Turning Back the Sun (18 page)

But by mid-afternoon the clouds were still high and few. For hours the hills had retreated before the convoy in dim palisades, but now one group separated itself from the rest. It was barely two hundred meters high, but in this flat land it rose harsh and precipitous, topped by porous crags like a man-made wall. At its foot, where it broke into gorges, the jeeps could go no further, and the men disembarked into a soft, still air. It was utterly silent. The scarps fell to their feet in a debris of shale. On the summits the northwest wind had twisted all the trees one way, but in this stillness you could believe that no breeze had ever disturbed the place.

They entered the bluffs in single file, with two Lewis gun sections bringing up the rear. The way was no more
than a shallow defile. Their boots clanged on its rocks. Once it opened into a stony valley and the first signs of human life appeared: a small salt pan where skins had been staked out to cure. Until now Rayner had hoped vainly that the place was uninhabited, but soon afterwards they passed a quarry littered with silcrete flints, and a pair of graves.

He edged up the line of march until he was trudging behind the half-caste corporal, and asked him, “Who are the people here?”

The man turned a blank face on him. “They used to be Yiljerong.” He turned his back again. “But I heard people come here from everywhere now.”

“They”re not hostile?”

“I don”t know what they are. They”re not my people.”

Next moment, with bewildering suddenness, the rocky slopes dropped behind them and they were advancing under trees. With every step these thickened inexplicably round them, until they were moving down a dense, sunless glade. Giant silkwoods lifted from the shadows thirty meters or more, and tossed down a tangle of lianas or spun them overhead from branch to branch. Enormous they seemed, festooned with their creepers and lichen, and after the open savannah the damp smell of the rotted trunks and dark earth rose to the men”s nostrils with a fetid closeness. They went nervously now. Nobody spoke. The rifles slipped from their shoulders and into their arms. And their range of vision had dwindled drastically. Among the thronging trees a host of savages might have touched them with their hands. Rayner, moving in the center of the column, could not glimpse Ivar, near its head. Momentarily he forgot what the soldiers might do, and felt the threat of a spear tip in his back.

Then they came upon the explanation for this fertility: a deep, auburn river. It had risen somewhere higher in the bluffs, and must escape by another gorge to die far out in the wilderness. But for the moment it carried its rain forest
luxuriantly between the cliffs. Turtles and thin black fish were swimming under the bank, and big trees had slumbered into the water, which was already brown with the tannin of rotted vegetation.

As the column advanced, it was clear to Rayner that the savages must know they were coming. The natives” traces were all about. A maze of stone fish traps ruffled the shallows, and he noticed a midden of shells in a water hole near the shore, where mussels had been baked in the earth and eaten. He remembered the mussel-shell necklace which the old man had given him, and was touched again by a fear that the couple might have reached here.

But there was still no sign of anybody. Even the mosquitoes seemed to have gone. The soldiers tried to tread lightly, but the forest floor was a matted commotion of fibers and palm branches, friable as bones underfoot. Their march across it detonated like pistol shots.

Only once, the column stopped to listen, and the forest fell silent. A diluted light survived here, like sunlight infiltrating a crypt. Parrots flew through its half-darkness. But all Rayner could hear was the rasp and click of leaves falling through branches to the ground. He prayed that the savages had taken fright and might simply watch from hiding places until the troops had gone; he even imagined a reception party at the end of the path, stately and bemused, with a basket of doughy welcome-cakes.

But instead the track ended in an empty space and a rearing cliff. The dying sunlight streamed in their faces. The scarp might have been no more than fifty meters high, but loomed immense in its suddenness: a red-rocked peninsula swept on its far sides by the river. Its size and clarity, cut by the brown water, proclaimed: this is a holy place.

The column shambled to a halt on the edge of the clearing, which was ringed by stones as if for ceremony, and Rayner saw that in its center stood a limestone pinnacle. The soldiers sat down in an exhaustion of heat and
nerves, while Ivar and the lieutenant consulted quietly. Rayner took the half-caste corporal by the arm and turned him toward the pinnacle. “What is that?”

The man gazed at it with the faint knot of savage puzzlement, and said, “It”s something they worship.”

