts and t-shirts, and looked like any other Amazonian caboclo. These people were something altogether different: they looked like children dressed up as make-believe savages. Each wore an outlandish and menacing costume, laden with magpieish accessories. They wore mirror shades and strings of plastic beads around their necks, women’s bangles, clip-on earrings. One wore a striped silk tie, tied in a knot around his waist, and a baseball cap. Another wore yellow swimming trunks and a thick vinyl belt with a huge sparkly buckle. They wore ragged t-shirts announcing unlikely affinities: RALPH LAUREN POLO, CALVIN KLEIN. With their short stature, high cheekbones and black, glossy hair, they were undoubtedly Indians, but their mannered, farouche expressions suggested some druggy gang of feral teenagers.
Looking up at them, Dr Kilhuth said, “I have a feeling this is the place.”
He shouted a polysyllabic greeting in an incomprehensible language, and the Indian on the end of the row replied with the same phrase. They had a brief conversation. The youth’s answers were curt and expressionless in tone.
“They don’t look very friendly,” Murdo said, and Donna murmured assent.
“At least they don’t seem to have weapons,” she said.
“He says they heard our engine from a long way off, and it wasn’t one they recognized, so they knew we were foreigners coming to see them. I suspect they have put on their finery for our benefit. He says we are welcome. So let’s go and meet the boss,” Jac Kilhuth said.
They stepped out of the boat, and walked up a narrow path to the top of the bank, where they shook hands with each of the Indians in turn. While this was going on, Dr Kilhuth searched for something in the second boat, rummaging under the canvas. He found his backpack, and removed from it a rectangular plastic box, which he carried carefully up the path with both hands.
They followed the Indians along a path through some trees, which opened out into a circular expanse of flattened earth. In the center was an assortment of huts made of wooden poles, branches, cardboard boxes, plastic sheeting and corrugated metal. There was a lot of junk lying around, wooden crates, and piles of firewood. A couple of bony dogs, one with a severe red sore on its side, were fighting over a bone. One of the youths kicked them away, and they whimpered and ran off into the forest.
A white man came towards them from the huts. He wore a ragged baseball cap, shorts and flipflops, and no shirt. A beard covered most of his face, and he wore glasses with smudgy lenses that had been repaired at the corners with tape. He walked slowly, with a stoop. There was little air of urgency or curiosity about him. He looked like he had just woken up. His name was Frank Taylor. Jac Kilhuth came towards him with his hand outstretched.
“Hello, Frank,” Dr Kilhuth said. Frank Taylor took his hand.
“Welcome to the stone age,” he said. “Where are you folks from?”
“Frank, I’m Jac Kilhuth,” Dr Kilhuth said. Taylor hadn’t recognized him.
Taylor was momentarily dumbstruck. He was still holding Kilhuth’s hand. Then he started shaking it again, more vigorously now as the information sunk in.
“Jac,” he said slowly, releasing his hand, and gazing into Kilhuth’s face. “Well, I’ll be darned. Jac. Gee, it’s been such a long time. How nice to see you. How’s, um...” He struggled to remember a name.
“She died,” Kilhuth said.
Taylor spoke incredibly slowly.
“Ohhh.” He thought about it. “I’m so sorry. When?”
“Six years ago. Don’t worry. How are you?”
“Well, I’m good, as you can see. How nice to see you,” he said, his tone now emotional.
“I’ve brought you this,” Dr Kilhuth said, handing Frank Taylor the tupperware box.
“How very kind. What is it?”
“It’s a carrot cake. I baked it myself. I thought you probably hadn’t had anything of this kind for a long time.”
Taylor held the box reverently, like a sacred treasure.
“Thank you. If only we’d known you were coming.”
“We had no way of contacting you,” Kilhuth said.
“That’s quite possible,” Frank Taylor said. “I’ve been out of touch for a while. So what’s brought you here? Who have you got in this little party of yours?”
Dr Kilhuth told him, and Frank Taylor listened, and at the end he said, “Yes. The Yururoa know what gold is, and how the white man will drive himself crazy trying to get it.”

That night they ate supper under the shelter of the shabono, a horse-shoe shaped shelter with a high roof that sloped down to the ground: it was the traditional kind of dwelling in Yururoa villages, although like most things in this village, the tradition had been adapted to suit their own very un-traditional ways of doing things. It was made of tall poles and a roof of branches and leaves, and opened onto the central plaza of the clearing. Most of the Indians slept here, in hammocks slung between the poles. The boys cooked the meal, under Taylor’s direction, on a wood fire. The main course was grilled fish, eaten on banana leaves for plates, and slathered with bottled pepper sauce. There was an abundance of fish, mostly piranhas, and everyone ate until they were stuffed. Then they put a huge aluminum pot on the embers and filled it with tinned spaghetti. Only the Indians ate this. They ate it greedily and messily straight from the pot with long spoons, standing over it and jostling for access.
After supper, the visitors pitched their tents in the plaza and slept, oblivious to the activity that continued around them long into the night.

In the morning, Murdo emerged blinking from his tent, into his strange new surroundings, beginning life from scratch once again, searching for a place to relieve himself, a place to wash, breakfast: the whole grim learning curve. The others were still asleep.
Instead of anything that might help him to solve any of these problems, Murdo found something that made him recoil with horror. On a pole at the edge of the plaza, beside the shabono, he saw the bloody head of an animal. It had been crudely hacked from its body. Black sinews hung from its neck and flies crowded around its dim blind eyes. Its jaw gaped open in a gruesome rictus, and there were gaps of clotted blood where its teeth had been.
He turned around in alarm and saw Frank Taylor standing behind him.
“I guess you’d like to know what that is,” he said.
“Yes, I would,” Murdo said. He couldn’t even tell what kind of animal it was.
“That’s a jaguar’s head. Some of the boys hunted it down and killed it because it killed a beloved hunting dog. Entirely for revenge. They knocked out its teeth and burned them on the fire because it killed the dog with its teeth. Pebbles and Bambam did it; you’ll meet them. They are very proud of it. It looks pretty gruesome, doesn’t it? But it’s nothing to be afraid of. How about some coffee?”
Taylor led the way to his hut. A small wood fire was burning on the ground with a pan of boiling water hanging over it. Taylor made coffee in an enamel cup and handed it to Murdo: instant coffee with sugar. It tasted better than Murdo expected, given the surroundings.
“Did you say ‘Pebbles and Bambam’? Those are characters in The Flintstones.”
“Right. Those are the names I call them. There’s also Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Fred’s wife, who isn’t here, is called Wilma, and Barney’s wife, who isn’t here either, is called Betty. The Flintstones all come from the same village. ‘The modern stone age family.’”
“Isn’t that kind of insulting?” Murdo said.
“What, naming them after the Flintstones? They’ve never heard of the Flintstones. They don’t mind.”
“Why don’t you use their real names?”
“If I called them by their real names they would be really insulted. For the Yururoa, personal names are shrouded in taboo. They are a person’s most closely guarded secret. To tell an outsider your name means losing your shadow, your soul. They wouldn’t tell me and I don’t ask.”
“Look. One of the greatest difficulties an anthropologist has when he first starts working with these people is recording accurate genealogies,” he said. Frank Taylor seemed glad to have the chance to tell someone this. He spoke hesitantly at first, as if he hadn’t even spoken English for a long time, as if he were struggling out of a caul of chronic solitude. There was a defensive tone in the way he talked.
“How can you work out who’s related to whom when it’s almost impossible under normal circumstances to find out what people’s names are? If you ask someone directly, which I did when I started, it’s the worst faux pas you could make. And either they won’t tell you, or they give you false information. The only way to find out is to keep track of who’s feuding with whom. When someone is having a feud with someone else, he’ll tell you his enemy’s name as a way of harming him. So I give them made up names. You have to call them something. What I do is, I give them names from a memorable group of names, like the Flintstones. That helps me to remember where they come from. It makes it easier for them, too. They don’t mind what you call them, as long as it isn’t in their language. I know that probably seems strange. But don’t forget that some of the things we do are pretty strange too,” he said.
“Is that normal?” Murdo said.
“Is what normal?”
“Cutting off a jaguar’s head and putting it on a pole.”
“I’m not really concerned with what’s normal any more, either for me or for the Yururoa. This isn’t a traditional Yururoa village. It’s where I live, and where others live, and we live together, and it’s pretty peaceful. But if you’re asking me if that’s a traditional Yururoa thing to do, the answer is yes it is.”

It was a weird place. There were no women or children here, Murdo noticed, just men, mostly young men and adolescents. Kilhuth was wrong: they hadn’t put on their strange epicene costumes just to welcome them. They dressed like this all the time. They wore wristwatches and sunglasses and bandannas, and reeked of cheap cosmetics, deodorants and artificially perfumed soap.
Breakfast was grilled plantains and Oreo cookies, about three large packs, from a big cardboard carton.
Afterwards, about a dozen of the Indians gathered in the plaza to take ebene, a hallucinogenic snuff made from tree bark. Taylor oversaw the proceedings, like a proud father watching his children acting in a school play. He explained to Murdo what was going on.
About a dozen Indians sat on the ground in a circle, partly under the shade of the shabono. At the center of the circle a boy sat with his back against a roof pole.
“The one sitting against the pole is Pebbles, who I told you about. He’s going to take ebene, and ask the spirits to cure him.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Murdo said.
“I’m not sure,” Taylor said. “Probably nothing much. He might just still be feeling depressed about his dog. He seems right as rain to me. I don’t know that he has any particular problems. But you don’t have to be really sick to be treated by the shamans. It’s like their version of psychotherapy.”
One of the youths unwrapped a parcel of leaves containing a coarse black powder. An older man went first. He came and squatted in front of the boy who was preparing the ebene. The older man had a wizened, monkeyish face, and wore red swimming trunks, a fake gold chain around his neck and armbands made of toucan feathers. He waited patiently as the other packed the powder into a cane tube about a metre long. When it was full, the boy who was preparing the ebene placed one end of the tube against the nostril of the other, who held it in place with one hand. The youth took a deep breath, and blew hard, shooting the black powder deep into the other’s sinuses. The older man retched violently, and howled with pain, coughing and spitting and shaking his head. He was still squatting, but had to put his hand on the ground to steady himself. The youth packed the tube again, and blew a second dose of powder into the recipient’s other nostril. This caused another bout of retching and howling.
The man stood up shakily, with his eyes half closed and his mouth gaping open, and then fell to his knees and vomited on the ground. He fell forward onto his hands, and vomited again.
Still on his hands and knees, he took deep breaths to compose himself. A strand of green mucus extended from his nostrils, but he made no effort to wipe it away.
“That’s Fred Flintstone,” Taylor said to Murdo. “He’s the oldest one here.”
“Right,” Murdo said.
Eventually, Fred stood up. He puffed up his chest, and looked around imperiously, with his lower lip jutting out and his eyes watery. He gazed up at the sky and pointed upwards, repeatedly stabbing the air with his finger, making loud yipping noises with every stab.
Then he began to scream: a long, shrill descending note, again and again, and got into a slow rhythm. He paced back and forth in front of Pebbles, who sat staring dejectedly at the ground beside him, as if completely unaware of what Fred was doing.
This rhythm begat a wild chanting: gruff sequences of repeated syllables. He sang little melodies in a high, keening voice; he screamed; he ran around in big circles with his arms outstretched, like a child pretending to be an aeroplane.
While this was going on, another man came forward and squatted down in front of the youth with the ebene, readying himself for a dose. He reacted as Fred had done, and was soon roaming around the plaza, singing, shouting and chanting, performing his own mad pantomime. Then Pebbles got up and took a dose: now there were three enchanted beings, each acting out an incomprehensible struggle with invisible supernatural forces, each in his own private, violent world of visions.
It went on for a long time. Somewhere in the chaos of this performance there lay a meaning, but the visitors watched without any idea of what this meaning might be. The Indians, who knew, only paid partial attention to it. They chatted among themselves, and slapped the flies that tried to settle on their bodies.

