Текст книги "The Red Pavillion"

Автор книги: Jean Chapman

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

The following morning all ten began clearing a circle of jungle flat enough to allow the broad fluorescent orange strips to be laid in the prearranged Z-shape. Then they retreated into the surrounding jungle and waited, rested and listened.

By the time the Dakota was heard it was near midday. Waiting until the unmistakeable drone of its engine came nearer, Alan radioed to ascertain that it was their dropping aircraft.

There was a crackly affirmation with the added information that they had located the marker and would circle once and drop on the second run.

Alan acknowledged. Then all waited expectantly for the supplies to be parachuted down, aware that the activity could also give away their presence to the enemy.

The Dakota circled once, then came in tighter and as the aircraft came down within a few hundred feet of the clearing they could see the men in harnesses standing in the open doorway. The plane tipped to one side to make it easier for the men to push the large wooden crates out with their feet. Almost immediately the aircraft was up and riding out of their sight over the jungle, the noise retreating into the distance as they watched four parachutes open and the crates tumbling rapidly down, towards the dropping zone, they hoped.

They watched carefully. ‘Bugger!’ Major Sturgess exclaimed as one went completely out of sight, well short. Two others landed spot on and the third hooked itself in a perimeter tree, hanging for a few moments until branches creaked, groaned and cracked under the weight, seeming to the watchers to lower the crate down from one layer to the next and to the ground.

‘Full marks,’ Sergeant Mackenzie approved.

‘Three out of four,’ Alan said.

‘Reckon we could have a fire tonight then, sir? Plenty of dry wood.’ Dan tapped the first crate with his toe. ‘Make a hot meal.’

‘The drop’s bad enough, we don’t want to alert the whole of Perak to our presence.’ Sturgess said shortly, then added, ‘Sorry, chaps, nothing hot until this one’s finished – it’s too important.’

‘Sergeant, you, Veasey and the Sutherlands open these three, distribute the loads between the packs, while I take one man and find that stray crate.’ As he took his compass from his pocket, he signalled to Alan to go with him, while Entap, their Dyak tracker, and the Smiths were detailed to keep lookout.

Danny caught Alan’s eye as he left, grinned but put his hands behind his back as if shielding it. Alan nodded grimly. His recent speculations had taken any humour from the situation.

The two of them had not gone far, making sure they marked their way back on various trees, when they could hear a different sound.

‘Can you swim, Cresswell?’

‘No, sir,’ he lied.

‘Let’s hope the crate’s not in the water then.’

Alan thought, judging by the sound, that if it was it would have been washed away. Then he caught sight of a drape of parachute over a tree to their right. The major obviously had not seen it, so Alan bounded forward and touched the officer’s arm. Sturgess drew away as if burned. Alan stood still for a moment, looking the man straight in the eye, then pointed out the chute.

Without a word the major turned in that direction. Alan, following, seethed. It had to be Liz, the older man was sweet on Liz and resented a mere guardsman being preferred to a high-ranking officer.

Sturgess came suddenly to a halt and turned to see the contempt on his inferior’s face.

Before him Alan saw a rushing, raging torrent and in front of it his officer, whose face was suffused with fury.

‘What is it with you, Cresswell?’ he hissed. ‘What makes you think you’re so bloody superior?’

‘No, sir. I don’t, sir,’ he answered, gritting his teeth against what he wanted to say, that he certainly had the advantage in the matter of Elizabeth Hammond for their love was mutual, consummated, a meeting of two made in heaven for each other.

Faced with the fury of the other man, the man who had for the moment forgotten his role as superior example-setting officer, he remembered an old soldier saying that the only weapon a private had against victimisation by a higher rank was silence and the capacity to keep taking the abuse.

‘You worthless conscripts, you’re more bloody trouble than you’re worth! What’d you say if I told you I’ve had complaints from the Hammond family about you?’

‘I’d say produce your evidence,’ Alan said carefully, the educated mind refusing to be quelled though his voice shook as he added, ‘and if you couldn’t I’d say you were a bloody liar.’

‘Why do you think I took you away from Rinsey?’

Alan toyed with a choice of words ranging from ‘jealousy’ to ‘spite’. He was not a man who naturally resorted to violence but it occurred to him that it would have been remarkably simple to tip the snarling major into the raging waters of the jungle river just behind him. In and gone he’d be. He doubted there was even a monkey to witness such a dark act in the green damp gloom of leaf and moss, huge overhanging ferns above their heads and the slippery bank – and he could see where the huge crate was being twirled in the muddy brown water like a matchstick in a plughole.