He seemed reluctant to walk over to it, but Rayner led him. A polished monolith six meters high, it grew more awesome as they reached it. It sprang from the flat earth with the lone momentum of a tree, and its base was piled with baskets of roots and berries.

Rayner said, “It”s not a god.”

“No. These people don”t make their gods.” The corporal apparently wanted to dispel his mistakes, but not to supply answers. Perhaps he did not have any. But he said, “This stone is more like a memory.”

“A memory of what?”

But the man pursed his lips and gazed up at the cliff. It was impossible to tell if he was being protective of native sanctities, or was just sensitive about his own mixed blood. Then Rayner added, “Is it the tree?”

The corporal turned his back and scrutinized the offerings. “Yes, they have some myth that this stone led up to heaven. Like a tree. You could climb up and down it.” He touched it with one hand, tentatively. “Who told you about that?”

“An old fellow I once treated. He said the tree was felled. And that was when everything began to go wrong.”

The sergeant”s boots scraped behind them, and the corporal”s voice, which had been wary and a little somber until then, changed. “That”s right, ever since then these poor fuckers have been lost,” he said. “They want to climb back but they can”t. So they”re stuck down here like the rest of us.”

Rayner recalled the old man”s sketch of the tree in the dust; he remembered his own childish illusion that perhaps the savages” stillness meant beatitude; and he felt a remote sadness for them all. Then the corporal straightened
from examining the offerings with a sharp
“Eh!”
“What is it?”

Beneath the panniers of food he had uncovered coconut bottles in bark containers. They gleamed dark, like hand grenades. “Water …” He murmured more to himself than to Rayner or the sergeant.
“Djannu.”

“What”s
djannu?”

The corporal glanced at the sky but did not answer.

The sergeant demanded: “What the hell”s
Jah-noo?”

Rayner added quietly, “Do they try to water the tree?”

“Yes.” The corporal shrugged almost angrily.
“Djannu
is a kind of ceremony. My father …” But he stopped and added expressionlessly, “They try to stop the sun going down.”

The sergeant said, “They
what?”

The corporal stared back at him. At that moment, it was impossible to tell if he was a soldier or a native. He said, “They try to turn back the sun.”

“For Chrissake!” The sergeant”s laughter bellowed in the silence as he lumbered back to his men.

Rayner asked quickly, gently, afraid that the corporal would also go away, “Do they believe they can do that?”

The man said, “Yes, they believe one day it will work. That if they stop the sun dying everything will be all right again.” Then he himself laughed, but like a thin echo of the sergeant”s. “People will believe anything, eh!”

The men were reassembling. The officers, Rayner noticed, had opened the flaps of their holsters, and the Lewis gunners carried their firearms at the hip. As he fell in line, he guessed they were planning to ascend the bluff.

For several minutes they wound directly below it, and were fearfully exposed. Rayner saw every man”s face clenched as he glanced up. The skyline of the cliff became terrible. Their rifles swivelled and jerked in their hands. At any moment the sky above them might erupt with men and the air whisper down a rain of spears.

Another path led them up. Under their boots the toeholds
in the stone came worn and small, gouged by bare feet. Hoarse bird cries shrilled in the chasm. Every time Rayner turned, his first-aid box banged against the stones and the men had to sling their rifles over their backs to claw themselves higher. He had the sensation that they were being beckoned up. The way could have been held by a single native tossing rocks. Yet nobody appeared.

Then the path levelled out and below them they saw the whole oasis from which they had come, locked in its gorge by the infant river. Beyond it, the sky of the wilderness was thickening and dimming into violet light as the sun declined, and a pair of eagle hawks circled over nothing.

By now the soldiers had clambered to the summit and were reforming. In front of them, as they followed the cliff”s rim, the plateau at first looked empty. Then, where a long promontory reached into space, they saw that the rocks were alive with men. The savages had not yet emerged fully onto the spur, and only their heads were visible among the shrubs, but they seemed to number hundreds and even from this distance Rayner saw that their faces were painted a dead, unnerving white.

Ivar yelled an order and the patrol took cover. The troopers crawled into line and steadied their rifles on the boulders. Even the Lewis gunners folded their bipods and wedged their barrels between rocks. But in front of them all, where the plateau”s curve separated them from the promontory, gaped sixty meters of empty air. Rayner lay on his stomach a short way from Ivar, and stared across.