Chapter 16
THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

In the afternoon, a group of boys went into the forest with shotguns to shoot game. They came back with some monkeys and a small tapir. This was an unusually successful catch and the boys were wild with excitement. That night there was a feast in honour of the visitors.
Only Taylor and the Indians ate the monkeys. They cooked them in the traditional manner: whole -- fur, guts and all -- grilled over the fire until they were as black as charcoal. The appearance of the burning monkey was too disgusting for the newcomers: the heat of the fire pulled back the skin on the monkeys’ faces so that they looked like they were grimacing in pain. Their little hands, which looked perfectly human with their thumbs and neat finger nails, curled slowly into fists as they cooked. They looked too human to eat.
The tapir, on the other hand, was delicious: a lean, gamy pork, with a delicate smoky flavour. This was cooked according to white men’s taste: that is, not so well done that it was tough and dry and black. There was also a huge pot of canned spaghetti. They ate this every day.
Dr Kilhuth ate little and retired to his tent to sleep. He was still exhausted from the journey, and the insects were bothering him. This had the effect of loosening Taylor’s tongue. He had been friendly enough to his old colleague, and had been happy to see him again, but there was an awkwardness between them, even in this remote location, and after so many years, and despite the fact that they were among the handful of white men in the entire world that could speak the Yururoa language, with all the common experience and hardship that represented. Taylor now had the chance to explain.
As he tore at the flesh of a monkey’s leg with his teeth, Taylor told them about his life, and how he came to be living here, as chief of an improvised tribe of misfit Indians, in a remote camp in the Amazonian forest. Every now and then he would pause to spit out shotgun pellets.
This place was an empty village when Taylor set up home here, he said. It was a Yururoa village that had been set up by a faction from Jepewi-teri who had split for a time from the rest of the village over a feud. After a few years the feud was resolved and the inhabitants went back to the main village. Now it was a haven for lost boys: they would come here from distant villages, for different reasons. Some were outlaws, who had committed a crime in their home village and could not stay there any longer: these became permanent residents. Others, attracted by the freedom that Taylor offered, and the goods that were freely available, came for a few weeks or months and then went home.

“It’s amazing to me that Jac should have brought you here,” Taylor said. “I don’t know if you know this, but we had a serious falling out many years ago. Did he tell you about that?”
“No,” Murdo said.
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me. But it was all a long time ago. You have to move on. If Jac hasn’t mentioned it, that probably means that he has moved on too. It is great to see him again. I never thought I would, here or anywhere else. The strange thing is, he’s the reason I’m here now, although I’m sure he doesn’t know that.
“As you can probably tell, I’ve given up on anthropology. I don’t believe in that stuff any more. Jac had a lot to do with that. This is my home now, and I’ll probably die here. I haven’t been back to the States in nine years. My purpose in life now is to live as I please and to keep as many Yururoa as I can out of the clutches of the missionaries and as far as possible from the kind of people you get out here who think the only good Indian is a dead Indian: gold miners, loggers, settlers.”
“Jac and I both came to Amazônia to study burial practices. We were at different universities, but we knew about each other because we were anthropologists and we both wanted to work with the Yururoa, who been been studied very little at that time. We came out here together, and were working separately on the same thing, in neighbouring villages. I went to Jepewi-teri, which is a bit further up the river from where the boys met you.
“When I say neighbouring, they were two days apart by canoe, but it was helpful to have him nearby. We would meet occasionally, to drink rum, share outboard motor parts, that kind of thing, but otherwise we were completely separate. We had a radio to communicate with each other, but otherwise our work proceeded completely independently.
“Our approaches couldn’t have been more different. Jac is an anthropologist of the old school. You know what he’s like by now, I assume: confident, patrician. He’s the archetypal white man. He came from a long line of academics: he came to the discipline as if it were an inheritance.
“I, on the other hand, was an angry young man. I disagreed with the way anthropology had been done in the past: where you would appear in a place out of the blue, set up shop, make friends with people so that they’ll talk to you, ask them a lot of questions, and then after a year or two years or whatever, head for home to write up the dissertation, get a job in a nice leafy college town, and never have anything further to do with the people that set you up for life. My position was that anthropology should be a fair transaction. The process should be open to the people I was studying. That meant I would try to involve them in it – if, that is, they were interested in participating. If they had not been interested in working with me, I would have said thank you and goodbye, and left them alone. I was determined not to violate any of the codes of their society, like every anthropologist working on Amazônian Indians has done ever since they started coming here. And I didn’t want to just present them to the world like specimens on a microscope slide: what I wrote would be an account of a collaboration, of a relationship. I wanted them to tell me how they wanted to be represented to the greater world outside.
“I came Jepewi-teri to study burial practices, and they agreed to work with me on that. I would say, Tell me about what you do when someone dies, and they would say, Sure, we’ll tell you about that, but it’s a secret, and you mustn’t tell anyone else. They agreed to tell me as part of a trade: I had given them things – things they needed, manufactured goods, things like machetes, guns, and stuff they liked – so they gave me things in return. It wasn’t altruistic on anybody’s part: each side got something they wanted. At first I thought, well, I can work with that restriction. I’ll find a way. But having found out superficially about, say, urn burial, I wanted to know more. Why, for instance, did they disinter the bones after a year? I asked them to tell me, and they said, Sure. But it’s a secret. You can’t even take notes. I agreed, still putting off until later the problem of how I was going to resolve what I had promised them with my need to write a fully-documented dissertation.
“They told me everything I wanted to know. But every time we sat and discussed what I wanted to know about, they said the same thing. Sure. We’ll tell you. But this part is a secret. If you tell anyone who is not a Yururoa, our ancestors’ souls will die, and that will mean that we have the right to kill you and every member of your family. That was the rule they applied to other members of the group, and it would apply to me too. They were treating me as an honorary Yururoa. I agreed to this, of course.
“But the consequence of this was that the more I learned about the Yururoa, the less I was able to say about them, according to the agreement I had made with them. I reached a point where I might as well have submitted a box of blank typing paper as my dissertation. It was check mate; and the Yururoa had won the game.
“Still, I grew to love these people. There’s nothing special about them, they’re not especially good, and they’re not especially bad. They’re just people. Anyone who thinks that the Indians of Amazônia lived blissful carefree existences hunting and fishing, in harmony with nature, until the white man came along should have his head examined. They are the most neurotic people I have ever met, and really don’t have anything approaching an idealistic, abstract respect for nature, like people think. They only refrain from blasting every edible thing in sight out of the trees all at once and feasting until they are sick because they believe that the souls of the animals will torment them for the rest of their lives if they kill too many of them.
“I still have doubts about whether I was right to have given them guns. Jac gave them guns without a second thought, but I still worry about it. See, before we came here, the Yururoa hunted with bows and arrows. Over centuries they had developed their own ways of doing this. They would use a poison from a certain plant and cover their arrows with this. When they shot a monkey in a tree, the poison would stun the monkey, and if they were lucky the monkey would fall out of the tree. If they weren’t, someone would have to climb up the tree to bring the monkey down. Making the poison and preparing the arrows was a difficult, time-consuming business. It also meant that hunting trips would take several days, and the hunters would come back with very little meat. Sometimes they would come back without anything at all. They were hungry all the time. Now that they have guns, they can go out for a few hours and come back with as much as they can eat. In a lot of areas, they have hunted out entire species, and scared a lot of others away. They’ve lost all those old techniques, and they are now dependent on the white man economically for the supply of shells. This has tempted a lot of Yururoa villages to migrate to the missions and submit to all the nonsense the missionaries fill their heads with. The Yururoa at the missions can speak a bit of Portuguese, and they know a lot of claptrap about Jesus, but they have to work like serfs for everything the missionaries give them. They’re confused and miserable.
“On the other hand, they weren’t all that happy with the poison and the bows and arrows. They gave that up without a second thought: they had no obligation to retain those old ways just to give foreign anthropologists something to write about. Surely they have just as much right to change as anyone, and to use technology to improve their lives. I don’t know if they are more or less happy now that they have guns; I do know that they are less happy when they go and live on the missions.
“I wanted to help the Yururoa, but as an anthropologist you aren’t supposed to do that. After I’d been at Jepewi-teri for about a year, there was an outbreak of a flu-like virus. It was probably introduced by a young man who had spent some time at a mission, and then came back home. About half the village got really sick. They just lay in their hammocks. So I gave them penicillin, and they got better within a few days. Kilhuth heard about this, and came down to take a look. He was really shocked: not by the extent of the outbreak, which could have killed people, but because I treated them. He thought it was conduct unbecoming of a professional anthropologist.
“He said, ‘Of course you can treat people. That’s easy. Now they love you, and you feel like Mother Teresa. But it’s not what we’re here for.’”
“He thought the anthropologist’s job was just to sit impartially on the sidelines and record what he saw, without getting involved. That’s not being scientifically objective, it was just hard-hearted, it seemed to me. He said I had no right to continue studying the Yururoa; he even wrote a letter to the head of my department, and they wrote to me giving me a slap on the wrist. So having forfeited my scholarly objectivity, and gone native, so to speak, I decided that Kilhuth was right, and I gave up. My dissertation was at a dead end. So I moved to this place, and a small group came with me. Seven people. I was reading a lot of Nabokov at the time, so I gave them names from Nabokov novels. Now there’s John Shade, Charles Kinbote, Vivian Darkbloom, Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert, Timofey Pnin and John Ray. They’re all still here. And Jac finished his dissertation, it was published as a book, and he got tenure.”
“But how do you support yourself?” Donnna said.
“I own an apartment in San Francisco that I used to live in. I rent it out, and the income is paid into a bank in Manaus. That’s what I live on. Believe me, it’s more than enough. I bought the apartment years ago, and it’s now worth a lot of money. I have an arrangement with a trader who comes every three months to deliver supplies: food, medicine, cigarettes, batteries, whatever I need. Books, CDs. I’ve been through the whole of Nabokov twice. I only read fiction now, not much anthropology. Though I still do a lot of writing, and maintain my databases.”
By now it was dark, and very late, and Taylor spoke over the racket of frogs. At this point, two of the boys came out of Taylor’s shack with a large ghetto blaster which they set on a tree stump and turned on at blaring volume, drowning out the sounds of the forest.
“That’s John Shade and Charles Kinbote,” Taylor said with an approving smile. “They love mambo music.”
Taylor did not mention that Jacinth Kilhuth’s letter to the head of Taylor’s anthropology department was only partly about giving penicillin to the Indians. Its main complaint was about what Kilhuth called Taylor’s “improper conduct” with Yururoa boys, which he went on to describe as “regular sexual abuse.”
The visitors slept badly that night. The ghetto blaster stayed on long into the night. In the morning, as he emerged from his tent, Murdo felt dizzy, and then realized that his intestines had turned to jelly and that a mass of diarrhoea was going to burst out of him within the next few seconds. He rushed into the bush and managed to lower his trousers just in time. When he stood up he noticed in the mass of tangled vegetation in which he had relieved himself a heap of thousands of spent batteries.
The others were similarly affected. Luckily for them, Taylor had a supply of pills for this purpose, which they all took. He was amused by their affliction.
“Jungle food doesn’t agree with you, eh?” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

