Dream thief

15

… TOWARD MORNING SPENCE WAS awakened by the sound of thunder in the hills. As the sun came up, a leaden rain started leaning out of low murky clouds. The three stirred themselves and sat huddled under the banyan tree that had sheltered them through the night. They munched soft overripe mm goes and sweet pears Gita had bought for them in the let marketplace and waited for the rain to stop.

"It might go all day," remarked Gita sagely. "It often does this time of year. We are nearing the rainy season."

"If it doesn't stop soon we'll have to go on anyway," said Spence. He had begun feeling more and more uncomfortable about Ari-a feeling somehow connected with his fainting speIl the day before. He had a strong sense of danger where she was concerned, and this sense made him impatient to reach hers soon as possible.

They waited half an hour more; Spence, leaning first against one of the trees' trunks and then another, was soon pacing like+ caged bear. "It isn't going to stop," he announced, arriving at the end of his patience. "Let's go on."

Gita made a face like a man smelling rotten eggs. He heaved his round shoulders and shuffled to his feet. "Don't worry, Gita," remarked Adjani. "The bath will do us all good."

They stepped out into the sullen rain and untethered Simba who also had been crushing the pulpy pears in her massive jaws. The elephant greeted her new masters with a rousing trump and examined each one and his pockets as she knelt and let them board her. Then they were off, heading northward, climbing slowly upward toward the mountains.

Spence saw the land through the hanging white mists and noted that it had changed a great deal since Calcutta. The jungle had become forest of a different type; the greens were deeper tending more toward blue in the misty rain. Sown in among lower trees he spotted tall pines shooting up out of the foliage around them and he could smell their scent in the air. Spence tough used they had risen several thousand feet in altitude already, the climb had been so gradual as not to be noticed. Nevertheless, he sensed a difference in the air-it seemed hasher and last night had been a little cooler than he remembered since coming to India.

They rode at a good pace for nearly an hour, each one cloaked in his own thoughts, like Gita wrapped in his turban, trying to keep out the rain which slowly seeped into everything anyway.

They came upon a small stream running across the road. Simba waded into it and then stopped and drank. She stood splashing her trunk in the water and blowing bubbles before squirting water into her mouth.

Spence let her have her fun; he did not know when they would be able to stop for a drink again. As the elephant stepped out of the stream he felt a quiver run through the animal like an electric shock and she froze instantly in mid-step, trunk reaching out, wavering as she sifted the air for a scent.

Up ahead the road wound sharply around a bend and was hidden behind a wall of forest. Spence could sense nothing that would make her react in such a way, but he knew better than to doubt an elephant's instinct.

"What is it? Why have we stopped?" asked Gita. His soggy turban dropped around his ears and eyebrows making him look like a waif wearing his father's clothes.

"Shhh!" hissed Spence. He gave a chop with his hand to cut off further discussion. He nudged Simba gently with his feet and she went slowly forward, with a ponderous, silent grace. He marveled at how smoothly and quietly the creature could move when she wanted to.

They crept toward the bend in the road.

Spence lay down on the elephant's head and peered ahead as far as he could as they came around the trees. He saw in the,,ad,, few objects of undetermined nature and then he looked down and saw something he recognized well: a severed human arm, thumb missing, lay directly in the middle of the road. Bloody and pale, it had been washed clean by the rain. White bone gleamed painfully from the torn end, and the arm itself seemed to indicate a warning. Halt! It said. Go no further!

Lifting his eyes from the grizzly memento he saw the lions.

There were two of them-a male and a female, both wet and draggled by the rain. The big male was tearing at a carcass splayed in the center of the road while the female sat on her haunches waiting her turn to feed. The carcass had been worried beyond recognition-as had the others he now saw littering the area-but Spence, with a sudden sickness in his stomach, knew what they were. The shreds of clothing, the shoes and sandals, hat and gun told him all.