‘It was a question of standing cock having no conscience, wasn’t it, Cresswell? The girl was there and so were you – and such as you never miss a sniff, do you?’

This, Alan judged, was definitely the time for silence. He was so appalled at his officer’s crudeness that all wish to retaliate vanished. He wanted to laugh now, not kill, astonished and dismayed at the man’s brand of vicious fishwife spite.

He heard a movement behind him and swung round, rifle at the ready, as Sergeant Mackenzie and Dan came along the track they had made.

Sturgess swore. ‘Thought I told you to supervise the unpacking of the other crates!’

‘All under control, sir,’ the sergeant answered, his glance going from his officer to Cresswell. ‘Brought a rope up in case you need one.’ He paused to look over the Major’s shoulder. ‘And looks like we do.’

Alan nodded gratefully at Dan, wondering if he had after all shared some real anxiety with the sergeant which had made Mackenzie come after them.

‘Don’t like the look of that,’ the sergeant added as the crate, hit by an extra surge of water, bounced about in the river like a canoe shooting the rapids.

‘Right! let’s get at it!’ the major announced. Gesturing to Danny, who was carrying the rope slung around his shoulders, he added, ‘think it’s your turn for the dip, Cresswell. Get the rope round yourself.’

Alan wondered if this was why he had lied about being able to swim – to test the major.

‘We could really do with another rope,’ the sergeant said, ‘one for Cresswell to keep round himself, the other to tie on the crate.’

‘Come on, man! It’ll be dark before we’ve finished. He’ll manage.’

The sergeant took up the rope and helped secure it around the guardsman.

Alan thought briefly of alligators and leeches as he waded into the water, but by the time he had gone three steps he felt the water was far too rough for alligators to survive. In another two steps it whipped his legs from under him and he was going downstream at some rate until the rope the others held braced around a tree stopped him.

He soon realised that the only way he was ever going to reach the far bank and the crate was to allow himself to be taken by the current to a bend. Below where they were, he could see the far bank looped towards him, though the water hit and streamed past it at great force.

Trying to signal, he held up the rope with one hand, going completely under as he did so. He tried again to indicate he wanted some slack. The rope suddenly gave, and he hurtled downriver, choking as he spun uncontrollably in the water. In a flash of vision as he surfaced he saw the bank rushing towards him and managed to get his feet forward in the water just before he hit the bank. He thanked God there were no rocks, then he saw there were – either side of where he had landed.

Laboriously he climbed clear of the water, stood gasping, trembling, taking a moment to recover and wave back to the other side. He could see that Danny and the sergeant still held their end of the rope, while the major stood in a critical attitude, hands on hips. His voice came faintly over the crash of the water, ‘Get on with it, man! Get hold of it!’

Alan turned away and swore under the roar of the water, ‘You frigging bastard! I’ll get your crate back, but not the way you want me to and be bashed to death by it.’

As he undid the rope he could hear Sturgess shouting again, but he ignored him. He’d make his own plans.

Without looking across again, he made his way, slipping and hanging from nearby lliang creepers, towards the tree ensnaring the crate’s parachute. With infinite care he lowered himself down by the branches towards the great box bouncing about on the swirling waters.

He was out of sight of the men from the other bank, and he was scared. ‘Father,’ he heard himself saying, ‘make me an ark of gopher wood.’ He was unsure whether he addressed his God or his late father, until he recollected the ease with which Edgar Cresswell approached a new task, a new piece of timber, then he slipped. He was down, able to touch, or, more accurately, fend off, the crate as it first swirled out into the stream, then was slammed back towards the bank.

If it trapped him he could be knocked senseless or have an arm or leg shattered in an instant. “... Careful! No room for errors,” he heard his father advise as he took the force of the crate on one boot sole.

‘Right, you bastard,’ he told it, ‘next time in you’re mine ... Oh, Christ!’ he cried as next time it drove towards him at head height. He crouched and put his hands over his head, but the current pulled it back before it hit. It was like being in the path of a killing pendulum.

His heart thumping, he waited for the next swing, calculating that what he had to do was reach the top of the crate, where its straining harness allowed for a rope to be passed though.