Frank Taylor would spend much of the day in a hammock in the shabono, where he could see everything that went on and could preside over all activity. The boys would wait on him like servants, fetching things from his hut, receiving instructions about work that needed to be done, bringing him coffee and food. They would show respect and courtesy to no one except him. In return, he would dole out gifts. The boys did not have wads of tobacco bulging out of their lower lips like the Yururoa traditionally did, but smoked American cigarettes that Taylor provided from a large box beside his hammock. At night they drank rum mixed with fruit juice and smoked joints made from marijuana that grew in luxuriant bushes in a grove at the edge of the clearing.
The visitors did not stray far from the settlement. Taylor enjoyed having them here: it was a pleasure for him to have people around with whom he could speak English, and with whom he could share his vast knowledge of the Yururoa, the flora and fauna that surrounded them, and the distant and mostly invisible but paranoia-inducing politics of the forest. Taylor knew that the corrupted Eden he had created here would not last forever, and that the way of life of the Indians of Amazonia was under threat from all around them. His policy was to enjoy it while he still could.
He was an encyclopedia of strange facts. He knew what moths tasted like (they were bland and had a powdery texture); that electric eels were prone to eye cataracts; that a certain type of maggot, that bred in a particular flower, placed in the ear, was of value as a treatment for excessive ear-wax (it would eat the wax, and fall out when the ear was clear and the maggot had eaten its fill).
Taylor’s Indians took ebene most days, in the late morning. That and the evening meal were the twin nuclei of the day: they spent hours gathering the raw materials of the drug in the forest and preparing it. The ebene ritual was partly entertainment, partly religious rite and partly therapy. It brought into the open whatever issue was uppermost in people’s minds: in this way disagreements or friction between people would be resolved, a hunting trip was given good prospects for success, or the malevolent spirit that was making someone sick would be driven out. The role of shaman – the leader of the rite, its chief protagonist, the conductor of the forest spirits that would appear when ebene was taken – was taken by different people at different times for different reasons. Every Yururoa man had the right to act as a shaman, though some tended to do it more than others, and to possess more of the knowledge of the spirit world, and were respected accordingly. Fred Flintstone held this position in Taylor’s village.
Since the visitors had arrived, Fred had conspicuously maintained a haughty lack of curiosity about them. He either ignored them or shooed them away when they got in his way: he slapped Seb’s hand one night as Seb was reaching for food when Fred was also reaching for it, for example. (Seb was startled by this: no one had slapped his hand for many years.) But there was one member of the visitors’ party that attracted his attention. Ever since her encounter with the Dolphin, Roberta had been mopy, grumpy, monosyllabic and withdrawn. Everyone was surprised when she chose to go with Seb’s group and not stay on the ship. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone. She wasn’t interested in cooking any more, and barely ate anything. She spent as much time as she could on her own. Fred studied her as if she were some kind of apparition. After scrutinizing her from a distance for some time from the other side of the fire, one evening at supper he squatted beside her and began a physical examination. He felt her hair, and stroked the skin of her arms. She tolerated this. Then he squatted in front of her and held her head firmly in his hands and looked into her eyes; this was too much: she yanked her head away and shouted in protest.
Fred announced to Taylor that Roberta was possessed by a malevolent spirit and that he would identify the spirit the following day, and drive the spirit out.

Chapter 17
ANACONDA SPIRIT

Roberta lay in the middle of the plaza, curled up on her side. Fred squatted on his haunches near Roberta’s curled up body as one of the younger men packed a long bamboo tube with green powder. He took the tube and held the end of it against his nostril and the other man took several deep breaths, ballooned his cheeks and blew hard, blasting the powder deep into the shaman’s sinuses. Then Fred took another dose in the other nostril. Immediately his face contorted with pain, and he curled forward, sneezing, coughing and retching violently. Green liquid poured out of his nostrils and tears poured out of his eyes. Fred struggled for breath, and then began a long, loud, high-pitched scream, descending slowly in pitch. He paced in wide circles around the enclosure, retching noisily, snorting. Long strands of green mucus hung from his nostrils. He began a staccato chant, a few short abrupt syllables followed by a long loud one, which he belted out to the rhythm of his pacing. After each circle, he reached down to the body and examined it, sometimes running his hands along her body, sometimes resting his hand on her head, as if taking her pulse. Roberta looked as if she were asleep.
Then he suddenly squatted down by Roberta, took her by the shoulders and sat her upright. He took her face in his hands and stared into her eyes. She recoiled at first from the sight of this sweating, snot-streaked apparition, then yielded. He was looking into her soul to identify the spirits that had invaded her body.
He saw that her body was covered with human mouths. Some were open, some were shut. They were all different, as if a crowd of people were imprisoned within her. Each was in distress. Some of the mouths were screaming in pain, some were grimacing, some were vomiting, and many of them were drooling a foul black liquid. Fred could see a pool of vomit and black liquid forming around her body as it lay on the ground. The mouths were of various sizes: some were the size of an adult’s mouth, while others were no bigger than a fingernail, but they were all moving and squirming about on her skin. Roberta’s own mouth was shut tight, and her nostrils were dilated as she breathed anxiously. Fred could hear the mouths shouting, but could not make out any words that he could understand.
He resumed his pacing around Roberta’s body. Now he called out to the spirits of the forest, demanding that the most powerful of the spirits that encircled the shabono should appear. He could see them: they first appeared as a swarm of sparks, like fireflies, and as they approached they grew larger and he could distinguish them individually and tell their names. Focusing on a point on the roof of the shabono, he called out to the Anaconda Spirit to stand up and come forward. Fred was the master of the Anaconda Spirit, although it was often disobedient, and had to be threatened and cajoled into doing what Fred told it to do. He chanted verses demanding that the Anaconda Spirit stop what it was doing and appear before him. He pointed to the spot where the Anaconda Spirit was sitting, and ordered it down. The spirit refused to budge, and Fred grew angry with the spirit, taunting it, accusing it of laziness, of being afraid of the white woman. He called out all of its names, showing the spirit that he was its equal, and that he was not afraid of him. Then the spirit appeared, and entered Roberta’s body. Fred commanded it to identify the spirit that possessed her, and to drive it out, and to chase it deep into the forest. He squatted by her body as the spirit did as it was told. He remained very still for a very long time, watching the Anaconda Spirit work its way through the inner spaces of Roberta’s body, humming quietly to himself. He saw a turbulence in Roberta’s chest: the Anaconda Spirit had found the invading enemy spirit and was digging it out of its lair. Then he saw the enemy spirit rush out, with the Anaconda Spirit chasing it deep into the forest. They whooshed past him like a rocket, and he screamed in triumph.
To all who could understand him, Fred announced in declamatory tones and formulaic shamanistic phrases that the spirit that had been purged from this woman was the Cobra Spirit, a creature of cunning and stealth who was able to disguise himself as other spirits and mimic their behaviour. The Cobra Spirit was a slave spirit; it worked for a shaman powerful enough to be able to control it. Whoever the master of the Cobra Spirit was, he had ordered the Cobra to possess her. Someone had wished to harm her.
When it was over, Fred lowered himself to the ground and lay on his back, exhausted. He lay there for ten minutes, shook himself, and walked away and drank some water from a can. Taylor murmured a rough translation of what he had said.
“Pretty trippy stuff, huh?” he said.
Taylor’s paraphrase of Fred’s shamanic speech burgeoned wildly in Seb’s mind. He immediately understood who Fred meant by the master of the Cobra Spirit. There was no doubt in his mind who this was. This shaman was evidently a man of advanced magical powers. He was the first person ever to discern Seb’s supernatural identity. But he was unsettled by what Fred had said about the Cobra Spirit having been sent to harm Roberta.
He had done no such thing intentionally. It would not have occurred to him that the Cobra Spirit was his servant, and if he had known that he could send it to do his bidding, he would not have used it to harm Roberta. The Cobra Spirit had been with him since the incident in Nepal. Here in the Amazonian forest it had assumed the form of an Amazonian spirit. The idea of mastery over the Cobra Spirit of which Fred had spoken was a way of expressing the conflict that he had been having with Roberta throughout the cruise of the Narwhal. Clearly, he had harmed her, and the Cobra Spirit was the agency of harm. Learning of this was a guilty pleasure.
Cobra Spirit: forest avatar of the nagaraja. Snake spirit, solitary hero. I am the master of the Cobra Spirit. It is the emanation of my will, Seb thought. He thought in dream images, not words.
“I want to try this,” Seb said. He wanted to see the Cobra Spirit. He wanted to develop this mastery, and learn how to use it.
“We can do it tomorrow,” Taylor said.
They left Roberta where she was, afraid to approach her. An aura of enchantment, like a taboo, still seemed to adhere to her. After a while she got up, wearily picking herself up off the hard ground. Speaking to no one, she withdrew to her tent and stayed there until morning.