The lion, sensing the intruders for the first time, glared up defiantly and loosed a snarl that turned blood to water. Simba stood her ground, raising her trunk high overhead and in a tight curl. The lion growled more fiercely and then seized up the carcass with a snap of its jaws and dragged it off across the road into the forest. The tawny lioness followed with the miffed air of snubbed royalty.

"That was close," said Spence. He grimly looked around the scene of carnage. "I thought they were going to challenge us."

"Lions are cowards," remarked Gita, "though I was feeling none too brave myself. Still, not many will go against an elephant. We must be near Jaldapara."

"What's that?"

"Many, many years ago there was a great wildlife sanctuary called Jaldapara. I have heard that there are still lions there." "Apparently they abound."

"This is what is left of the governor's party," observed Adjani. "I don't see anything to save. We'll have to report this to the authorities in Darjeeling."

"I wonder if there were any survivors." Spence urged the elephant onward, stopping only once to direct her to retrieve an official cap which had been worn by one of the governor's aides.

"The goondas probably did not leave any survivors," said Gita. "The only reason they allow the merchants to live is because they want them to go back and amass their goods so they can rob them another time.

"But this-" Words failed him. He shivered. "Merciful Father, protect us!"

They resumed their trek through the scene of ambush. Spence saw things lying in among the bushes on either side of the road, but he did not peer too intently lest he discover what they were. He had seen enough. …

THE NEXT DAYS WERE indistinguishable one front another-much as the towns and villages they passed through.

They rose to swollen skies and rain soon after dawn. The rain continued until midday whereupon the sky cleared and the sun burned with vigor to turn the road and surrounding forest into a steamy, smothering welter.

The landscape changed little, offering only hills and more hills, some with spectacular gorges and deeply cleft valleys between, but after so many of these impressive sights, the travelers grew numb to such profligate magnificence. India, the Country of Too Many-too many people, too many languages, too many religions, too many customs, too many problems-had too many wonderful sights as well. The effect was to deaden, as all the rest deadened, too, in this strange land.

But as they began to ascend the final climb up to the high hills of Darjeeling, Spence noticed that the forest thinned and became scrubby. The trees were shorter and the hills more pronounced and steeper. Twice they crossed ancient suspension bridges whose cables had rusted-many had snapped and now dangled uselessly into the cataract below-and the missing steel plates formed open trapdoors to be cautiously avoided.

Once they met a dozen or so pilgrims, Buddhist priests, who were making a pilgrimage to Buddh-Gaya to the south. They wore bright yellow dhotis bedecked with garlands of white magra flowers that looked like little bells, and waved their prayer flags at the elephant as it passed, murmuring and chanting as they went along.

Not more than fifty meters away from where they passed the happy pilgrims, they encountered a beggar squatting in the road. Spence could see the man's leg outstretched beside him and he whined piteously as the elephant approached, flinching away from it, but making no move to scuttle out of its path. The wretch raised imploring eyes to the travelers, and Spence looked down as the elephant deftly stepped around the human lump in the road.

Then Spence saw the man's leg curled beside him in a grotesque and inhuman curve. He stopped Simba and slid down from his perch; Adjani and Gita quickly followed. The beggar, seeing this response, went into wild and fearful lamentations, afraid that the travelers would beat him and steal his pittance, yet wanting their help anyway.

"Oh," said Gita, looking at the man's leg. "It is not good at all. It is very far gone." He lifted the filthy, rain-soaked rag that covered the man's frame and Spence saw the hideous sight. The leg was a festering mass of green-black flesh, ulcerated and oozing pus and blood.

"What can we do for him?" asked Spence, turning away. "Nothing," said Adjani. "He is beyond our ability to help. He's dying."

The cloudy eyes, the listlessness Spence beheld in the beg. gar's slack features confirmed Adjani's diagnosis. But he refused to accept the injustice of such a hopeless pronouncement. "We're going to help him," he said tersely. "If not to live, then we'll at least help him die like a human being."

Adjani gazed at his friend with wonder. "You are right, Spence. It is the least we can do."