The next time he was surprised by the swinging power and force of the box as it came towards him. The time after that, he managed to push his hand though the harness but was not quick enough to loop the rope through. Instead he felt his hand caught. He pulled back and thought his whole arm might be jerked from its socket; he felt the rough wood of the crate grate at his hand, the sharp angular edges tearing his skin, but then he was free.

He realised that he would quickly become exhausted battling with these forces. Grimly he set himself to succeed the next time.

‘Right! Come on, you – you thing on the side of the bloody high and mighty officers! Come on!’

He waited, but aggression wasn’t his best motivator, and as it swung in again and again he muttered, ‘This time for Liz.’

It came closer this swing, nearly pushing him off balance. Using the extra seconds, he got his arm through the harness, grasping the rope from the other side and pulling it through. For a frantic moment or two he slithered and was drawn down the bank as he held on, then his foot found a root which stopped him sufficiently to secure a knot on the harness.

He climbed the bank until he could see the men opposite. Dan lifted his fist in salute. He motioned to them that he would sever the parachute above the harness, then they should pull the crate across. ‘Take up the slack,’ he bellowed.

He hauled himself up the tree to cut the parachute cords, leaving them as long as he could. Once free of the bonds holding it to the tree, the crate fell and, no longer being pulled by two forces, floated with less agitation. When the other three begun to pull it across, Alan took a tight grip on the trailing cords and was towed back safely after it.

Dan thumped him on his back as he reached the shore. Then all three seemed automatically to glance at their officer, waiting for his comment. The major walked to the far side of the now safely beached crate and released the parachute harness from it.

Sergeant Mackenzie cleared his throat rather like a parent reminding a child of its manners, but, as Sturgess busied himself with rolling and tidying the cords, he took on the leader’s role – as he was trained to do if anything untoward happened to his immediate commander.

‘Well done, Cresswell! Reckon if there’d been someone shooting at you as well, that would have been worth a medal.’

Alan gave a humph of laughter as the comment relaxed the tension of the situation, and, as Dan promised to strip him when they got back to the others and ‘go over him for leeches’, he quipped, ‘What more could a man ask?’

Chapter Fifteen

If vigilance had been the order of the day before the airdrop, afterwards the tension of the exercise was screwed several notches tighter.

Before they moved off on the fifteenth day, the major beckoned them round for a briefing.

‘I worked this area for most of the war with the help of old Entap here, “the best pucking scout in Perak!”’ He paused after the imitation of the Dyak’s response to any remark made to him, and Entap self-consciously put his blowpipe to his mouth and made the spitting noise that preceded the expulsion of the poisoned darts.

‘And unless,’ the major went on, ‘our calculations are seriously out we’re within a day’s march of the camp we think the commies use as area headquarters. All kinds of activities point this way – a major link in their jungle postal system, raids to extort and terrorise, printing of leaflets, training, indoctrination, we believe it all goes on at this base.’

‘Anyway, Entap and I are the reason this unit’s come in from the longest cross-jungle route – not, Veasey, because I had a personal down on anyone. I thought we’d get that clear now.’

Alan glanced down at Dan, who shuffled a jungle boot in the undergrowth and scowled like a guilty schoolboy.

‘The other units on this op won’t have started so soon or have travelled so far, but we serve to complete the encirclement. If the CTs make for the deepest jungle we’ll probably be heavily involved in picking them off. I hope we will anyway, though we’re running a little behind time.

‘We had a decent result at the kampong; this next could be the best result of the whole campaign so far.’

They murmured their support and even Alan was impressed in spite of his alienation as Sturgess went on.

‘Entap has found elephant tracks just off to the left. I propose to use these provided they don’t veer off our course too much. It’ll give us the chance to move more quickly and to keep a better lookout for their tripwires.’

It was the practice of both sides to guard their positions with elaborate systems of alarms or booby traps – a tin set to rattle against a pole, a bundle of tins in a tree, a flare or an antipersonnel mine.

They moved cautiously though much quicker all that day, following the paths the elephants had trampled, marvelling at the branches torn from trees and saplings uprooted as the animals had grazed their way through the jungle.

Sturgess read his compass and consulted Entap at regular intervals, and early in the same afternoon the Dyak came back to the line of soldiers with the speed and silence that astonished Alan and gestured them all down.

