by Peter Tonkin
Nic liked being ahead of the game, thought Richard. And he remembered the irritation in the Texan’s face when he realized he did not know about the Bugis harbour at Paotere, north of Makassar. Did that mean, Richard wondered suddenly, that Nic was not planning to be aboard when they got to Makassar? There were implications in that thought which might bear some examination. And which might form the basis of a conversation on the kolek riverboat if not before.
But Inge was talking again with that quiet authoritative insistence that commanded full attention. ‘Much of the tourist information about the peripheries of the national park will not really apply to us. We will moor as close to the port of Kumai, which is the starting point for almost all authorized visits into the park. By that time you will have finalized your groupings. You will have been issued with all relevant documentation and will have had your equipment checked. So we will simply transfer you in your groups from Tai Fun into your koleks, check with the crew, double-check with the park’s guards and rangers, and off you go. You have already paid the standard daily rate for the koleks, which includes food, drink, accommodation aboard as necessary and guiding along the trails as you require. Or rather, we have done so on your behalf. To those of you watching your budgets, that’s a hundred and fifty thousand rupiahs each, which comes out at about fifteen dollars each. The hotel comes in at nearer seventy dollars. Those of you in hotels, your rooms are reserved, your meals are spoken for and your places on night tours booked. There are no shops in the park itself, remember, so you have no need of money in the park, though if you are staying at a hotel you might wish to take a little. But not much. That is the upside of your need to ensure you have packed everything you are likely to need for your visit. We will take care of any other matters such as gratuities as you instruct us upon your return to Kumar - she consulted her watch - ‘in almost exactly one hundred hours’ time.’
Almost exactly sixty hours later, almost breathless with childlike excitement, Richard handed Robin down into the stern of their kolek. This turned out to be a narrow blue-painted riverboat the better part of six metres long. It was fully decked, with a motor nestled under solid planking and a tall, flat-roofed accommodation area midships, looking for all the world like a cross between a Wendy house and a tree house, which he had already learned to call a ‘mandi’. It would accommodate four, eating or sleeping, in campers’ comfort. Its solid roof would make an excellent observation platform. Indeed, as Richard let go of Robin’s hand, he saw Nic already swarming up the ladder, intent on deploying his camera and binoculars at the earliest opportunity. Gabriella talked quietly to the taller of their boatmen, and saw to the disposal of their bags. The smaller, younger, of the boatmen cast off and powered up the motor as the kolek eased into the stream, first boat out of the day. Richard paused for a moment to look at the men who would be their crew and guides for the next two days and the intervening night. They were pale-skinned and almost Chinese in feature. But the lobes of their ears were stretched by weighty rings and the square-cut fringes across their broad foreheads gave them an almost South American look, as though they were members of some tribe long lost in the Amazon jungle. They were Dyaks, he realized; the best possible guides for this terrain.
‘What are their names?’ he asked Gabriella quietly.
‘You’d never get your tongue around them,’ she answered; though she had been able to, Richard noted. ‘The tall one there is Father. The shorter one is Son. Father and Son. That’s the best we can do, and they’ll answer to them in English, if you call.’
Richard nodded, and looked as Father pushed the baggage into the mandi and Son opened the throttle a little wider, keen to be away up the river, now that they were off.
Above and behind them, as the dawn began to brighten the sky, excited figures bustled on the Kumai piers, beside the fading glow of the brightly lit Park Ranger office. While Gabriella had elected to lead the expedition from the lead boat, she had left Inge to oversee the others, and, no doubt, to bring up the rear. Not that the vessels would present an armada, or even a flotilla. As soon as possible, each would ease into its own unique channel and follow its own course through the all-but-floating jungle. That was the plan, at any rate, according to the briefings.
Richard forgot about the others as soon as he turned to look ahead. And a moment after that he was up with Nic on the roof of the mandi, with Robin like a tall electric charge sparking energy and excitement beside him, straining to see as much as he could as quickly as possible.