Chapter 18
COBRA SPIRIT

With the help of Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty, Seb dressed himself like a Yururoa about to go to war. He wore a dirty red loincloth, macaw feather armbands and a headdress of fluffy white buzzard feathers. He borrowed the loincloth from Clare Quilty, who since coming to Taylor’s village had stopped wearing it in favour of cotton shorts. The parts of Seb’s face that were not covered by his beard were smeared messily with red ochre. They painted designs of red serpents on his arms. Around his neck he wore a chain of plastic beads, and a pendant made of a stainless steel shaving mirror. He still wore his Tibetan bracelets and Tiffany watch: the boys had told him to keep them on, despite Seb’s protests that they were out of place. What was out of place here? They knew better than to attempt to make Seb look like a real Yururoa. His body was too big and too hairy; his skin was the wrong colour; and no Yururoa had anything like Seb’s sedentary middle-aged paunch. He did not have their distended holes in his earlobes for the display of parakeet feather earrings, either, nor a row of piercings in his lower lip for bamboo sticks.
Nevertheless, there was a barbaric splendour in Seb’s appearance. It showed that he was prepared for ritual, that he was ready to leave his everyday identity behind to enter the spirit word.
Today’s ebene session drew a large audience. The whole village had turned out. They sat on the ground, on logs and in the shade of the shabono. The Yururoa were curious to see how a white man would react to ebene.
Seb sat on the ground in the middle of the plaza, and Fred administered the drug, blowing huge doses of green powder into each of Seb’s nostrils in turn. Seb coughed and retched violently, but absorbed the force of the blast. He sat with his eyes wide open, gazing calmly into the middle distance, waiting for the chlorophyll fantasia to begin.
He began to rock gently from side to side as the drug took effect. The ground around him turned red, and became flat and shiny, like a mirror. His surroundings melted away into a fog of rainbow colours. His last conscious thought was, This is a bit like toad venom. The thought that followed that was, There are transparent turnips in the attic. He laughed. And then the spirits of the forest arrived. They arrived in clouds of little points of light, like a swarm of fireflies: the toucan spirits, the fish spirits, the peccary spirits, the bat spirits, the curassow spirits. He absorbed them all.
He moved to the shabono, and sat with his back against a post. His eyes were closed and his mouth drooped open, and green snot poured from his nostrils. Ants began to explore his hands and climb over the serpent designs on his arms, which were melting away in his sweat. He remained in this position; unlike the Yururoa shamans, he didn’t sing, or chant or dance around. He could have been dead, or he could have been asleep.
A toucan spirit came to him and assumed visual form. It waddled across the ground. Seb studied its glossy black feathers, which glittered like jewels, and its huge orange beak. He marveled at its beauty, and felt a warm, benign feeling towards it. The bird looked at him with its sharp mute eye and began to write in the dirt with the talon of one foot. It wrote in strange characters, unlike any he had ever seen, but Seb was able to read them. He realized that the bird was writing a prophetic text. The writing was small, but perfectly legible. The text described the destruction of the world by fire and poison.
A darkness like no other would befall the earth, it read, an endless night of fire and poison, and in it all creatures would die. They would lie scattered on the earth, and when they were all dead and rotting the world above would descend to the world below and crush their bodies into powder. Only the Cobra Spirit would survive. It was born before the world was created and would die long after the world had disappeared. The Cobra Spirit knew how to avert this destruction, but it was indifferent to it. It was lazy; it preferred to lie still and watch, as if digesting a monkey. Only a shaman called the master of the Cobra Spirit could influence it; it would obey him and no one else. It was the duty of this shaman to discipline the Cobra Spirit, to command it to act. The text then gave precise instructions about where the shaman would find the Cobra Spirit.
When he had read this, and was pondering its meaning, the bird disappeared. He felt a cold wind, and everything around him went dark. The sun turned into a black disc in the sky. A profound terror engulfed him. He shivered deeply, lay on his side, and began to moan.

The Indians had been drifting away while this was going on. The entertaining show they had been hoping for had failed to materialize. Murdo and Donna were among the few who remained. They sat together in the shabono and watched Seb’s encounter with the spirit world.
“What are we doing here, Murdo? How did we end up here, in this crazy place?” she said.
“It was Seb’s idea. You know why we’re here. You’re saving the forest.”
“This is crazy. They just get stoned every day. Look at Seb: he looks like a junkie, passed out in the gutter,” Donna said. “I have been blind. Seb is evil. He gets people to follow him and to believe in him, and then he leads them into disaster every time. Now disaster has caught up with him too, and we’re in the last ditch. Look at Roberta: she stood up to him, she wouldn’t join the fantasy at first, but she got sucked into it. We could be on a nice comfortable ship, eating decent food, doing what Narwhal usually does – campaigning, doing what we’re supposed to be doing. This isn’t what I signed up for. I want to get out of here, Murdo. I want to go home. I’ve had enough. Haven’t you? This is hell on earth. I think Seb is losing his mind.”
“Where would we go?” Murdo said. “I can’t go back to Belem.”
“Why not?”
“The police will find me there.”
“Why are you so worried about the police? I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. I used to, but I don’t any more.” She thought for a moment.
“Look, Belem isn’t the only way out of Brazil. Manaus is closer. And it’s got an international airport. Murdo, let’s go. If we stick together we’ll be all right.”
He said nothing, but then she put her head on his shoulder and he knew she had persuaded him. The spirits of Amazonia were transforming him too, but in a different way. He felt a stirring within for this tiny, severe woman, who had been so suspicious of him when he arrived on the ship, and had maintained such a stern front of distance and disapproval. The experience was strange and frightening. Best to remain silent for now.

Seb had fallen asleep. When he awoke, he began to piece together his memory of his ebene visions. He remembered the prophetic text that the toucan spirit had written in the ground, and the instruction to contact the Cobra Spirit. He looked at the patch of ground where he had been sitting, hoping to see some trace of it, but all he saw was a lot of ants running around. He had been sitting beside an ants’ nest.
Taylor was curious to hear about Seb’s ebene experience.
“Let’s have a victory drink,” he said. “Grab a hammock.”
Seb climbed into a hammock in the shabono and lay back. He felt very comfortable. It was shady here, and a gentle breeze blew. Taylor gave an order to one of the boys, who immediately shimmied up a tall straight tree at the edge of the clearing, carrying a machete in his waistband. There was a rustling in the leaves as the boy hacked at the branches, and a branch laden with fruit crashed to the ground. The fruit were orange and yellow; Taylor gathered them up and disappeared into the hut that served as a store room for food and other supplies.
From where he lay, Seb watched a flock of tiny green birds with red flashes on their wings frolicking in a tree; it was an enchanting sight. He still felt a comfortable glow from the ebene: his visual sense was heightened. Taylor emerged a few minutes later with two tall metal beakers with plastic straws. He handed one to Seb.
“Cocktail hour. Bacuri fruit juice with cachaça. It’s very thirst-quenching, I think you’ll find, although I’m afraid it’s sans ice. Don’t forget that we are in what they call the ‘green hell.’”
They sipped their drinks. The juice had an agreeable astringent bite, and was indeed very refreshing, despite its being lukewarm.
“So did the spirits of the forest sling their hammocks in your chest?” Taylor said, tucking his wrist behind his head, and swinging slightly in his hammock.
“Well, I guess they did,” Seb said. “That’s a good way of putting it. I felt that the boundary between my self and the world had kind of dissolved.”
“You did pretty well. Most people can’t stop puking the first time they take ebene. They just sit with their heads in their hands and wait for it to finish.”
“What’s the active ingredient?” Seb said.
“I’m simplifying greatly, but the active ingredient is a tryptamine alkaloid, which is a molecule that’s found in different forms in drugs like psilocybin and LSD. What you had was probably the kind made from a kind of seed called hisiomö in Yururoa. They look like lentils. Its botanical name is Variolo callophylla. Another kind is variolo theiodora, if I remember correctly. The Yururoa grind them up and mix them with saliva to make a paste. The paste is also used as a topical cream to treat ringworm.”
They sipped their drinks. The little green birds swooped away.
“Frank, do the Yururoa have a spirit called the cobra?” Seb said.
“Sure. Very important and greatly feared.”
“How can I meet this spirit?”
Taylor leaned his head back in his hammock and didn’t answer for some time. Seb couldn’t see his face. He wondered when or if he was going to reply.
“You know, it’s strange for me to hear you talk about that. It’s one of the reasons I left Jepewi-teri and decided to come here. I can tell you exactly how to contact a snake spirit.
“When I was living in Jepewi-teri – and I have no idea how the situation has developed since I was last there – a power struggle was going on between two men who were vying for the role of head man of the village. The Yururoa have no formal social hierarchy: there is no such thing as a chief. But some men are recognized as having more authority than others.
“The struggle was between a man called Kaobawa and a man called Uuwa. Those are their real names. They couldn’t have been more different, and the struggle was as much a clash of personalities as anything else. Kaobawa was younger, but he had a natural authority. He was quiet and capable, and everybody knew this and liked him. He never acted solely in his own interests, he was always thinking about the good of the village as a whole. Uuwa, on the other hand, had a chip on his shoulder. His parents died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his mother’s sister, and he was always treated as an outsider. He was violent and bullying and reckless, and would never let a real or perceived injury go unavenged. While people liked Kaobawa, they feared and dreaded Uuwa, and would do their best to stay out of his way. But Uuwa had one talent that Kaobawa did not have. He was recognized to have great skill and knowledge as a shaman. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the hekura, the spirits of the forest, and of traditional medicine. These things go together. If they were sick or feared someone had sent evil magic to harm them, they went to Uuwa.
“He has a particular reputation for treating snake bites, and for his knowledge of snake spirits. He is definitely the man to see. At one point they got so sick of him that they ostracised him. He disappeared into the forest for a few weeks, and just when people were thinking he had died and they were rid of him, he came back, as bad as ever. I can’t stand him: I’m surprised no one took it upon themselves to knock his brains out years ago. But he would be your man.”
He finished his drink, and got up to make another. When he came back, he stood in front of Seb’s hammock and said, “You’re not seriously thinking of going to see him, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” Seb said, and he told him about the toucan spirit’s prophetic text.
Taylor listened quietly, and spoke carefully after a moment’s thought.
“Seb, look. Ebene visions can be beautiful, and affecting. The stuff has changed my life, and given me great insights. But although the hekura are real to the Yururoa, they are not real to us. You do realise that, don’t you?”
Seb said nothing.
They were interrupted by a commotion: two boys were having some kind of fight, and a crowd of onlookers had gathered. Each boy had a long pole, and they were taking turns hitting each other on the head as hard as they could.
Taylor smiled. “They love that game. The winner is the first one who can make the other cry out in pain,” he said.

