Jon Evans - Dark Places

There was a wet thump a little like a water balloon hitting pavement. Then the small boy lay dazed on the ground, blood oozing from his mouth and his left leg. And Michael laughed. He laughed as if he had just witnessed a Buster Keaton comedy routine, not a malnourished child's serious injury.

I stopped and stared, not knowing what to do. The car — a Mercedes with tinted windows, almost certainly belonging to a government official — reversed slightly and then drove around the fallen body and away. I took a step towards the victim but Michael grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

"What — what are you doing?" I demanded.

"We have to go," he said. "They'll blame it on us. They'll call the police. We'll be arrested, we'll have to pay off everyone and their dog, it'll be whole days of hassle."

Other passersby began to congregate around the boy, who hadn't moved except for a couple of spastic twitches. A small pool of blood thickened in the dirt around him. The Africans looked at us darkly and muttered to one another. I didn't know what they were saying but I could tell from their tone of voice that they were moving from shock to outrage in a hurry.

Michael stepped into the street, tugging me along, and waved down a taxi.

"We can't just leave him," I protested feebly.

"There's nothing you can do," Michael said, his voice now irritated.

He pulled me into the taxi. And to tell you the truth I didn't really resist.

He was probably right about what would have happened. He was probably right about my inability to help. It wasn't that which put him on my shortlist of potential murderers. It was that laugh, that instinctive amused laugh, when he saw the car smash into that little boy.

Morgan Jackson because he was the Great White Hunter, friendly but utterly without empathy, a man who had never had a moral qualm in his life. He told stories about hunting wild pigs for sport in his native Australia, relishing every gruesome detail. He left the truck several times, alone, for up to a week, and never told us much about where he had been when he got back.

He was fun to be around, and he seemed to like me and Laura. But if he didn't like you, he made it pretty clear that he didn't much care whether you lived or died. And with Morgan you knew it wasn't just an expression. If I had been with Morgan instead of Michael that day in Wagga, he wouldn't have laughed. He would have kept walking without paying the wounded child any notice at all.

One night in Ghana, I remember, we hacked the campsite out of the bush with machetes, a job Morgan took great pleasure in. Around the fire that night the talk turned to the wildlife in West Africa. More precisely to its nonexistence. There were allegedly a couple of hundred elephants in Ghana, but for the most part the denizens of West Africa's game parks had all been killed and eaten during the region's periods of drought and famine.

"Must have fucked you off to hear that," Robbie said to Morgan. "The Great White Hunter comes all the way here and there's no animals left to hunt."

"Not a problem," Morgan said.

"Why not?"

Morgan smiled. A toothy predatorial smile. "I can always hunt Africans," he said. "If I feel the need. No shortage of them, now, is there?"

After a moment we collectively decided it was a joke, just another outrageous Morgan quote, and we laughed. Uncomfortably, but we all laughed. Except for Morgan himself. He just continued to smile.

Bali is a small island, and it took me only two hours by air-con tourist bus and no-air-con bemo (a van with two benches in back, jammed full of about twenty people, their luggage, their pets, and their families) to get to the town of Penelokan, on the edge of Gunung Batur's volcanic crater. Indonesia was ridiculously green. I have been to many lush tropical places but Indonesia's green was so deep and pure it seemed surreal, as if a drug had heightened my senses. Statues of Hindu gods in stone and wood marked every crossroad, each one a little artistic gem, perfectly rendered. Metallic crooning gamelan music wafted through the air at every other turn. The men wore white and gold, and the women wore sarongs so brightly coloured they nearly burnt my retinas.

The view from Penelokan was stunning. The crater was a perfect circle maybe ten miles in diameter and four hundred feet deep, and Gunung Batur rose, red lava over green forest, from the exact center. A crescent-shaped lake took up the eastern third of the crater. The remaining floor was scarred by previous volcanic flows, some of which had overrun whole towns. Not far from Gunung Batur was a sea of black lava from which rose a verdantly green cone-shaped hill. The black lava reminded me of Mile Six Beach near Limbe. And of Laura's naked corpse splayed on its fine black volcanic sand.

I hitched a ride on a pickup truck down the steep switchbacking ribbon of road that led through a volcano-destroyed ghost town to the settlement of Toyah Bungkah at the foot of the mountain. Hill, really, maybe 2000 meters high, and that in heels. But nobody ever shelled out fifty US dollars for a guide to lead him up a hill.

Toyah Bungkah was pleasant enough. Scenically located between the mountain and the lake. More lodges than you could shake a stick at, and stores selling Cokes and Marlboros and Snickers and the other American logos you could find anywhere in the world these days, but the people seemed a lot more friendly than those of Kuta Beach. Lots of would-be guides, but they didn't hassle me too much. I didn't intend to climb Gunung Batur. I was just here to check the lodges. I had noticed in Kuta Beach that I had had to sign in to my bungalow, and was hoping that was a universal government mandate.

It was. What luck. I pretended to consider staying at each lodge in turn, actually pretty typical shoestring backpacker behaviour, except I wasn't seeking the lowest price and then trying to bargain it down, I was looking through all the registers. No joy. No Lawrence Carlin, no Michael Smith, no Morgan Jackson. And no Stanley Goebel, although I doubted The Bull II was still traveling under that passport.

By the time I had exhausted the possibilities, it was still midafternoon, and I was depressed and disappointed. If I rushed I could still make it back to Kuta Beach tonight, but what was the rush? I had struck out there just like I had here. My whole flight to Indonesia was beginning to feel like an embarrassing moment of madness. It was nice of Talena to have been concerned, but I should be so lucky as to be endangered. I decided to stay the night and in the morning climb Gunung Batur. Since I'd apparently come to Indonesia to exercise futility, I might as well try to enjoy myself.

I didn't hire a guide. How hard could it be? You just went up until you could go up no more. Admittedly there were a few false starts in the forested trails, and a couple more past the treeline on the barren lava crags that rose to the top, but I made it. Two weeks on the Annapurna Circuit had toughened my legs so much that this low-altitude ascent felt like a walk in Golden Gate Park. The lava was razor-sharp, but that just meant my boots gripped it more firmly.

The top was a U-shaped wall around the central crater, like a castle wall surrounding the treasures within. The interior of the crater was lushly green. There was a distinct smell of rotten eggs, and at one point I smelled burning rubber and looked down to see my boots bubbling on one of the hot rocks. Only a few meters separated me from magma, I reckoned, quickly stepping away.

The last eruption had been some twenty years ago, and historically speaking, Gunung Batur was about due for another, saith the Lonely Planet. Looking down I could see a half-dozen black frozen-lava rivers running all the way to the lake. I wondered how it felt to live in Toyah Bungkah, knowing that any day you might be immolated by a river of searing lava. I guess not that different from living in San Francisco, knowing that you're next-door neighbour to the San Andreas Fault.