He was pulling his tube of poison darts from his belt as he went forwards alone. They listened intently, rifles at the ready. Alan thought he heard a noise like a tree keeling over, as they often did on the soft jungle floor, except that the next moment Entap reappeared grinning, holding something down by his side.

Sturgess, who was nearest, swore softly.

‘Pucking guard,’ Entap reported, lifting his left hand to reveal he carried the guard’s head.

Behind him Alan heard Danny bring back his breakfast. Several men swore and blasphemed under their breath; Alan swallowed hard several times. He had heard that this was something these Dyaks did instead of carrying the whole man back for identification purposes. In camp he had seen them sitting around their tent, continually honing their parangs to razor-edged sharpness.

‘You know?’ Entap asked, holding his trophy higher for Sturgess to examine. ‘You take picture!’

‘Yes,’ the major said patiently, ‘then you can get rid of it. I said I would use my camera so you do not need to do this.’

A look of hurt and stubbornness came over the tribesman’s face and after the photograph had been taken Alan suspected he took the scalp before finally disposing of the head at the major’s insistence – at gunpoint.

‘We don’t want anything extra to carry,’ he told the tracker. ‘Now on we go. But good work, good work!’ He patted Entap on the back and his grin came back immediately.

About an hour after this Sturgess halted the line and called them in again. ‘We’ve made good time so we’ll bivouac early, keep a low profile in case they miss their man – we don’t want to trigger anything too soon.’

There was a heightening of morale, for now their officer was working as a fully committed soldier. Alan too admitted his superiority as an officer in action. Every soldier had heard of officers and sergeants who deliberately made their presence known in the jungle – to make sure they never did encounter any terrorists. He watched Sturgess as he went from man to man with a word for each one; in action he was of a different calibre.

‘Have a listen in,’ Sturgess asked as he reached Alan, ‘just make sure there’s nothing we should know about.’

The signaller had barely swung his radio and pack from his shoulder when from some distance came a single reverberating echo. It was hardly more than the sound of an eardrum popping as an aircraft climbed, but they all froze, listening intently. The single shot was followed by the unmistakeable stutter of an automatic weapon.

‘Christ! Someone’s blown it!’ Sturgess spat out the words.

‘Not all that walking for nothing!’ Dan stood and shook his head.

Alan dived for his radio, put on headphones and throat microphone, switched on and listened to the operation frequency. Silence. Then he switched to their headquarters at Ipoh. His hand was just reaching for the knob to retune back to the operation call station when the smooth, upper-class and unmistakeable voice of the commander in chief came on the air.

‘Sunray here! Attention! Sunray here! All units Operation Tight squeeze! Go in now! I repeat. Go in now! All units ... ’

Alan looked up at the major, slipped the headphones off and handed them to him. Sturgess listened, nodded, handed them back. ‘Acknowledge,’ he said turning back to the men. ‘We’re going in now!’ he told them. ‘I estimate we’re about a quarter of a mile from the camp – a bloody long way in jungle, but if these tracks go our way a bit farther and the CTs want a quick way out, we may pick some of ‘em up.’

He gestured to Alan to let him have the throat microphone as well and, pressing it to his larynx, reported in no more than a whisper.

‘Unit One to Sunray. We’re on a natural escape route so won’t go in hell for leather, we may pick up more if we let ‘em funnel in rather than scatter them around the jungle.’ He listened out, then passed the instruments back to Alan.

‘The other thing is it’ll be dark in about an hour,’ he told the group. ‘We’ll move off right way, then lie in ambush along these tracks for the night. Signaller, see what else you can pick up as we go.’

Alan reassembled his kit, loaded up, locked his radio on to the operation frequency and, wearing his headphones and throat microphone over from the set on his back, followed the major and the sergeant. They had barely gone two hundred yards when they were again given urgent signals from Entap to disperse.

Alan slid the headphones aside a little so he could hear what was happening around him. It was not difficult. Whoever was coming, he thought, was not Dyak or Iban and sounded in a blind panic. The jungle trapped the sounds, sending them rolling along the track like the echoes in a tunnel. Soon, he thought he could actually hear laboured breathing, the regular suck and pump of air, then he realised it was his own heart thumping.

He swallowed hard, took deep breaths and tried to remember his training, the drills men said came automatically when action began. He had two conflicting thoughts: one was that he had still never actually shot a man, never seriously hurt a fellow human being – and would he be able to? – the other was the drill of bayonet practice, the instant response to the command to charge in and the ‘in, twist, pull’ of the bayonet.