The sky was beginning to brighten rapidly and dawn light was filtering across the still surface of the Sungai, or River, Sekonyer. Richard had explored the great rivers of Africa and had been half expecting to be dwarfed by timelessly giant vegetation, such as Conrad himself had described in his Heart of Darkness. But this was altogether more intimate. The river was narrow and closely overhung. Nipa palm trees crowded the half-submerged banks like bushes with grandiose ideas, close-packed and seemingly trunkless, close enough to touch as they swept majestically by. As the light gathered, they faded out of blackness into gathering green. An avenue of bushy treetops seemingly floating on the still black water.
But if the emergence of the colours was slow and painstaking, almost elegant in its waking languor, the same could not be said of the stirring inhabitants within them. For with the dawn came the dawn chorus. Every bird in the forest woke with the uprising sun and began to twitter, hoot, sing or scream. Nor was it only the bird life stirring. Against the stained-glass brightness of the pale-blue sky, flights of bats went skimming, leather-winged, snub-nosed and tailless, adding a high-pitched, piercing shrilling to the cacophony of the birds. And, as the river-smelling jungle atmosphere of the place closed around them, seeming at the turning of the first river bend to jerk them back to the dawn of time, so the apes and monkeys, lemurs, sloths and orang-utans all joined in. The stirring of the jungle at dawn would have drowned out the loudest, most drunken and bellicose of football-hooligan crowds.
Only as the daylight filtered further down did Richard begin to see the activity the cacophony was drowning out. Here and there the palms parted widely enough to allow a pathway to approach the water and here tiny deer were stealing down to drink. But their nervousness was little to do with the near-silent passing of the kolek. For there, in the shaded deeps beneath the leafy overhangs, stirred great scaly bodies half as long as the boat. Long, angular heads peeped above the water, too long and narrow, seemingly, to belong to crocodiles - and yet fearsomely armed with teeth.
‘What’s that?’ asked Richard, as one angular head reared right out of the water grinning toothily at him.
‘False gharial. Kind of crocodile,’ answered Nic, as quietly as the storm of awakening songs would allow.
‘There are real estuarine crocodiles here too,’ added Gabriella knowledgeably. ‘Big and very dangerous.’
‘Most dangerous to them, I should expect,’ added Robin, gesturing to another tiny deer. ‘Is that a mouse deer?’
‘I believe it is.’
As the daylight gathered, and the humid heat began to build, so the howling in the jungle began to die back. But the activity did not slow. Squadrons of monkeys came and went through the treetops on either side. Larger deer and wild pigs passed like shadows - or blundered like little tanks - through the undergrowth. The distant snarl of a hunting leopard came and went echoing into sudden silence; silence that passed again in an instant.
‘Probably not as big or dangerous as it sounds,’ said Nic. ‘Clouded leopards and leopard cats is about it for this park. You’re more at risk from inquisitive orang-utans, I’d say.’
‘And the spiders, snakes and scorpions,’ added Gabriella bracingly. ‘But we’ll talk about those in more detail when we go ashore for our first walk.’
The lazy flow of the river widened into lakelets where white herons stood, apparently admiring their perfect reflections in the obsidian mirror of the surface. Almost invisible, beside them, black on black, stood the occasio
nal hornbill. At the bank of one such lakelet, where the low palm jungle was just beginning to ease back into more patchy forest, the kolek’s crew brought the long blue hull to rest and they stopped for an early lunch of fruit and water. Although they ate aboard their still, near-silent vessel, they all soon climbed ashore to stretch their legs. And so it became obvious that the place and time of their landfall was no coincidence. For after the early and sustaining repast and enough exercise to loosen them all up, Son, the shorter of their guides, checked their footwear, clothing and equipment. Then Father, the taller, led them off across the clearing and into the scrubby trees. Almost instantly, it became obvious that they were following a path. There were bright markers on posts beside their way, and, at the first convenient stopping place, a shelter with a map and a set of instructions in a range of languages from English to Japanese, warning them to keep to the path and to beware of straying into the jungle. Robin for one was uncertain whether the vivid pictures of spiders, snakes, scorpions, cats of various sizes, deer of various sizes, wild boar and orang-utan were telling them what to look for - or what they should beware of.
Father held up his hand with fingers and thumb spread.
‘Five kilometres,’ translated Gabriella. ‘That should take, what, two hours?’
‘Allow three,’ advised Nic. ‘We may want to dawdle a little.’
‘I want to dawdle a lot,’ insisted Robin gamely, patting her camera and her binoculars. ‘I don’t want to miss any of this at all if I can help it.’
