Blood Diamond Chapter 15

But for the next few days, stretching into long, hot weeks, Daniel had no opportunity to see Tregoning. And so the time passed and they trekked further and further into that enormous, signless wilderness. The trees and hillocks, the rivers and valleys and plains, seemed to meld together. Daniel knew they were moving essentially northwards, sometimes zigging and zagging east and west by the dictates of a non-existent compass. Occasionally, the tacking would make sense - to avoid this scarp of sheer rock, to circle that bog or low-lying, rock-strewn valley. But at other times, it felt as though they were following lines drawn in the air – force fields or currents or perhaps simply the habitual tracks of memory. There was a pattern to their wandering, but it was not a pattern that revealed itself to the eye.

And Daniel had more near escapes from death. One night, he sat long around the fire, listening to the low babble of voices – still largely indecipherable to Daniel’s ear, although he was becoming better at recognising words and phrases and picking up, almost without being aware of it, the general thrust and drift and topic of conversation. But when he felt the familiar fatigue steal over him, he decided to turn toward bed. The Princess had sat with them that night. She had made no further overt contact since the night she had introduced him to the Sacred Bird and the Sacred Stone, but he was aware that she was aware of him. There were glances across the fire, and that flat, unblinking stare that was her defining behaviour – a look that held his eyes and casually refused to drop them, those bright, green eyes shining as mysteriously as jewels. There was no message he could read in the looks, no tell-tale expression, none of the coyness or uneasiness that might have given him stuff for speculation had she been one of the women of his home, one of the women he had some slight hope of understanding, if ever any man had hope of understanding any woman, of whatever origin.

When he stood to leave on this occasion, she had looked at him flatly and murmured something – words directed to him directly, not through a mediator or through Tregoning. Tregoning was not present – he had contracted some manner of ailment and was scarce to be seen around the camp, recuperating in his own shelter – and Daniel had no grasp of what it was she said to him. He looked at the others but eyes were averted from his, as they were often of late, so he made recourse to his decidedly shaky grasp of courtly etiquette and merely bowed deeply and murmured words in a politely regretful tone, and took his leave.

Daniel’s practice of an evening was to return to his shelter with a blazing torch in order to scour the undergrowth and bushes for the shining eyes of intruding predators. At his shelter – within the circling boma and protective ring of fire - he would drive the unlit end of the torch into the earth, then enter, grope for his animal-hide bedding in the near darkness, and slip beneath the hide and to his sleep.

On this occasion, though, he paused when he reached the shelter. His senses, for so many weeks lulled into a state of trust and comfort by the protective embrace of the tribe, were alert. He felt a prickling presentiment, an intimation of danger. There were no specific grounds for it, but he likened it to the alertness he had seen on occasion in the animals of the wild, when they sniffed at the air for peril, even when the peril was safely downwind and there was no sound or scent to give it away. Daniel supposed that when you are alone and vulnerable in the midst of so much that seeks to do you harm, you develop a kind of animal intuition for threat.

Daniel stood in the dark night, the flames of the torch making the overhanging branches seem to sway and reach for him. In the distance an owl cried mournfully. There were the usual scufflings and rustlings of the night. He examined the ground at the entrance to his shelter. There were no signs that anyone had been there, no tell-tale marks or scuffs.

You are frightening yourself, he told himself. At this rate, you will die of a nervous ailment before anyone can do you harm.

He peered inside, holding up the torch that he might take in the small space. There were no lurking intruders, no great cats with snarling teeth, no crouching assassins, only the loose bundle of his bedding spread out in the corner. Daniel was about to discard his torch and take his rest when something made him freeze, and he felt as though a cold hand had trailed down his spine. He had seen his bedding move.

He looked again, straining in the dancing dimness. Nothing. Had it been a trick of the flames? A slight breeze gusted the torch, and the whole shelter seemed to sway jerkily to and fro. Was it just that? A figment of the light playing upon an over-worked mind? Daniel stepped back, walked to the nearest tree and broke off a dried branch the length of his arm. He leant into the shelter and gently, carefully, with the very tip of the branch, lifted a corner of the skin. Nothing. Daniel’s heart thudded in his chest. He slid the branch further, so that half of the skin was draped over its length. With a sudden jerk he threw it back.

He had seen snakes before, but not like this. The ones he had seen on the weeks of their travels had been flashes of black or grey or green in the foliage, lithe objects flitting across his path. This was huge. It was thick, as thick around as his muscular arm and it reared almost half as high as a man, with the other half still coiled in a dark, gleaming knot. Its mouth gaped with a terrible, violent hissing sound, like a throat being cleared, its dark mouth, its glistening fangs, strung with silver wetness. A kind of cowl flared behind its head, and it seemed to Daniel as though it rose and rose, swelled and filled the space in the small enclosure. He was shocked rigid, his limbs screaming to run, his mind turned to stone, the branch still out-held, the flaming torch in his left hand.

The snake swayed and feinted, its demonic head bobbed, searching its target. Then suddenly, from the back of that gaping hell-mouth a stream of shining fluid was propelled though the dim air in a powerful jet. It struck the flames of his torch and hissed, the fluid sizzling with an awful acrid smell. Daniel screamed and leapt backwards, stumbling to the floor. With a blind terror, he threw the torch in the direction of the entrance to prevent the serpent coming out after him. It missed and fell against the loose hide of the wall. The hides were rubbed with animal grease to caulk them against the weather, and in an instant the grease ignited. The hide rose in orange flames and, as Daniel scrambled backwards on his haunches, desperate to get away from that terrible place, the entire shelter rose like a pyre.

Copyright Ranulph Moore

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Ranulph Moore describes himself as an explorer, who became a writer to purge himself of the adventures that were crowding his life. He says he has seen it all, in a life spent observing the lives of others. He will travel anywhere – as long as he can make a decent cup of tea and launder a linen jacket. He describes Africa as one of his great loves. He has spent time in every country on the continent. If he can’t find a good champagne, he has been known to resort to gin. He has homes in Paris, Jura and Cape Town. At present, he lives in Madagascar, where he is researching his latest book.

Read an interview with Ranulph Moore.