He wondered if a real body felt anything like those heavy, awkward dummies they had screamed at in training.

Listening, his state of apprehension bordered on terror as the noise of those who approached sounded to him more like trains than terrorists. They passed within yards of where he lay. What was that bloody major playing at? Alan could have wept with the frustration of seconds hanging like sentences. He was sure he heard a stifled sob, a swift, involuntary gasp from Dan. Alan held his breath as if to compensate, then realised that the bandits were making so much noise they would never have heard.

He also dimly realised that the major was waiting until he was sure all the communists were in their sights. Alan reached the pitch where he really did not care what he fired at as long as he shot his gun off.

Then the challenge rang out. ‘Halt or we fire!’

The communists dived and the soldiers fired. The shots exploded, whined and ricocheted along the line.

‘Follow me!’ Sergeant Mackenzie was on his feet, crouching low, running to an ellipse of untrampled undergrowth in the middle of the tracks, an island of cover. As he moved more shots rang out, then answering fire from both sides as in the jungle gloom men saw where bullets were coming from. There was more firing and the swift cry of a man mortally injured.

Alan felt a shiver go over his spine as he was up and running. His sergeant seemed slightly behind but gestured he should take one side of the patch of central cover while he went the other. They emerged firing. Alan saw a hat with a red star in the undergrowth ahead of him and fired as fast as he could as he ran towards it.

When he got there it was just a hat caught in a bush. He grabbed at it and looked around for its owner. Mackenzie called to him, ‘I’m coming on your right, Cresswell.’

‘We got him then.’ The sergeant nodded at the hat. Alan turned to deny it, when he saw the young Chinese terrorist at Mackenzie’s feet, three shots splayed across his chest like a dotted line. ‘Make up for Veasey!’

A burst of automatic fire from farther back was followed by high Chinese voices, gabbling, appealing, the major’s command, and ‘All right! Stand still! Stand still!’

‘Come on!’ Mackenzie went ahead to where the major and one of the Sutherlands had two prisoners at gunpoint. They indicated their surrender with hands as high as they could reach above their heads.

‘Disarm them,’ Sturgess ordered.

Alan went forward, pulling hand grenades from back pockets, knives from belts. He gasped as he pulled a hefty parang out of the belt and across the chest of the second terrorist, and drew back as if stung. ‘This one’s a woman, sir.’

‘Is it!’ The major sounded unimpressed. ‘Lucky you. Right! We want some good long bamboos and Mackenzie will show you how to tie these across their shoulders, hands at each end. They won’t run very far or very fast in the trees then, should they try to escape.’

Alan had moved towards Entap, who was already cutting at a clump of stout bamboos, when he turned back to the sergeant. ‘Make up for Veasey?’ he questioned.

Everyone’s eyes was on Mackenzie as he looked directly at his officer and reported, ‘I’m afraid Veasey bought it, sir.’

‘That who screamed?’

The Sergeant nodded.

‘But I heard that ... ’ Alan began as if in the fact he had found out their lie, ‘He can’t be!’ Alan turned and went quickly back to where he and Danny had been lying almost side by side. He had run forwards, he thought, with Danny following.

Alan did not see him come but the sergeant reached the spot midway between the jungle and that central island of cover at the same moment. He knelt by the body as Alan stretched a hand down to Dan.

‘Sorry, lad, afraid he’s gone!’

Such a rage overtook Alan, he wanted just to shoot off his gun at everything – friend, foe, jungle, sky, everything was his enemy now.

‘Take a hold of yourself, lad,’ Mackenzie said, gripping his arm.

‘Don’t bloody lad me,’ he said between clenched teeth, repeating the words again very slowly, ‘Don’t bloody lad me,’ Then he asked, ‘Are you sure?’ and dropped his knees by his sergeant, though even as he asked he remembered the cry. He remembered knowing the man was dead. He stretched out a hand towards Dan’s shoulder as he lay on his side, facing away from them.

‘He’s dead, soldier.’

‘Not sure ... ’

The Sergeant tried to catch his hand before it reached his friend’s shoulder. ‘He’s dead, Cresswell – half his bloody head is shot away.’

Their two hands lay together on Danny Veasey and the pressure rolled him on to his back. Only his light-red hair was recognisable. Bile exploded from Alan’s mouth. He dropped his rifle and bent double until the retching stopped. Danny had been sick when Entap had produced the head. They needed Danny, he was a kind of weathercock, he knew how they were all feeling, he championed them all!