At first, nothing happened. The distant outcrops and acacia bushes only stirred slightly with a half-submerged life. Then, in twos and threes, the savages started to materialize and coalesce. Their naked bodies were whitened by ritual designs, which appeared to clothe them, and they were clasping shields and swinging thongs. They were still emanating from the rocks when the vanguard broke into a lope—more than two hundred men, they seemed—
merged in a long phalanx which rolled and undulated along the plateau”s brink. The soldiers” barrels were already following them when Ivar yelled out “Prepare to fire!”

Rayner turned his head in horror. The order had sounded jubilant, but he could see no expression under Ivar”s cap. And now the barrels were levelling on either side of him. The Lewis gunner at his elbow advanced the snout of his gun beyond the rocks and tensed the butt against his cheek. Ivar was crouched on his haunches, staring through binoculars. They all went still.

Yet the savages were not advancing toward them along the plateau”s edge, but filtering onto the spur above the chasm. Their lope was less a run than a light, ritual stamping, which scarcely carried them forward. They were not facing the soldiers at all. By now the last of them had issued from the rocks, and the whole procession began to ripple and dance along the promontory. They were barely eighty meters away, and within helpless range. But they moved forward oblivious, with a plunging, tremulous motion toward the spur”s end.

Ivar bellowed again, “Prepare to fire!” Rayner twisted round and their eyes met. Ivar was pouring sweat, and his lips tensed back from his teeth. He jerked his eyes back to his binoculars.

It was impossible that the savages had not noticed the patrol. It was lit up on its clifftop like a stage set. But above the slow-motion pitch and throb of the natives” legs and torsos, all their heads were staring in front of them beyond the headland”s drop to where a crimson sun was falling toward the earth. They seemed to be moving on a different stratum of time. With their hair and beards hardened by pipe clay into clinking locks, and their bodies quartered with bars and diagonals of chalk, they looked coeval with the rocks on which they trod. And when Rayner glanced behind him he was astonished to see a crowd of women and children gathered within a stone”s
throw—women in bark and sedge cloaks, tattered dresses, kepis—all gazing at the spectacle over the soldiers” heads.

He sank his face onto the boulder in front of him and shut his eyes. He waited for the final order. The lints and bandages in his kit would not suffice for a tenth of the wounded. But instead of gunfire there rose from across the gulley”s silence a rhythmic, high-pitched singing. It wavered over to them with an uncanny melancholy, and when Rayner looked up again he saw that the savages had reached almost to the end of the spur, and that their heads were thrown back. In front of them, and level with their bodies, the sun was descending and the whole horizon reddening. He realized that a different order had been passed down the line. The level gleam of rifles had gone. Their barrels now rested upright against the rocks, or on the ground. The Lewis gunner had plucked the cartridge belt from its breech, and Ivar was leaning forward against a boulder with his head turned away.

Rayner stared back across the chasm, with sweat dripping into his eyes. He could make out the painted countenances on the natives” shields now and the jostling, whitened faces above them, and the feathered tassels on the ceremonial thongs. As he watched, the natives” dancing trembled to a halt at the edge of the drop. Nothing intervened now between them and the sun. Their keening rose to a heartbreaking crescendo, and some of them lifted long, cylindrical wooden horns to their mouths, like monstrous bassoons, which blared and moaned under the chanting.

All around Rayner the soldiers were standing up in full view and gazing across the chasm, uncomprehending. Their rifles strewed the rocks. The sun burnished the earth round them and lit their astonished faces. Some of them sat speechless on the boulders. The sergeant, who had just noticed the women crowded along the ridge behind, kept muttering, “What”s happening here? What the hell”s happening?”

By now, at the headland”s end, the savages were massed in a coppery glow of bodies, their shields fallen to their sides. As the sun touched the skyline, the singing and the bray of the horns quickened with pathetic urgency. Rayner felt a foolish grief for them. Their sounds intertwined in a wavering threnody, which echoed less like the prayer of humans than the mourning of some unearthly animal. Perhaps it was a distortion of the atmosphere which delayed the sun on the wilderness”s rim. But for an instant—so Rayner thought—its red circle and the sharp-edged clouds froze in the sky.