In his final days in Frank Taylor’s settlement, Seb wore the shaman’s red loincloth and feather armbands all the time, and never again changed back into his original clothes. He took ebene every morning, and while he seemed lucid enough in the remaining hours of the day if you spoke to him, most of the time he seemed to be living on a different plane of reality. In all his waking hours, he could see the dancing lights of the hekura all around him, in the trees, in the shadows, in the eyes of quarrelling dogs and in processions of ants. They shimmered around him like gnats.
The ebene he was taking never quite wore off, and he was ingesting huge quantities of it every day. For someone who was a novice to the drug, and who had not built up a resistance to it over years, as experienced shamans like Fred had, Seb had a formidable capacity for it.
“Give it to me with both barrels, Fred,” he would say.
Seb stopped talking now about the Narwhal, about its mission to protect the Amazonian forest. He was alone now, lost in his own world of spirits. The Cobra Spirit had summoned him, and he was readying himself for the encounter.
He played the role of shaman to the hilt. He spent most of his time with Fred, and copied his habit of talking and singing and chanting to the hekura, copying his nonsense syllables, his scraps of ancient Yururoa verse.
Frank Taylor, whose policy as headman of this settlement was never to forbid anything, enabled Seb in what he wanted to do, and observed it with benign amusement.
He tried to warn Seb about the risks involved in travelling to Jepewi-teri. It would be a dangerous and difficult journey, he said. Jepewi-teri was a primitive, isolated village with none of the amenities Taylor had here. The people were fierce: if they felt at all suspicious of him, they would kill him immediately. There was no way of predicting how they would react to his appearance there. They had little experience of white men, but knew that in most cases they represented a threat. And then there was Uuwa. Seb would somehow have to get along with Uuwa.
None of this put Seb off, so Taylor did what he could to help him with his arrangements.
“I’ll send someone to go with you,” he said. “The boy I call Vivian Darkbloom has a ‘brother’ in that village, which means a cousin. He hasn’t been back for a long time, but they should accept him. He also speaks a bit of English, which he learned from me. He’s a good kid. You’ll get on with him.”
“Another thing you have to be very careful about is snakes. Obviously, this is why you’re going. Let me tell you what I can about that. Snakes are Uuwa’s special subject. He has a reputation for his knowledge of herbal treatments and of the whole supernatural dimension of snake spirits, and he guards this reputation jealously: he keeps all his knowledge secret. While it is true that he has has a genuine record in saving lives, he also uses his knowledge to keep people in a state of perpetual fear.”
“He achieved his reputation at a time when there seemed to be an invasion of snakes. The fact is, wherever there are gardens for food crops, there are snakes, and in Amazonia most of them are camouflaged, so they are very hard to see, and easy to step on. For no special reason, as far as I remember, at one time a lot of people were stepping on snakes. Uuwa treated everyone, but also made it clear that the snake spirits were angry with them, and only he could propitiate these spirits. To this day, they fear Uuwa’s power to control the snake spirits. They think that if anybody makes him angry, he will invoke a snake spirit, and someone will wind up getting bitten. So be careful. I think you’d better take this. I’ll be right back.”
Taylor went into his hut, and came back with a black plastic thing with a handle. It looked like a crab’s claw, with two stubby metal prongs.
“Do you know what this is? It’s a stun gun, the kind the police in America use to incapacitate people who are resisting arrest. It’s an effective first aid treatment for snake bite. If you or someone else gets bitten by a snake, apply the stun gun at points in a ring around the wound.”
“How does it work?” Seb said.
“It destroys the cells of the enzymes in the venom. The voltage has been modified. The factory setting is 100,000 volts, which can knock a man out. This one has been modified to 15,000 volts. It hurts, but it doesn’t burn the skin, and it doesn’t affect the nervous system. But again: be careful, it might scare the living daylights out of someone if you use it. It gives a powerful shock.”
“I’ll be careful,” Seb said.

Seb set off at dawn with a backpack full of trade goods that Taylor had given him (five machetes, a roll of red polyester cloth, some bags of sugar, a box of counterfeit Ray Ban sunglasses), a bare minimum of camping equipment, and a resentful Indian youth called Vivian Darkbloom. If the boy spoke English, he gave little sign of it, though he seemed to understand what Seb was saying to him.
Vivian Darkbloom was disgusted that Seb had insisted on using a damp and dirty wooden dugout canoe to make the journey upriver to Jepewi-teri, rather than the larger, more comfortable and faster inflatable that he could have taken. Seb would not budge from his decision to use the dugout: he liked the idea of the traditional boat. Using wooden paddles rather than an outboard motor meant that the journey would take days rather than hours, and the boy resented the unnecessary exertion.
The journey took three days. They camped twice on the riverbank, and ate canned food. Seb was untroubled by his companion’s surly mood. On the morning of the third day, Vivian Darkbloom pointed to a gap in the trees.
“Stop,” he said, and motioned to Seb to paddle to the bank. They had arrived.
They pulled the canoe onto the muddy bank and climbed up to the path.
They walked for an hour through tall vegetation. The air was hot and damp, and Seb’s shirt, drenched with sweat, clung to his back. A long tear in his right sneaker had grown so that the sole flapped on the ground as he walked. His feet were soaking, and the gnats stung him relentlessly.
At last the outside of the perimeter fence of Jepewi-teri appeared before them in the half-light of the forest, a tight palisade of tall, narrow sticks. The entrance was covered by a thick layer of dry palm leaves. Vivian Darkbloom pushed these away, and crawled through a low opening at the base of the fence. Seb followed him, crawling on his hands and knees.
Inside, he looked up and saw a line of about twenty naked, sweaty, scowling Indian men with blackened faces staring down at him, each holding an enormous bow with the string pulled tight, and each pointing a long, straight arrow at his head. Their faces were distorted horribly by thick wads of tobacco inside their lower lips, and green snot oozed from their nostrils. Seb knew instantly that they were high on ebene, and that he was probably going to die. He closed his eyes, and breathed in a stench of rotting vegetation and faeces.
Vivian Darkbloom started to shout aggressively at the men, repeating a staccato phrase again and again. The Indians and their arrows remained motionless, and Seb stayed frozen where he was, with his eyes closed, head downward, waiting for the arrows to enter his body. Vivian Darkbloom continued to shout, and the men answered him with insulting shouts and surly murmurs. Seb could hear the men move back, and the tension slackened enough for him to dare to open his eyes and look up. They had put down their spears, though they still looked angry and far from welcoming.
“Up,” Vivian Darkbloom said. Seb stood up, shaking. The Indians had lowered their bows and were staring suspiciously at the intruders, surrounding them in a semi-circle.
Vivian Darkbloom addressed the crowd in a loud, firm voice. It was a kind of formal oratory, announcing who he was, who he was related to, where he had come from and who his companion was. The speech was an essential formality of Yururoa custom, establishing their arrival as a visit governed by traditional rules and protocols. It invoked mutual obligations: the visitors to provide presents, and the hosts to provide hospitality. Having satisfied themselves that the visitors knew what the rules were and intended to abide by them, the archers relaxed.
Vivian Darkbloom hadn’t been away from Jepewi-teri for so long that he had forgotten about the tension in the village between its rival headmen, Uuwa and Kaobawa. If they were to avoid trouble, he knew that he would have to greet them both in a way that did not cause him to fall afoul of either. To feel his way forward safely through this diplomatic minefield, Vivian Darkbloom inquired about the health of the leading men of the village, mentioning as many as he could, in a random order, and inserting the names of Uuwa and Kaobawa at different points in the list, separated by other names, according no one a status greater than anyone else. To his relief, he learned that Kaobawa, the benign headman, was away on a hunting trip. This meant that their tribute could be given to Uuwa alone, which would satisfy Uuwa, but also avoid giving offense to Kaobawa. He asked to be taken to Uuwa.
They walked into the central plaza of the shabono. It was very different to the shabono at Frank Taylor’s settlement. This one was entirely enclosed on all sides, rather than an open semi-circle, as at Frank Taylor’s. Seb and Vivian Darkbloom stood alone in the centre of the plaza, and Vivian Darkbloom announced their presence. A figure swing out of a hammock and a short, ugly, muscly man with a tonsured scalp and a necklace of peccary teeth came forward.
“Is that Uuwa?” Seb said. Vivian Darkbloom said nothing.
Uuwa stood in front of Vivian Darkbloom and looked him up and down. He spat out a jet of tobacco juice. He breathed in, his nostrils flared, and he addressed Vivian Darkbloom in an abrupt, peremptory tone. Vivian Darkbloom answered him in a quiet voice. Then Vivian Darkbloom turned to Seb and said, “Give him something.”
Seb took off his backpack, set it on the ground and rummaged in it for a gift. He took out a machete and a pair of sunglasses. He handed these up to Vivian Darkbloom. Uuwa snatched the things from Vivian Darkbloom’s hands, but said nothing and did not move, as if he were expecting more.
“Give him something more,” Vivian Darkbloom said.
Unsure what else to offer, Seb produced a bag of sugar.
“No,” Vivian Darkbloom said, and he reached into Seb’s backpack and took out another pair of counterfeit Ray Bans. Uuwa took these, and put them on. Vivian Darkbloom and Seb could now see themselves reflected in Uuwa’s dark lenses. This seemed to satisfy him. He dismissed them, and waved his arm toward the canopy of the shabono, and then retired to his hammock, with his new machete in one hand and his second pair of sunglasses in the other.
They fetched their gear, and found a space under the canopy to set up camp, and then Vivian Darkbloom went off on his own to look for members of his family. Unlike Taylor’s settlement, there were women and children here. Each family lived in a section of the shabono.
Seb sat in the shade of the shabono, found a bottle of water in his backpack, and took a long drink. Then, realizing he was hungry, and that no one was going to offer him food, he ate a can of sardines and some crackers. While he ate, he watched some naked children – boys eight or ten years old – playing a game in the plaza. They held little bows and arrows, and were shooting arrows at a foot-long lizard that was tied by its neck to a long string, which was secured to a peg in the ground. As it dashed around in circles, the boys laughed and shouted as one arrow after another failed to hit the target. When he had seen enough, Seb rigged up his hammock and immediately fell asleep, to the sound of cockroaches rustling in the palm branches of the roof above him.

At first he thought he was dreaming. He was lying in the hammock, suspended between roof poles in a shabono, in the dark, coccooned in mosquito netting. All around him were asleep. He could hear their murmurings and breathing, was dimly aware of the infrared presence of bodies. He could see nothing but a distant orange blob, the embers of a fire.
He heard a commotion of outside in the forest: a throng of men: he could hear them talking and crushing branches underfoot. The sound terrified him. He was certain it was men from an enemy village on a raid. They would smash their way into the shabono and kill whoever they could find. Now awake, he looked at his watch, but he couldn’t read the dial in the dark. He sat up and tried to see. He could hear frogs croaking in the distance, and an infinity of tiny rhythms. Soon he could hear the men enter the shabono, talking loudly, arguing. Their chests glowed with a pale green phosphorescence: they had smeared themselves with fireflies.
They did not seem to have hostile intent. They acted like they lived here. After listening and watching as best he could Seb realized that this was Kaobawa’s hunting party returning. Some retreated to hammocks; others built up the fire and sat around it, talking loudly. Seb gradually went back to sleep, despite the clamour of their voices.
The dawn chill came a short time later, and Seb awoke, shivering. He was unable to get back to sleep, and watched the grey light uncover the scene in the shabono. Women lit fires in other parts of the settlement, and babies began to cry. Vivian Darkbloom was nowhere to be seen. He fumbled for his water bottle and drank the bottle empty. It was his last one. He wrapped the hammock around himself to keep warm, and dozed. His eyes stung.
The hunters sat around the fire while some women butchered the game the men had brought back: a peccary and two birds. Then they put the meat on the fire; it hissed and smoked. The savoury smell made Seb’s mouth water, and his stomach gaped with hunger. By the time the sun had risen above the shabono roof, the meat was cooked, and the hunters were chopping it with machetes and bringing armfuls of it to their families in their own sections of the shabono. No one had given Seb any food since he had arrived here; he might as well have been invisible. He wanted to eat: not only was he very hungry, but the act of sharing food would be a way to introduce himself to these people. He decided to hold back and wait until he had a better sense of the pattern of the day. He felt weak.