As he raised himself up, he saw the two prisoners coming towards where he knelt, their hands roped to long bamboos as if in crucifixion. He groped for his rifle.

‘We all feel like that at these times.’ The sergeant was there first and, picking up Alan’s rifle as well as his own, managed to stand between him and the prisoners as he helped him to his feet. ‘All right?’ he asked before passing the gun back to him.

‘Came from your part of the world, I understand,’ John Sturgess said as he came to them. ‘You’ll miss him, we’ll all miss him.’

‘What do we ... ?’ Alan sounded panic-stricken as he thought the major was walking on, for he remembered what he had said about the head and not wanting anything extra to carry.

Sturgess came back almost immediately with Danny’s pack and began to unstrap his waterproof poncho cape.

‘We take him with us,’ Alan asserted.

‘Of course.’ As if seeing in Alan’s concern all the questions of what happened to a body in the heat, he explained ‘There’s a road much nearer the far side of this camp we’re heading for. Don’t worry, we’ll get him out. Do you want to ... ’ he held out the cape questioningly, then added, ‘wrap him tight?’

The sergeant took the cape and Alan nodded. They laid it on the ground; Alan closed his eyes as the sergeant took his shoulders and poor half head while he lifted the feet and placed him on his cape.

‘Wrap him tight,’ his brain was saying, ‘for he sleeps well tonight. Wrap him in swaddling clothes and lay him in the tropics thousands of miles away.’

When the body was neatly swathed, Mackenzie produced two lengths of cord. ‘Twist and tie the ends,’ he ordered and, when Alan looked up questioning the added indignity, he added, ‘We don’t want anything in there with him.’

The time of darkness was nearly upon them and there had to be much swift organisation. The major photographed the dead terrorists. The prisoners were gagged and their lashed feet tied to the trunks of trees. Alan watched critically, determined nothing should be left to chance. He saw how, with her hands lashed to her pole, the girl’s black shirt was pulled tight over her breasts.

Danny had talked a lot about his mother. Alan’s heart gave a sickening thud as he realised he must write to her, tell her how her son had died – well, some of how he died – and how in half an hour or less, all their lives had changed. Dan’s mother wouldn’t know for days; he hoped she would have a nice time until she was told. He wondered what day it was, perhaps the weekend?

He went back to his radio duties, reporting to headquarters. He was informed that other units had been under similar fire in areas surrounding parts of the camp. Things were quietening down now it was dark, but they were to proceed into the camp at first light, ‘taking the normal precautions’.

The major had decided that now they had prisoners they should withdraw a few yards into the jungle and Danny’s body would lie in his place in the line.

They rigged a string between the ten of them so they could signal if need be without giving away their position. The two Sutherlands had extra strings to the arms of the prisoners, with Ben taking first watch. No one, prisoner or soldier, could move more than an arm’s length without waking the others.

Alan lay keeping vigil by his friend’s body. He stared wide-eyed into the night and his mind went back to the villages he and Dan had known: a litany of Sheepy Magnas and Sheepy Parvas, of Littlethorpes and Greatthorpes; of being on the opposite sides at an inter-village cricket match; of the sleeping mounds in the village churchyard, generations of the same family laid to rest in the same place. But where would this son of England be buried? ‘Some corner of a foreign field … ’

His mind slipped out of control into total despair. Liz loved this country, this jungle he felt bearing down on him, doom-laden. In the heat and tormented noises of the night where creatures preyed on each other he felt he would never see her again. Then his body fell into exhausted sleep while his mind played the nightmare on. He started awake, overwhelmed by terror, as he found the string on his wrist pulled violently by the sergeant. ‘You’re shouting, Cresswell.’

Well before dawn he was awoken again by something moving nearby. He lay rigid with listening until he was sure what he heard was the foraging and grunting of wild pigs. Around him he could begin to make out what looked like a ghastly painting of a ghostly cathedral: the pale and dappled greens, blacks and reddish silver bark of the tree trunks rising high and true as pillars to the vaulted canopy of leaves a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet above. Still and straight, the trees seemed at once to witness and to judge man’s presence. The verdict, he felt, was not favourable, and the sentence was carried out by cutting off light for ever to the floor below where man murdered his fellows.