‘Fair enough,’ agreed Nic accommodatingly. ‘Tell the man, Gabriella.’
Gabriella pointed at her watch and held up three fingers.
Father shrugged accommodatingly and turned, the late-morning sunlight gleaming on the gold in his pendant earlobes.
Richard wondered why they bothered with the pantomime - he was sure they had been talking to each other when he handed Robin aboard in the darkness of the dawn.
The muddy path led out of the scrub and back into the forest almost at once. The taller canopy of the trees closed over them at once, keeping the fierceness of the noonday sun at bay. Not that the shadows or the thick air through which they seemingly half swam were actually cool or anything like it. Humid, enervating, but bearable, for all that their clothes were sodden within five minutes - soaked from the inside as effectively as if they were walking through a monsoon rainstorm. In the trees above and around them, they soon began to see families of monkeys lazing in the noonday heat: proboscis monkeys, macaques, gibbons, red-leaf monkeys or maroon langurs.
‘We should be looking out for sun bears too,’ whispered Gabriella. ‘And of course sambar deer, mouse deer like the one you saw drinking this morning, Robin, and wild pig. We heard a clouded leopard or leopard cat hunting too, but we won’t see them at all. Anyone particularly interested in plants or trees? There’s nothing of the first rank here. In the jungle proper upriver this afternoon we should see orchids, a range of other striking and endangered flowers and stands of protected trees. And that’s where we’ll find the orang-utans too. Especially if we time it well and join the others who’ll be there for four o’clock feeding.’
No sooner had Gabriella delivered herself of this confident and authoritative speech, however, than an orang-utan dropped on to the path immediately in front of them. It was the creature’s size that stopped them dead. It stood the better part of a metre and a half high, topping Gabriella’s five foot four and nearly equalling Robin’s five foot eight. It was broad, solid and enormously powerful-looking. It must have weighed in excess of two hundred pounds, the better part of fifteen stones. Its fur was shaggy and beginning to fade, but nevertheless still burned with the orange glow almost unique to the species. It was bare-chested, pot-bellied and balding, its long serious face lined and drooping into pendulous jowls. It opened its mouth and grunted, showing an array of yellow teeth almost as intimidating as the crocodile’s this morning.
Robin gaped. She had been half afraid that she would find the creatures disappointing, little more than lively versions of the King of the Apes in Disney’s Jungle Book. But this didn’t disappoint her at all. It terrified her. Its feral stench seemed to cow something timeless deep inside her, and perhaps fortunately, the shock of its naked ferocity so close so suddenly robbed her even of the ability to scream. Almost robbed her of the ability to breathe. Here in the wild, face to face, there was no safe limit to protect her. No cage or moat. The massive creature could do anything it wanted - and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it.
Such was Robin’s relief when the huge orang-utan reached for Gabriella with the terribly unnatural length of his right arm that she almost fainted on the spot. Nic made some kind of a noise and the orang-utan simply glanced up at him, too powerful, too regal, too much in charge of this moment, this clearing, this jungle to be disturbed. It reached out further with one massive pale-palmed, shaggy-backed, black-nailed hand and removed the bag from Gabriella’s shoulder. With simply human knowledge and understanding, it opened the flap and reached inside. It pulled out the two-litre bottle of chilled Evian water that Son had ensured they were all carrying. It put the bag down. It pulled the top off. It drank until the bottle was empty. It threw the crushed plastic aside like the husk of some discarded fruit. It licked its lips appreciatively.
It vanished.
The somnolent silence of a jungle at noon lingered with nothing but the buzzing of invisible insect life to break it. Or rather, to emphasize its utter stillness.
‘I know,’ said Gabriella with a loud and sudden brightness that bordered on the hysterical, as she bent to retrieve her bag, ‘when we’ve finished our walk here and sailed on up the river a spell, let’s give orang-utan feeding time a miss!’
