Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“It won’t be so bad,” he muttered, forcing himself to smile.

But he didn’t know. He didn’t even know what they were going to see over there. Davuth, as far as he could see, was haggling with the boatman.

In fact, he was telling him that he was ready to embark immediately and he was trying to put him off.

He glanced at his watch and said, “No, we’ll leave at three.”

“Why so late? It’ll be dark when you come back.”

“It doesn’t matter. We need to have lunch. The young lady insisted on it.”

He looked up at the upper-class girl on the wall and grumbled.

“All the same, sir, it’ll be dark and it’s not good to be out there in the dark.”

“Maybe, but there we are. I can pay a little extra.”

But Davuth was thinking fast.

“We might even stay out there tonight. In which case, it doesn’t matter. You can come back at once.”

This sweetened the deal.

“All right, at three,” he cried.

He shook a few hands and it was a deal.

He went off to the wall and told Robert and Sophal that under no circumstances would the stubborn vermin agree to leave before three o’clock. There was nothing he could so. He threw up his hands and laughed.

“I suggest we go and have lunch near the market. We can pass three hours easily enough.”

“But it’ll be dark when we come back,” Sophal said at once.

“He said it wasn’t a problem. We also get to see the sunset. There’s nothing better than the sunset from Phnom Da. In fact, it’s the whole point of going to Phnom Da in the first place.”

“Then I suppose we could,” Robert sighed.

“Or we could leave tomorrow.”

Sophal’s voice was hopeful, but Davuth waved the suggestion down.

“No, that would be a waste of time. What is there to do in Takeo? Nothing! There isn’t even a single decent three-star hotel here. Not even a two-star.”

They looked around for a moment and concluded that this was likely the case.

“Then let’s get lunch,” Robert said brightly.

They left the car there and walked in toward the market. They soon found a run-down place to eat some soup and satay and as they did so they looked up at the clock on the café wall and internally counted down the minutes. It seemed interminable, this unnecessary wait. But for Davuth it served a purpose. He needed to collect his wits and think a little more. He let them buy him lunch and during it he said very little, chewing his food methodically and listening to the radio behind the woks. It would be an hour to cross the water and maybe more, maybe two hours. The return would indeed be tricky, and in darkness. But it could be done.

The boy’s eyes had flared up a beautiful dark blue. Did he really like this little Khmer girl? It was hard to say. Davuth bantered with them.

“So you like our country and want to stay?”

“I like it,” Robert said.

The Vikings — they had eyes like that.

When they had finished their Vietnamese coffees they walked back down to the quay in the sticky afternoon heat. As they approached the water’s shimmer, clouds gathered far off over its horizon. Davuth went down and got hold of the boat and paid the man up front for a one-way trip. “What about the return?” the pilot asked hopefully. Davuth shook his head impatiently and said, “We’ll talk about it later.” They went down into the longtail one by one and Davuth sat next to the pilot and the other two seated themselves behind the prow. It had not been that difficult to arrange, Davuth reflected as they set off across the harbor filled with water plants and oil, and headed out into the floodplain with the sun on their right.

—

Halfway across they lost sight of land altogether. Here the trees sticking out of the surface were white as bone and draped with creepers. Driftwood floated idly past them, a few household items, broken birds’ nests and strands of dark yellow flowers like garlands tossed from an abandoned wedding feast. The pilot asked no questions above the roar of his engine. Shaded by his jungle hat, Davuth watched everything pass by: the dead fish lying on their sides in the sun, the crowns of interlaced branches. As they approached Angkor Borei he saw the red roofs of distant houses on dry land and now they seemed improbable and exotic. The land there was under shadow. The rains were coming back, but they were doing so incrementally. They swept into a wide, obviously ancient canal that curved around. On the banks lay upturned little boats, knee-high shrines and men fishing with poles at the edge of pale and impenetrable mangroves.

Angkor Borei was little more than a municipal museum with stone replicas of Vishnu statues standing in a shabby garden. While Davuth remained with the pilot at the jetty, Sophal and Robert walked around it wondering why they had been taken there. From the back wall they looked down, however, at an idyllic river scene which might not have changed much in centuries. Children swimming naked in the shallows, boats tethered within the reeds; the sun blazing on the water. They went into the dark and stuffy museum and peered at a few exhibits of prehistoric artifacts. There were aerial photographs made in the 1930s by a French archaeologist named Pierre Paris showing the canals of the ancient city which had been called Vidhapurya. A guide appeared out of nowhere and began to beguile them. He told them about the mysteries of the lost kingdom of Funan, whose capital they were now standing in. “One dollar,” he asked politely in the middle of this discourse, holding out an even politer hand. Robert paid him and the young man shadowed them as they went from case to case. He seemed to understand that they didn’t really want to be there.

There were exhibits of piled human bones from funerary sites, beautiful pottery and stone friezes depicting Vishnu.

“I feel a little claustrophobic,” Sophal said at last, and Robert thanked the guide to dismiss him and took her back outside. The sun had ripened and the skies were half clouded. Next to the museum stood a decomposing French colonial mansion of moss-thickened vaults and balconies, not dissimilar to an antebellum plantation house of the American South. They walked around it and mosquitoes came and nipped their necks and they found themselves wanting to go back to Takeo.

“But the temple will be special,” Robert said at last. “Let’s just go there now.”

“Let’s. I’m being bitten alive.”

The mosquitoes, in fact, launched a major assault as they clambered back into the longtail and the pilot uttered a ritual cure aimed at these well-known belligerents.

“The mosquitoes of Angkor Borei — they are the worst!”

They crossed the floodplain in about half an hour.

Before they arrived at Phnom Da, however, the conical hill appeared with the dark ruined prasat at its summit. At the bottom was a dark mud beach with a few shacks scattered in the jungle behind it. There was a small bridge over an estuary, a few fires in the clearings, woodcutters or fishermen squatting under thatch. It looked like a dozen people and no more. The pilot left them there and Davuth made an abrupt sign for him to leave, but the man simply hung back near the bridge and waited. Davuth knew he would not depart without a return fare. He turned back to his charges and cheerfully pointed to the path that led up from the beach through the woods toward the stone steps of the temple. He said it would be a long, sweaty hike up to the top, and it looked likely that it would be. They saw that the hill was now an island entirely surrounded by water. The dry-season roads that connected it to land had disappeared and there was just the little bridge.

It was Sophal who led the way. By the time they were at the foot of the steps the forest had closed in all around them and the heat, though now decreasing, made the prospective climb forbidding. Bringing up the rear, Davuth encouraged them. It was not, he said, as bad as it looked. They climbed for half an hour and then rested.