A few hours later on the day he was to die, Seb felt someone shaking him. He woke up, and saw the face of Vivian Darkbloom looking down at him. His face looked different: he had a large wad of tobacco in his lower lip, making his mouth bulge grossly.
“They take ebene now,” he said.
Seb swung himself out of his hammock and onto his feet. Uuwa was standing as still as a post in the centre of the plaza, waiting. By now, Vivian Darkbloom had given him a garbled account of everything he knew about Seb, which wasn’t much. He was a foreign doctor, he was a friend of Frank Taylor, he liked taking ebene. Neither Seb nor Frank Taylor had tried to explain to Vivian Darkbloom any of Seb’s complicated reasons for wanting to come here, his esoteric purpose, his vision of the toucan’s prophecy of the Cobra Spirit, Seb’s belief in his own sacred identity.
He thought this as he walked towards the shaman, and when he stood before him face to face he held out his hand, and Uuwa took it and held it for a long time. Then he pulled Seb’s head towards him and pressed his damp cheek against his.

They sat opposite each other on the ground in a shady part of the shabono. Vivian Darkbloom prepared the drug. He took the green powder from a package made of leathery green leaves and tamped it into two long bamboo tubes. Uuwa took up one of the tubes and put the end against his nostril. Vivian Darkbloom took the other end, squatted down, took a deep breath, and blew hard.
Uuwa howled. He sneezed and grimaced and coughed. Then Vivian Darkbloom gave him a second dose. Uuwa sat back and waited for the hekura to appear, while Vivian Darkbloom prepared the drug for Seb.
As soon as the ebene entered his sinuses, Seb knew this was a different order of drug to the kind he had taken at Taylor’s. This stuff was much stronger, and much more toxic and foul-tasting. It burned and stung his nostrils and mouth. His eyes watered, and green lights of intense nausea clouded his field of vision. His head spun as the nausea engulfed him; it rose up within him like an ocean wave, and he began to vomit violently. The spasms were sharp and painful; he felt he was drowning. He saw points of white light and then everything went black.
Seb fell sideways, and curled up on his side in a fetal position. His eyes were squeezed shut, and his mouth hung open limply. Oblivious to Seb’s suffering, Uuwa paced the ground, singing to the spirits.
Seb lay still, unable to move. He felt himself streaking through a black void, blind, aware of nothing but a raging terror, and of a muscular constriction that made him gasp for air and fear that he was suffocating. His consciousness hurtled through space, yet his body felt as immobile as stone. The part of his mind that remained aware announced the thought that if this was the experience of death, which it seemed to be, then death offered no consolation: no meaning, no resolution, only the torment of a violent separation of mind from body. He wanted to weep at its pointlessness.
He lay there all day, with the sun burning his exposed skin, turning it red. The Indians of Jepewi-teri came and went, singly and in small groups, to look at him there, curious but fatalistic. Ebene sometimes affected people this way. All you could do was wait and see. Perhaps white men could not take it, they said among themselves. Perhaps it was poison to them. Perhaps someone had sent evil magic to kill him.
In the cool of the evening, as families were cooking food for supper, Seb came to his senses, grateful to be alive. Feeling shaky and remorseful, he raised himself onto his hands and knees, and felt dizzy. He took deep breaths to steady himself, and the dizziness abated enough for him to rise to his feet. Faces observed him from a distance. A small dog approached and sniffed around his ankles. He ignored it, and tried to concentrate. He felt disoriented, like someone trying to find a door in a dark room. He thought, I need to get out of here.
The entrance to the shabono was a wide gap in the fabric of the circular structure. Through it, he could see the gardens of Jepewi-teri, where the people grew food crops: he saw trees and low vegetation. He headed towards this, thinking a short walk might revive him and help him to clear his head.
He walked among plantain trees, growing head-high in uneven rows. The trees were laden with big, dark green fruit, with thick, leathery skins. Seeing them made him realise how hungry he was, and how long it had been since he had last eaten. Would they never give him anything to eat? He thought of picking a plantain and eating it, but remembered that he could not eat them raw. He walked on, feeling the crunch of leaves underfoot, treading carefully, in case his bare feet came upon something sharp. The plantain grove was big; it seemed to go on forever. Through the leaves he saw spots of red on the ground ahead of him. He approached them to see what they were: bright crimson fruits that had dropped down from a tree. He knew that the Indians ate these, so he bent down to pick one up. It was the size and shape of an egg, with a thick hull. He knew that you peeled this off and ate the fruit inside, which was sweet and juicy.
It was then that he felt the snake bite the side of his right foot – a small, sharp, sleek pain, at first, and then the pain grew as it flowed up his leg. He knew what it was, and he knew that he didn’t have much time. He ran as best he could back to the shabono, crashing through the plantain trees. His leg already felt stiff and heavy, a useless vessel of pure blazing pain. Seb knew he had the stun gun that Frank Taylor had given him in his backpack. He needed to find it and use it, fast.
The shabono was filled with the savoury smoke of cooking fires as he staggered into it. Faces turned towards him as he entered. He managed a few steps into the centre of the plaza, and then collapsed. Uuwa rushed towards him. He recognized the brown stain on Seb’s right foot: the flesh was necrotising rapidly. Seb tried to speak, to tell him about the stun gun, but Uuwa did not understand what he was saying. Where was Vivian Darkbloom? He was nowhere to be seen. Seb tried to call out for him. He heard Uuwa shouting, and then a crowd gathered around Seb where he lay, and Uuwa was rubbing something moist and gooey into the wound and all over his leg.
“Surucucú,” Uuwa said, which was the name of the type of snake that had bitten him. He knew this from the appearance of the bite. The Surucucú was common in this area, and at least one person a year died of its venom, although most survived after long illness. Uuwa’s herbal poultice was somewhat effective as a remedy in most cases, though it was hard to say how much.
Seb’s breathing grew shallow and intermittent, and after a few minutes it stopped altogether. Uuwa stood up and announced in a low voice to those around him that Seb was dead. They looked down in silence at the dead man.

They carried him back to Frank Taylor’s camp: Vivian Darkbloom, Uuwa and two others. They put him in a litter of palm branches, and then loaded the litter into a wooden canoe.
Paddling in silence, and assisted in their journey by a current that was flowing in their direction, Seb’s Yururoa funeral procession arrived at the camp early the following morning.

Frank Taylor and Dr Kilhuth met the party when it arrived. There was a protocol of greetings and formulaic speech to be observed on such occasions, which the anthropologists and the older Indians in Taylor’s village knew and followed the best they could. The litter was placed on the ground in the center of the shabono. Normally, the body would be cremated there as quickly as possible. Sitting vigil over the body, and waving away insects with branches, Taylor and Dr Kilhuth delayed the proceedings until they had discussed what they should do.
“There’s no point trying to ship him back, is there?” Taylor said. “What do you think?”
“It’s out of the question. It’s too complicated, it would take too long,” Dr Kilhuth said. “The body wouldn’t last the journey, either if we waited here for the Narwhal people to come back to collect it, or if we tried ourselves to bring it to the airstrip at Itaituba.”
“Whatever we do, we have to notify someone. We have to let Narwhal know immediately. What about his family? They’ll have to be notified.”
“I have to admit I don’t know anything about his family,” Dr Kilhuth said. “Certainly, I know that he didn’t have any children.”
“He didn’t seem the type.”
“Indeed. I seem to recall him saying something about an ex-wife, but I don’t know anything about her: even where she is, or what the state of the relationship is.”
“This isn’t good,” Taylor said. “It’s bad for the Yururoa to have a white man die in their village. I can just imagine what will happen when the missionaries hear about it. It will be taken as an excuse to make their lives even more difficult than they already are. You know the kind of thing they’ll say: that they’re dangerous savages who have to be brought under control. And then the garimperos will feel emboldened to move in as a result, thinking they have the powers that be on their side. They think the only good Indian is a dead Indian. They’ll shoot them as soon as they see them.”
“Do you have any idea what killed him?” Dr Kilhuth said.
“Uuwa told me it was a surucucú. That’s a fer-de-lance or common lancehead. They are very common around here. They are attracted to the mice and insects that feed in the plantain gardens. It’s a terrible problem in Jepewi-teri. I should have just sent them a crate of sneakers long ago. I thought about it once, but I didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t think they’d wear them. Now this happens. What the fuck was up with him? I’ve never seen ebene affect anyone like that.”
“He had problems,” Dr Kilhuth said. He slapped his knees with both hands and stood up abruptly. The subject was distasteful to him.
“The turmoil he liked to create finally caught up with him, I guess. But I feel a responsibility for this. I made him come here,” he said. “Come on, Frank. Let’s get this show on the road.”

They discussed the details of the funeral ceremony with Uuwa. Taylor organized some of his people to collect firewood and to build the pyre. Others began to prepare a feast in honour of the visitors.
The pyre grew until it reached four feet high and ten feet wide. When it was ready, they heaved Seb’s body onto it. The sticks cracked under the weight, and the body sunk down, but the pyre held him.
Yururoa custom dictated that a person be cremated with all his personal possessions, but Taylor and Dr Kilhuth agreed that this aspect of the tradition should be discreetly waived; it would be too difficult to burn a whole GPS receiver, for instance, with all its hazardous chemicals and metals.
When none of the Yururoa were looking, Dr Kilhuth removed the Tiffany watch from Seb’s wrist, though he decided to leave the bracelets. He drew back when he touched them: to struggle with their antique Tibetan clasps seemed like a violation of the sanctity of the dead. Someone close to him should have the watch, he thought. He dropped it into the backpack Seb had left behind in Taylor’s hut before he went to Jepewi-teri: he felt a nervous guilty thrill in handling the dead man’s possessions, then a wave of self-disgust.
Taylor poured gasoline from a jerry can over the pyre. He walked all around it, sprinkling gasoline onto the sticks. The fumes rose up like a shimmering glass curtain in the midday sun. By now a crowd had gathered, forming a circle around the pyre at a safe distance. Then he struck a match and threw it on. The pyre burst into flames with a whoosh, and the wood began to crackle. A gentle breeze was blowing, and the fire grew quickly.
The body lay crumpling slowly in a cage of bright fire, and turned into a black silhouette. The flesh crackled and shrank off the bones; the hair burnt in a sizzling flash and the skin of the head melted off to reveal a smiling skull beneath. Soon all was black. The fire burned to the ground, and by nightfall, when the feast began, a mound of ash lay smouldering in the centre of the shabono. The final dismemberment of the shaman was complete.