Spence turned to view the chanting pilgrims as they hurried away, their song still hanging in the air. "Is your god deaf and blind?" he shouted after them, venting his outrage. "Doesn't he care? Is he even there at all?"

Spence picked the man up-he seemed to weigh nothing at all-he could feel his bones hard through their paper-thin covering of skin and rags. Adjani held the injured leg gently as they moved him to the side of the road. The beggar regarded them with scared, feverish eyes and whimpered with pain at being moved. "He has probably been sitting there for days," muttered Adjani. Spence looked at the place in the road where the man had sat. It was dry, and the footprints of the Buddhist priests in the mud passed mere inches away from where he had been.

Gita produced his medicine sack and began assembling some articles which might be of some help. He also brought the man a drink of water and some of their store of mangoes and pears. The man drank thirstily, but refused to eat a bite of the fresh fruit. He continued to watch them with mute suspicion as they exposed his leg and set about cleaning it.

The sight was almost more than Spence could stand, and the stink of it brought tears to his eyes. The foul limb had rotted away to nothing resembling a human appendage. Using a collapsible canvas bucket they found in Simba's howdah he fetched water from a nearby ditch running with clean rainwater. A few curious crows who had been watching the beggar from a distance now assembled on the branches of a nearby tree for a closer look.

Gita and Adjani delicately picked up the leg, which by the look of it had been crushed in an accident-perhaps when he had dived in front of an oncoming vehicle for some scrap of refuse someone had tossed to the ground. Spence began pouring the water over it, bathing it and washing away the filth and ooze.

This exertion started the blood flowing freely again over the gangrenous flesh and the gentle flooding of the water dissolved the decaying skin and muscle. Flesh and bones dropped from the leg as the water splashed down. The limb split and the stench of putrid flesh overcame Spence. The bucket dropped from his hand and he turned aside as the contents of his stomach came surging up.

Spence wiped his mouth on his sleeve and grimly picked up the bucket, but before he could begin again a crow from the tree above fluttered down and seized a small bone with a morsel of flesh still clinging to it. The bird snatched up its prize in its yellow beak and jumped back into the air and away.

"They're hungry, too," said Gita. "Do not blame them."

Spence, tears brimming in his eyes, raised the bucket and poured the rest of the water over the leg. They then tore up one of Gita's muslin sacks to use as a bandage; they wrapped what was left of the limb carefully and neatly in the dry cloth. They started to strip the sopping coverings from the beggar to clean him up, but he clutched at them so furiously that they let him keep his rags.

Gita offered more fruit, speaking softly in the man's tongue, explaining that they were not going to hurt him and did not expect to be paid for their kindness. The beggar gingerly accepted the fruit and opened his mouth, full of blackened, rotting teeth, to eat.

He took two or three mouthfuls and then lay back, still watching them as if he expected them to pounce on him at any moment. He closed his eyes and, with a long whimper and a violent shake of his bones, he died.

Spence could not understand why the beggar died so suddenly and so quietly. He looked at the still body in amazement, and then turned abruptly away.

"Spence, it's all right," said Adjani, coming close to him.

"We did the right thing. We did what we could."

Spence shook his head sadly. "It was not enough."

Gita, standing over the body with outstretched arms, said,

"See how he died, Spencer Reston? This one of the streets who in his life never knew a moment of compassion or concern knew both at the moment of death. He ate and drank and was bandaged and someone knew of his passing."

Spence looked at the body for a long time, trying to comprehend the life this discarded bit of human litter must have known.

He could not-any more than he could imagine exchanging places with a jellyfish. The gulf between their respective worlds was just too great-light-years apart.

But Spence, in an effort of pure, selfless compassion, had tried.

They wrapped the body with the governor's flag which they found rolled into the howdah and carried it a few meters into the trees beside the road. They laid it in a hollow beneath a tree and with their hands covered it with rain-damp earth.

"Father," said Adjani as they stood over the grave, "receive one of your own."

They climbed silently back onto the elephant once more and rode on into Siliguri.