he wondered how well
this kind of place could sustain such a creature. Large animals were unlikely
in this isolated environment, fresh water would be more likely inland than
anywhere along the coast, and that body wasn't really built for walking or
even slithering over this kind of terrain.
Still, Gus had shouted to meet near the lava flow and on this side of it,
fortunately, and he owed it to the creature to check before heading inland. He
set off across the sands toward the billowing steam, Terry following.
The sight from the top of the rise was spectacular, prob-ably even more so at
night, with the lava steaming just be-low the surface in front of him and then
the monstrous, churning, seething, bubbling region creating the steam just
beyond.
There was no sign of Gus, nor had he expected any, but he'd done his duty.
They could hardly stay there and wait in the expectation that the Dahir would
suddenly appear; they'd need the daylight to explore the island. Brazil also
didn't have anything he could leave to indicate their sur-vival and presence,
nor was there much he could use to cre-ate anything. The black sand wasn't
even conducive to writing a message in
English that only Gus would under-stand, and even if he could haul some rocks
from the lava field inland and build something, a feat hardly possible
con-sidering how much he ached, anything small enough to es-cape the notice of
pursuers would be overlooked by Gus and anything conspicuous enough to get
noticed might well attract the wrong people.
It was Terry, either by chance or by design, who came up with the somewhat
gross but only logical means of leaving Gus any sort of message.
She took a crap in the sand.
Hardly permanent, but a hunter species might well notice such a thing and Gus
would recognize the species of origin, possibly the specific scent. Others
might do the same, but they would first have to know to come to this specific
area of the beach.
That taken care of, it was time to make their way inland to the jungle. If
possible, they'd check back at this spot on a regular basis, if only to see if
anything had either been disturbed or something else had been left to give
them a sign.
I feel like Tarzan playing Robinson Crusoe, he thought. Friday was even the
silent type, as always, although he sus-pected that the old shipwrecked sailor
would have preferred this kind of Friday to the one he'd gotten.
Walking through the sand wasn't much of a problem, but the sand ended well
short of the jungle, and it was a dan-gerous and slow journey through masses
of rock that had flowed, cooled, and frozen, often shattering into huge lumps
or collapsing into deep holes. It was a boulder field, but of black rock that
was twisted into bizarre forms, some looking like taffy, others looking like
frozen rippling rivers. It wouldn't take much of a misstep in that field to
twist or even break an ankle, and so it was a slow process of trial and error
to get through it, and it took them several pre-cious hours to reach the edge
of the jungle.
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Volcanic areas were always fascinating for their con-trasts. Where they had
come ashore had probably been ocean only weeks earlier; now, here, where not
much older flows had come, it might have been anything from beach to jungle,
but the lava had burned and scoured all in its path, leaving no sign of
anything. Yet the wet green jungle had resisted where it could, and just
meters from where the flow ended it was as if nothing had happened at all.
There appeared to be no birds or animals, large or small, but somehow insects,
or the equivalent of insects, had made their way here on air currents and were
the dominant spe-cies. Some looked pretty fearsome, huge creatures that flew
on multiple wings and were the size of hummingbirds and strange translucent
creatures the size of a man's head that made their way up and down trees and
vines shooting out long, creamy white tendrils.
To Terry, the jungle gave a sense not of real danger or strangeness but of an
odd familiarity. She had spent some time in jungles like this, and while the
individual plant and insect life was different, this jungle was no more
bizarre than the Amazon had been. She felt almost as if she were in her own
element, a cross between the swampy jungle of Glathriel and the dense yet
protective Amazon rain forest. Terry the
American television producer would have found the region creepy and
threatening, but somehow that Terry seemed like another person, someone she
barely knew. That Terry would have found the comforts of
Hakazit to her lik-ing, while the new Terry had felt only its sense of
wrong-ness and had been relieved when they'd left it.
For all intents and purposes Theresa Perez was dead and had been for quite
some time, save for some of the knowl-edge from her past that might be useful.
She hadn't realized it and did not do so now; the
Glathrielian way did not al-low for reflection and introspection on that
level, but that did not change the truth of it. She hadn't even been conscious
of when it had happened; it had been quite late, though, when she'd
made the decision to be the diversion for the others to get through the Well
Gate. Even when she'd told Lori that she would remain in the Amazon until
finally she could make her way to civilization, she'd known that she had no
intention of doing so. She hadn't known un-til it was snatched away how much
she really had hated her life or how much pressure she'd been under until it
had been removed. It had long ago ceased to be anything more than a job, and
that job had been the only thing she'd had, the only reason to wake up and
exist every morning. She had no personal life, no friends outside the
business, and she hadn't even had the glamour of being on camera. It had been
over since that horror on the Congo, but she'd had no place else to go and her
work was the only thing that she did better than almost anybody else.
She had hid it well, but the rock-hard woman Gus so admired had been terrified
to walk alone to her car in an Atlanta parking lot.
Overcoming the initial fear, shock, and terror of the jun-gle and having been
accepted into the Amazon tribe, she'd found a closeness and a sense of herself [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]