Chapter 19
CAMP HOPE

The day Seb left Frank Taylor’s camp, Donna and Murdo set in motion their own plan to leave. Not just to leave Taylor’s settlement, with its drugged-up Indians and consumer garbage, but to leave the Narwhal campaign altogether, to leave Amazonia, to leave Brazil, and go home, go home. That’s what Donna wanted, and Murdo was happy to go with her. They agreed they would bring Roberta with them.
Roberta was in a very bad way. She had built a kind of nest for herself in a dark part of the shabono, a pile of palm branches in which she lay wrapped up in a sleeping bag day and night. She would emerge at unpredictable intervals for food or drink, and to relieve herself in the forest. Usually she would emerge during supper time, when people were gathered around the fire. She would not speak unless spoken to. “I’m OK,” she would say, and then disappear from the firelight into her own darkness. She didn’t complain or ask for anything, but seemed to be patiently and obediently waiting until the ordeal could be over, and in the meantime she was trying to keep it all at bay. Life in Taylor’s camp -- its discomfort, its strangeness -- were not doing her any good, and she needed to get out.
They talked about it with Frank Taylor. Woodsmoke stung their eyes as they sat around the fire. They felt dirty and uncomfortable. They were sick of being bitten by insects all the time, something Taylor didn’t seem to mind. He calmly swatted them away with the patience of a cow switching flies with its tail. He sympathized with them, and offered to help them arrange their journey.
“Saying this goes completely against my principles, but I think you’d better go up to the mission. If you tell them about Roberta, I’m pretty sure they’ll arrange to have you flown out of there as a medical case. That’s what they say they’re here for, after all,” he said.
“What’s the mission like?” Donna said.
Frank Taylor snorted with derision. “I don’t remember what they call themselves, or what flavour of holy roller they are, but they’re American bible-thumpers. For their own amusement, and no other discernible purpose, they have set up a kind of gulag for misguided Indians. It’s about thirty kilometres north of here, up the river. They know what I think of them, and I know what they think of me, and we co-exist by having as little to do with each other as possible. But this is an emergency, and I don’t think they’d say no to you, especially since you’re trying to leave, and they’re very well equipped. I’ll call them on the radio.”
He paused.
“I’m sorry. It’s been great having you here. I’ll miss you.”
The next day he told them that it was all arranged. Two boys from the settlement would take them by boat up to the mission, and from there a plane would take them to Manaus. They would have to pay for the plane, though: the missionary had insisted on that. “He wasn’t in the mood to do us any favours,” Taylor said. “It doesn’t surprise me. When you get there, ask for Bobby Briggs. He’s the guy in charge.”

After a long river journey and a three-hour bushwhack through wet forest, Murdo, Donna and Roberta, accompanied by two of Taylor’s boys, arrived at Bobby Briggs’s mission. It was called Camp Hope (“A Ministry of the Sovereign Holiness Church of Christ,” according to the sign). In the afternoon heat they emerged from the trees into a vast flat expanse of cleared forest. A startling vision of neatness appeared before them: a line of white-painted wooden cabins, set back from a dirt airstrip. It looked as if a piece of suburban Ohio had been cut and pasted onto the Amazonian forest, a misplaced pixel in the big picture of the earth. As soon as they broke into the clearing, the Indians who had been accompanying them did not stay to look, but disappeared without a word back into the forest. Murdo, Donna and Roberta stood blinking in wonder under a blazing blue sky.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Donna said.
“Where do we go?” Roberta said, suddenly fearful.
A cabin at the end of the line of buildings had a screened-in porch and a tall radio mast beside it. It was painted such a brilliant white that it hurt their eyes.
“That one at the end must be where the boss lives,” Murdo said.
There was no one in sight. In the distance they could hear the whine of an engine. It got closer; eventually they could see a white man riding a huge and very loud tractor lawnmower. He was cutting a neat line along the far edge of the airstrip. As soon as the man driving it saw them, he stopped mowing, killed the engine and walked towards them. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and navy blue trousers.
“You must be the people from Taylor’s place,” he said, squinting into the light from beneath the peak of a baseball cap. The cap had a logo of a white dove on it.
“Yes,” Murdo said.
The question gave Donna a twinge of anxiety. It sounded like an accusation, as if the place they had come from immediately put them in disfavour. She decided that she didn’t like this man at all. Already, she thought, she preferred Frank Taylor’s place to this.
“Praise the Lord. You made it, that’s great. Welcome to Camp Hope. Bobby Briggs. I’m the pastor here. Good to meet you.” He shook hands with them all with a big meaty hand and gave a broad smile.
“That must have been a heck of a journey,” Bobby Briggs said. “Folks usually come in here by plane. Did you have a guide?”
“We had two Indians from Frank Taylor’s camp,” Murdo said.
“Where are they?” Bobby Briggs said.
“On their way home, I guess. They didn’t want to stay.”
Bobby Briggs’s smile faded into a frown. “That don’t surprise me much. I don’t know Frank Taylor, but I do know that his Indians are lost in sin and witchcraft. If we could help them, we would, but we wouldn’t be welcome, to say the least. Time will tell, and the Lord will prevail. He always does. Frankly, you’re better off out of that place. Which one is the evacuee?”
“I guess that’s me,” Roberta said shyly. She was standing behind Donna and Murdo, as if trying to hide.
“Are you in need of medical attention?”
“No,” she said. “I’m OK.”
“Praise the Lord.” He gave another beaming smile. “Hey,” he said, with sudden enthusiasm, as if he had just had a good idea, “Let me show you what we’ve got going on here.”
They followed him down the line of whitewashed cabins. The treeline was far away in every direction, as if the intention of the camp was to keep as great a distance as possible between the human beings who lived here and the forest.
“This is the women’s dorm. You two ladies can bunk here. Maria inside will show you where to go. Dump your stuff inside. We’ve arranged a plane to come for you tomorrow morning, first thing. Seven o’clock.”
As he strode past the next building, Bobby Briggs said, “This is the kitchen and dining room. Supper is at five o’clock.”
About a hundred Indians lived here, he said. They learned English and had daily classes in religious instruction. Others worked in the gardens, growing food for the community. He opened the door of the next building they came to.
Suddenly they found themselves at the front of a classroom where a lesson was in progress. A mass of brown eyes turned towards them. The students, about a dozen of them, were Indians of all ages. Like Bobby Briggs, they wore white shirts, and their glossy black hair was neatly cut above their ears. They were sitting at rows of desks, watching a silent film that was being projected onto a white bedsheet tacked up on the blackboard. The film showed characters in thick coloured robes with Arab headdresses and long beards.
“Excuse us, Don,” he said to the teacher. “Don’t mind us. These folks are visiting with us for a while. I’m giving them a tour.”
The teacher, a young, gangly American in a checked shirt, smiled at the visitors. “We’re learning about the Book of Leviticus,” he said.
“That’s fine, Don,” Bobby Briggs said. And then, in a loud even preacher’s voice, he turned to the class.
“People, I want you to welcome our guests. They have come from a place where the presentation of the gospel isn’t welcome, so we’re glad to have them here, and I want you all to make them feel at home. This is Murdo, and this is Donna, and this is -- what did you say your name was, honey?”
Roberta flushed. She couldn’t speak.
All eyes were on her.
“Um,” she said, and fell into another abyssal silence.
“Natasha,” she said at last, looking down at the floor.
“Natasha, that’s right,” Bobby Briggs said. “This is Natasha.”
The class listened to all this in obedient, incurious silence. Then Bobby Briggs turned his address to the visitors.
“As you can see, the Lord is doing great work here. If the news media would come here, they’d see it’s the biggest story going. These people had nothing before we came here. They were headhunters. Now half of them are baptised. This place is their only link to the outside world. Joe, when were you baptised?” he said, addressing an elderly man in the front row.
The old man said something indistinct through a mouthful of missing teeth.
“He said he became a Christian on Easter Sunday last,” the teacher said.
“That’s great, Joe. OK, Don, we’ll leave you to it,” Bobby Briggs said.
Outside, he asked them what they were doing in Amazonia. Donna had decided to say as little to this man as possible. She let Murdo answer the question. Murdo talked about the Narwhal campaign against gold mining and the destruction of the Amazonian forest.
Bobby Briggs was unimpressed. He shrugged. “We know there are a lot of ecology people here these days. But remember, we were here first. The way I see it, whatever happens to the jungle is the will of God. We can’t do anything about that. The important thing is saving souls, and that’s what we do here.”
Donna’s heart hardened.

They sat with Bobby Briggs at supper in the dining hall. The tables were covered in stainless steel dishes of food and pitchers of milk. Bobby Briggs sat at the head of the table, and held Donna’s and Murdo’s hands in his as he improvised a Grace. With his eyes shut tight in concentration, he intoned, “Lord we thank you for this food, and for the fellowship that you have bestowed upon us, and for the presence of our visitors, and we thank you for their safe journey here. We pray that the millions who live in the darkness of sin and witchcraft here in this state will open their hearts to the gospel and to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. We hope our guests have a safe onward journey tomorrow and that Natasha recovers her health through your healing power. Amen.”
Donna pulled her hand away as soon as she could. His hand had been clamped down hard on hers as he spoke; he gave it a little jolt as each phrase of the prayer came to him.
Roberta did not eat during the meal, and Donna did not speak. Donna didn’t just dislike Bobby Briggs by now: she hated him. She realised that she hated this place more than the gold mines. Her crusading zeal had evaporated by now; her spreadsheets and reports had melted into mental slush. At least the miners were Brazilian, she thought. They were just poor men. At least they were free, doing what they wanted to do, whatever laws they were breaking. At least they didn’t have a plan to destroy the way of life of the Indians, to turn them into white bread American proles, cut off from the forest, from their own religion, from their freedom. But in one sense Bobby Briggs was right: there was not much they could do to save the forest. It was the people that mattered, more than the sloth, the anteater, the kapok tree, the ricinuleid spider. If that’s true then I guess that means we were wasting our time.
I wonder what Seb would think of that, she thought.

The plane came the following morning, descending from the milky sky like an angel from heaven. In the freshness of the day they threw their backpacks into it and climbed in. Murdo peeled off five hundred dollar bills from the wad that he kept hidden in a pouch in his shirt and handed them to the pilot.
The plane sped along the dirt runway, and pulled up into the air. Once they were above the treeline, Murdo looked down and saw a flock and yellow and red birds scatter over the treetops, disturbed by the sound of the engine. Soon all detail was lost, and they were flying over an infinite, flat, monotonous expanse of green, occasionally gashed and cut into rough rectangles where the forest had been cleared for a settlement.
“Goodbye, Bobby Briggs,” Donna said.
“Goodbye, Amazonia,” Murdo said. “I’ll probably never see it again.”
“No, I don’t think I’ll be coming back either,” Donna said.

