The Whispering Land - Durrell Gerald - Страница 25

When we eventually reached dry land we all got out, removed our trousers and wrung them out, while our driver soundly berated the Indians for their attempted homicide, while they both grinned amiably at us. Then the driver, in his shirt-tails,* opened the bonnet of the car and peered into the engine, his moustache twitching, muttering to himself. He had carefully wrapped in cotton waste certain vital parts of the internal organs of our vehicle before we entered the flood, and these he now unwrapped, and then proceeded to dry other parts of the engine. Eventually, he climbed in, pressed the starter, and with a wide grin of pride, heard the engine roar into life.* We piled in and jolted off down the road, the Indians waving their straw hats in gay farewell.

We had travelled some five miles and were just beginning to dry out when we met our next water hazard.* The road here ran along the lower slopes of the mountains, and the terrain was intersected at intervals by deep, narrow gorges through which the water from the mountains drained. Where the road crossed one of these narrow but powerful rivers one would have thought that the simplest engineering method would have been to throw a small bridge across from bank to bank. Apparently the vast numbers of these rivers made this too costly, and so another method was employed. A slightly concave apron* of cement was laid across the river bed, which at least gave your wheels some purchase.* In the dry season, of course, this looked merely like a continuation of the road, but when the waters from the mountains stormed down they roared over the apron, sometimes four feet deep, and then dropped into a graceful ten foot waterfall the other side to join the river lower down. A few days covered with water and the cement developed a surface like glass, owing to the algae that adhered to it, and so it was considerably more hazardous than the original riverbed would have been.

Here there was no winch to help us, and the driver nosed* the station-wagon carefully into the red water, scowling fearfully behind his bristling moustache. We had got half-way across the invisible cement apron, when the engine stalled.* We sat and looked at each other mutely, until suddenly the force of the water piling up against the side of the vehicle shifted it an inch or so in the direction of the waterfall on our right, and then we were all suddenly galvanised into activity. We none of us wanted to be sitting in the station-wagon if the torrent suddenly got a good grip on her and swept her over the edge and downstream among the tangle of rocks we could see. We left the vehicle as one man.

"Push… we must all push," said Luna, raising his voice above the noise of the falls. He was clinging to the side of the station-wagon with both hands, for the force of the water was considerable. He was so slight in build that I expected at any moment to see him plucked away by the current and swept over the waterfall like a feather.

"Go round the other side of the car," I shouted, "the water won't sweep you away there."

Luna realized the force of this argument, and made his way round the wagon in a starfish-like manner, until it stood between him and the waterfall. Then we laid our shoulders to the wagon and started to push. It was quite one of the most unrewarding tasks I have ever undertaken, for not only were we trying to push the wagon up the opposite slope of the cement apron, but we were also pushing against the current which all the time was trying to twist the wagon round at an angle. After about ten minutes of struggling we had managed to shift our vehicle approximately three feet nearer the edge of the waterfall. I began to get really warned, for at this rate I could see the wagon plunging gracefully over the water-fall in a matter of another half-hour, for the three of us alone had not the strength to push her up the slope and against the current. We had a rope in the back of the wagon and, if it was long enough, the only thing I could suggest was that we tethered the wagon to a tree on the opposite bank, and just sat there until the waters subsided. I was just about to try and put this plan into Spanish, when round the corner of the road on the opposite bank appeared a Fairy Godmother,* heavily disguised as a wheezing, snorting lorry, which in spite of its age and rust, looked powerful and phlegmatic. We greeted it with shouts of joy. The driver of the lorry took in our predicament in a glance,* and slowing down, drove the vast bulk of his vehicle slowly into the red torrent until he was within a few feet of us. Hastily we got out our rope and shackled the two vehicles together; then the lorry went into reverse and gently drew our vehicle out of the flood and on to dry land. We thanked the lorry driver, gave him a cigarette, and watched enviously as he drove his mighty steed through the torrent as if it bad not been there. Then we turned our attention to the laborious and messy process of drying out our engine.

Eventually we reached Oran at two o'clock in the afternoon, having had to navigate three more water hazards, none of which, fortunately, was as bad as the first two. Nevertheless, we arrived at Luna's house all looking as though we had spent our entire day in the river, which was not so far from the truth. Luna's charming family greeted us with delight, whipped our clothes away to be dried, cooked us an enormous meal, and sat us down to eat it in an indoor courtyard, overflowing with flowers, where the frail sunlight was just starting to make its heat felt. While we ate and drank good, warming red wine, Luna sent an apparently endless stream of his smaller relatives on mysterious missions to different parts of the town, and they kept reappearing to whisper reports to him, whereupon he would nod his head portentously and smile, or else scowl ferociously, according to the news that was being vouchsafed to him. Everyone had an air of suppressed excitement, and stiffened expectantly if Luna so much as coughed or looked in their direction. I began to feel as though I was having lunch with the Duke of Wellington on the eve of Waterloo.* At last he leant forward, poured us both out a last glass of wine, and then grinned at me, his big black eyes sparkling with suppressed excitement.

"Gerry," he said in Spanish, "I have found you some bichos."

"Already?" I asked. "But how?"

He waved a hand at his small army of relatives, standing in a grinning line.

"I have sent my family to make inquiries, and they have discovered a number of people who have bichos. Now it only remains for us to go and buy them if they are the bichos you want."

"Wonderful," I said enthusiastically, finishing my wine at a gulp, "let's go, shall we?"

So, in ten minutes' time, Luna and I set off to quarter* Oran like huntsmen, preceded by our pack of Luna's young and excited relatives. The town was not really so large, but rather straggling, built on the typical Argentine chessboard pattern. Everywhere we went, as Charles had predicted, Luna was greeted with cries of joy, and we had to refuse many invitations of the more bibulous* variety. But Luna, with a reluctant gleam in his eye, sternly turned his back on such frivolity, and we continued on our way. Eventually, one of the younger members of our retinue ran ahead and beat a loud tattoo on a most impressive-looking door of a large house. By the time we had reached it the door had been opened by an ancient woman dressed in black, which made her look like a somewhat dilapidated cockroach. Luna paused in front of her and gave her a grave good evening, to which she bowed slightly.

"I know that you have in your house a parrot," said Luna with the air of a policeman daring a criminal to deny the existence of a corpse, which he knows to be concealed beneath the sofa.

"That is so," said the woman, mildly surprised, "This English senor is collecting for his jardin zoologico* in England," Luna went on, "and it is possible that he may wish to purchase this bird of yours."