Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Forty-five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he's still standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as the chapel's door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably) what Randy would describe as a wizard's robe. But as he walks across the compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals. Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat voyage went.

“Your friends should have come into the country that way,” says Doug Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious immigration hassles were ironed out. “Why didn't they go to Taipei or Hong Kong?” Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.

Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled water. After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out of the compound and into a transitional zone of big-leaved traveler trees and giant clusters of bamboo: ten-centimeter-thick trunks spraying out and up from central roots, like frozen shell-bursts, to heights of at least ten meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be millions of crickets and millions of whatever's making the whistling noise, but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again, so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.

The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots, but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's mind can't recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind-free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root's chapel. But it is clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not doing it for altruistic reasons.

Where the jungle's dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under-growth is only knee-high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy's tentpoles are huge trees—“Octomelis sumatrana,” says Enoch Root—with narrow buttress roots splayed out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal philodendrons winding up their trunks.

They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it becomes possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of, and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be above them—forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as though he's at the bottom of the food chain.

They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees, clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating for about ten seconds and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have assaulted in order to get here. The river's bed is shallow and rocky here, with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. “What is the point of all this?” asks Enoch Root suddenly. “I don't mean to sound discouraged by these physical barriers, because I'm not. But I'm wondering whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind.”

“This is fact-finding. Nothing more,” Randy says.

“But there's no point in just aimlessly finding facts unless you're a pure scientist, or a historian. You are representing a business concern here. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“And so if I were a shareholder in your company I could demand an explanation of why you are sitting here on the edge of this river right now instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does.”

“Assuming you were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that's what you'd be doing.”

“And what would your explanation be, Randy?”

“Well—”

“I know where we are going, Randy.” And Enoch quotes a string of digits.

“How did you know that?” Randy asks kind of hotly.

“I've known it for fifty years,” Enoch says. “Goto Dengo told me.”

All Randy can do for a while is fume. Doug Shaftoe's laughing. Amy just looks distracted. Enoch broods for a few moments, and finally says: “Originally the plan was to buy this land with a smaller cache of gold that was dug up and loaded aboard a certain submarine. We would then wait for the right moment and then dig up the rest. But the submarine sank, and the gold sank with it. I sat on the knowledge for many years. But then people started buying up land around here—people who were obviously hoping to find the Primary. If I'd had the money, I would have bought this land myself. But I didn't. So I saw to it that the Church bought it.”