Chapter 17: Ramin
After the scrub and more open forest where they had stopped for lunch and their first, almost disastrous, exploration, the jungle proper gathered in. Son and then Father guided the kolek with its shocked and silent passengers into the shaded sections where the tall walls of greenery began to close over their heads. Even in the shadows of early afternoon the huge lily flowers lining the banks seemed to burn at the hearts of massive pads seemingly large enough to hide even the largest crocodiles. Behind the big green puddles of lily leaf, the lower greenery blazed with huge bushes of great golden gardenias and ranges of male and female pandanus. These varied in size from small bushes to tall trees whose leaves joined the canopy overhead. They were covered in white flowers almost as beautiful as the gardenias and fruits the size of pineapples that reminded Richard irresistibly of the spiked maces carried by medieval knights. The fruits varied in colour from green through orange to bright red, and hung in series back into the green jungle darkness like Chinese lanterns suspended in the trees. The smell was disorientatingly complex, a mixture of garden, with fragrant flowers and compost, greenhouse and kitchen spice cupboard. The pandanus, like many of the water’s edge trees, had support roots like mangroves reaching out of the black surface and halfway up their trunks. And these roots, filled with leaf-mould, debris and detritus, gave safe haven to a bewildering range of ferns, vines and orchids.
As the kolek eased past this dazzling array, as close as the giant lily pads would allow, so Robin and Richard began to see that beneath the flower-jewelled carapace of the bank, the roots gave refuge to other, less gorgeous life forms. Here, amongst orchids as purple as the robes of emperors, ran giant scorpions as red as blood and as yellow as bile. Under gardenias as bright as golden goblets crouched spiders as big as dinner plates, waiting to trap kingfishers and hummingbirds. Up vines as beautifully woven as hand-made tapestries crawled centipedes that looked as long as the quick green mambas and pythons hanging from the branches overhanging above.
Kingfishers flickered in and out like flames capable of burning underwater. Darters of all kinds threw themselves like tiny bolts of lightning across the shadowy air. Hummingbirds hung like gorgeous hornets sipping fragrant pandanus flowers, and, like the massive
insects that they resembled, carried the vital pollen between the male and female plants. Dragonflies swooped, bigger than the droning hummingbirds, as bright as the darting kingfishers. Flying ants, mosquitoes and midges stirred as the afternoon wore on, making all of them grateful for the insect-repellent cream that was even more vital than the sunscreen; almost as vital as the cool sustaining water.
At last they came to a landing stage. ‘Pondok Panggui. Ranger Station,’ said Gabriella. ‘We’re actually in perfect time for the orang-utan feeding, if any of you want to go. Son will take you. I’ll stay here. This is a good place to tie up for the night, in any case...’
‘Naaaw,’ drawled Nic. ‘It’d be an anticlimax for me. Might as well be at Central Park Zoo, or San Antonio, Houston or Austin. I never want to see an orang-utan any other way than face to face like that again. I tell you, Gabriella, I came as close as this to having a heart attack! It was only after he’d gone I realized I was excited instead of terrified. I simply cannot imagine what it must have been like for you. You are one ballsy lady, if you don’t mind me saying so!’
‘I agree,’ said Richard, calculatedly vague about which bit he agreed with. ‘What about you, Robin?’
‘I agree too. Especially with the bits about being terrified and not wanting to see another orang-utan up close again...’
‘That’s not quite what I said...’ temporized Nic.
‘But it’s what I feel,’ said Gabriella simply.
‘Right, then,’ concluded Richard. ‘Gabriella, what is there if we miss out on this trek and the four o’clock feeding, and press on for another hour or so instead before we tie up and camp for the night? Anywhere more off the beaten track, so to speak?’
‘There’s Leaky Creek. That flows deep and clear. Most people don’t get that far in on the first day. You’ll maybe see some pretty spectacular aquatic life at sunset there. The jungle eases back into marshland and opens up as well, offering all sorts of new fauna and avifauna. I expect Father or Son would know a good spot there to tie up and camp. And we could maybe do a night trek. There’s a lot to see after dark, when the apes and monkeys have bedded down. There are all the night hunters, owls, bats, moths. Lots of stuff when we get up into the ramin-tree woodland. Clouded leopards, which are not big enough to attack and are notoriously shy, little honey bears, deer of all sorts, luminous lichens, toadstools that glow in the dark. You name it. I’ve heard rumours that there may be a Dyak village somewhere up there too; and there’s talk of an ancient ruined Hindu temple the better part of two thousand years old...’