Chapter 20
MANAUS

In Manaus, Donna and Murdo went to the American consular office to try to get Murdo a replacement passport. They trudged through the hot, sweaty, dirty streets of Manaus trying to find it, fending off hawkers, including one who tried to recruit them for an “eco tour” of the jungle. They were expecting a huge, grand embassy building, surrounded by a high iron gate, with a garden and trees. Instead, the consulate occupied a floor in a cracked, mildewy office building.
The lobby was cool and had a marble tiled floor. It felt strange to be pressing a button and getting into an elevator. The consular office was air-conditioned; after months in the forest, it was like being in a refrigerator. They took a number and waited on hard chairs under fluorescent light. The only decorations in the room were a potted plant and a framed portrait of the President. There was a Coca-Cola machine, so Murdo bought them both a drink.
“Are you together?” the official said, speaking from behind a high counter with a bullet-proof glass window in front of it.
“Yes,” Donna said.
They sat before a young foreign service officer: clean-cut, alert, polite, wearing a striped silk tie and a neatly ironed shirt with a button-down collar. Murdo said he needed a replacement passport, since he had lost his original one. And he tried to explain how he lost it.
He hadn’t told this story for a long time, and he spoke with hesitation, but then the pieces of his story began to tumble out of him, and became a torrent of fragments. The consul had to ask him repeatedly to back up, to clarify. He couldn’t help telling the story as if it were a plea for clemency. He told about the Neroli, the Liberian-registered freighter en route to Rio de Janeiro, the Dutch captain, the Filipino crew, the arrival at Belem, the attack. He grew agitated as he summoned it all back again, and for the first time he mentioned new details, ones that he had never remembered himself until now.
“At first I though they were pirates. Then I realized that even though they were wearing police uniforms they were worse than pirates. They could shoot us all and not have to worry. It was very nasty, very scary,” Murdo said.
“We know about this case,” the American said. “I’m very glad you’re safe. We have been in touch with SENAD about this, the Brazilian government agency responsible for drug enforcement. It turns out that ship -- the Neroli -- was also carrying two tons of raw cocaine paste, which was to be collected and taken to a distillery outside Belem. The problem was that the captain was trying to bring it in without giving the Civil Police their cut.
“So far, they have given us nothing, which is disappointing but frankly not completely surprising. However, we did put some pressure on the Brazilian authorities, and the Federal Police are investigating it now. We understand that they made some arrests, including a number of members of the Civil Police from Belem. As I say, you are lucky to be alive, and we will do everything we can to help you. How did you get away?”
Murdo put his hand to his ear, and felt the smooth scar. And remembered the stubby blade, like a worn-out kitchen knife, with its grubby rope handle that the cop had held in his fist and pressed against his ear. The nauseating mingled smell of diesel and garbage. He was on a chair in the galley, with two men holding him down, trying to keep him still, and the third about to cut his ear off, when the boss shouted for help in the captain’s cabin, where the rest of the crew were being held. They locked the door from the outside. Murdo climbed out of a skylight in the galley ceiling, working his body through the little window with the frantic need of a mink in a trap biting off its own leg to free itself. He ran down the gangway and bolted from the wharf and into the town, where the festival of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré was taking place. Then he stopped talking. He was remembering it in full for the first time, in the light of day.
“Are you all right?” the consul said.
“Yes,” Murdo said. “I’m just trying to remember. It was very confusing. It has been very hard to distinguish what really happened from a bad dream. Was there any report of anybody being killed?”
The question made the consul squirm in his seat. He didn’t want to give away any more information than he had to. He twisted his lacquer fountain pen in his hands, and then set it down precisely in the centre of the shiny desk, studying it as he prepared the neat parcel of information he was about to vouchsafe.
“According to the information that we have at this time, two of the Civil Police officers who were arrested were charged with the murder of a crewman, a Filipino national.” He rested his fingertips on the pen as he spoke.
“Huh,” Murdo said.
“It is a very sensitive case, which luckily for us, and for you, has not reached the attention of the media,” the consul said.
“Is there going to be a trial? Am I going to have to testify?” He dreaded the prospect: he just wanted to go home.
“Again, as I say, this is a very sensitive case, which is being handled at the intelligence level. But I can say that luckily for us, and for you, there will probably not be a trial at this time.”
“Why not?”
“Two of the Civil Police officers – Belem’s finest, no doubt – died in custody. These were the same officers who were charged with murder.”
“Now. Do you have enough money to get back home? Because we can lend you repatriation funds. However, I wouldn’t recommend that you borrow money from us. We’re very expensive. We have to do something about the budget deficit, you know.”
This attempt at a joke fell flat on its face. The consul went red.
“You’ll have to fill out some forms and pay a fee. You do all that next door. They will assist you. It will take about a week. In the meantime, I would advise you to remain in Manaus. Where are you staying?”
“Hotel Amazonas,” Donna said.
“Nice place. Don’t forget that we’re closed next Monday. Public holiday. We are closed on all American and Brazilian public holidays and sunny days.”
They got up to leave.
“Have a nice day.”
“Thank you.”
“Wow,” Murdo said, in the elevator on the way down.
“What?” Donna said.
“That was something.”
“What was?”
“What that consul said.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know you didn’t kill anybody.”
“How did you know that?
“I just knew.”
“Even I didn’t know that.”
They went back to the Hotel Amazonia in a taxi.
“I could do with a drink,” Donna said. “Something in a coconut with a paper umbrella.”
“So could I,” Murdo said. “But I don’t care what it’s served in as long as it’s got alcohol in it.”

Back at the Hotel Amazonas, in a room with a balcony and a bowl of tropical fruit and a TV with a remote control, Donna mustered her courage and called the Narwhal. It was time to face the music, and this was the right moment. Murdo was in the bathroom. She wanted to be alone when she made the call.
She called the ship’s satellite telephone number. Captain Johnson answered and told her the news about Seb. The call was brief. After she hung up, she sat very still on the edge of the bed.
After a few minutes, Murdo came out of the bathroom, feeling cheerful and comfortable in a white towelling bathrobe. But the sight of her expression changed his mood suddenly.
“What was that?” he said. He could tell it was something serious. Donna’s eyes flickered between mental states.
“Seb has died,” she said. “They burned his body three days ago. The campaign is over, it’s been called off.”
“What?”
She didn’t need to repeat it.
Murdo sat down in an armchair in the corner of the room.
“Crazy fucker,” he said -- as if Seb had merely done something careless and stupid, like dropping a tray of eggs.
But the reality quickly sank in. Seb had broken more than a tray of eggs. Murdo knew that he was lost once again, that their time together now would end before it had even had time to begin. He could feel himself disappearing back into the oblivion from which he had come. The spirits of the Amazon that had rescued him and destroyed others had withdrawn and returned to the forest, like a swarm of gnats. A different kind of memory came back to him now, a memory of reality rather than a memory of trauma, of the life he had tried to flee when he boarded the Neroli: the unwelcome memory of the gloomy dawns of his home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, of work in the fishing boats, of the seasickness, the cold, the black waves of the Atlantic, the binge drinking of fishermen in the 24-hour dockside bars. He had come from this, a life of graft and grime and tedium, and done all he could to run away from it, and now he was fated to return to it. This was the experience, foreign to all of them, that the people on the Narwhal had been unable to read in Murdo, seeing only clenched reticence and absence.
“‘As I was going down the stair’,” Donna said, “‘I met a man who wasn’t there.’”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a poem. Murdo, will you tell me something you’ve never told me?”
“Yes?”
“Where are you from?”
“I thought you knew.”
“You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
“I’m asking you now.”
“New England. Gloucester, Mass.”
“Uh huh. So how come you can speak Portuguese?”
“I picked it up. There are a lot of Portuguese fishermen there. I spent a lot of time with them.”
“You must have been scared.”
“I’m scared now.”
“No, I mean before. All that stuff on the ship. The other one, I mean.”
“I suppose it’s what you’d call false memory syndrome, or something like that.”
“A source monitoring error, I think. I took a semester of psychology.”
“Whatever.”
“I never thought you’d done anything wrong.”
“Yes you did, you thought I was a criminal.”
“Well, yes, I did at first.”
“It was Kilhuth who stole that watch.”
“I know.”
“He put it back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So what happens now?” He was thinking of what would happen to them.
“Seb’s dead, and I have to go to New York to see the Narwhal board and tell them what happened. That will be the real funeral. I think it’s probably the end of Narwhal. It is for me anyway. Let someone else save the world; I’m not up to it. I don’t even think I’m going to finish my doctorate. I’ve had enough, I just want to go home.”
“I thought this was your home.”
“I don’t know where my home is any more.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Are you going to come with me?”
“I’d just be in the way.”
“What about afterwards?”
“Maybe.”
That night no sword lay between them.

Dr Kilhuth remained at Frank Taylor’s camp. He made himself at home there. With the help of some of the Indians, he built himself a small hut beside Taylor’s. It had a hammock and a rickety chair and table, at which he would pass the mornings reading or writing notes and letters. Frank Taylor was happy to have the company, and Dr Kilhuth enjoyed being among the Yururoa once again. He fitted in with the life of the village; his knowledge of the language and customs of the Yururoa made him an asset. His command of the language was a source of inexhaustible fascination and amusement to the Yururoa, who would quiz him on points of Yururoa vocabulary, then squeal with laughter at his responses, especially when he gave the wrong answer. When he could not remember a word, he would tear at his hair and grimace, and this also delighted them.
“But I have been in another village for such a long time!” he would protest.
Eventually the time came for Dr Kilhuth to discuss his plans with Frank Taylor. As they sat drinking coffee one morning, Dr Kilhuth said, “Frank, I’d like to stay here for a while.”
“That’s fine with us, Jac. You are welcome to stay for as long as you’d like.”
“Coming back here has rekindled my interest in continuing fieldwork among the Yururoa. I have been mulling over some ideas for articles. I’d like to base myself here to develop them and conduct research.”
“It’s a great place to be,” Frank Taylor said. “I couldn’t live anywhere else now. As long as you don’t mind that.” Dr Kilhuth looked up as Frank Taylor pointed to a distant column of thick black smoke rising up above the treetops and blending into the hazy sky.
“What is it?” Dr Kilhuth said. “Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but those fires have been getting closer every day,” Frank Taylor said. “It’s probably garimperos clearing forest for another airstrip. They’re burning everything. An endless bonfire of trees, insects, birds, monkeys. They’re incinerating species there that no one has even catalogued, and that probably even the Indians have neither seen nor given a name to. It’s all going up in smoke. No one will ever know they even existed now. In its place there will be wasteland. I don’t know how close they’ll come, whoever they are, but if they get too close, it’s bound to be bad for us here. Whatever happens, the important thing for us is going to be to stay put, to keep this settlement together. So I guess we’ll both have plenty to keep us busy.”
He got up to mix them a cocktail.
God alone is omniscient.

END

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