Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"I mean, how are we doing?"

The village of Seville was some way off, Francis said. He could not say exactly how far. He squinched his face when Father asked him the miles.

"How many men paddling the cayuka when you were here before?"

"No cayuka," Francis said. "Just foots." He showed us his cracked feet. His ankles were oily from pedaling the boat.

Father blew up. "Now he tells us! He walked! For all we know, we might not get there until tomorrow." He yanked the stern painter from the branch and said the lunch break was over. "If you want to stay here, you can," he said to me. "But we're not going to hang around and watch you feed your face."

I stuffed the sandwich I had made into my pocket, and we cast off. Soon, with Father's barking, we sudsed along like a motorboat.

"What are you brooding about?"

I said, "I wanted to pick one of those avocados back there."

"You're seeing things," Father said. "There aren't any avocados around here."

But there were — small, wild avocados. We had eaten them at the Acre. Alice Maywit had identified them. The Zambu John had told her about them. We peeled them and mashed them with salt and planted the seeds. I looked at Francis, but his eyes were turned on Father.

"Ain't real butter pears," Francis said. "Just bush kind."

"If I've got so many authorities on board, how come we're making such slow progress?"

No river is straight. They only turn and go crosswise and sometimes lead you backward — the nose of your boat heading into the direction you just left. River travel is like forever being turned back and not getting there. The sun shifts sideways from the bow to starboard, where it sways until a riverbend brings it over to port. Soon it slips astern. You know you've been going forward, but the sun isn't in your face any longer — it is heating the back of your head. Some minutes later it is beating on your knuckles. Then it is back to starboard. Another reach and it is burning around the boat, useless to navigate by. All it tells you is how much time has passed. For coastal sailing, the sun is a good guide, but it was confusing here.

In the jungle, all rivers are mazes, and this one was mazier than most — it was something only a small cayuka or an ingenious pipanto like ours could negotiate. The bad part was not that we were going backward, but that we seemed to be going nowhere. We would come to a bank choked with water lilies and hyacinths and green ruffled leaves, and see a bend of open water. We would turn and follow that bend. After half an hour, as the hyacinths piled up and the branches at the bank swung against the boat and smacked our faces and pushed Father's baseball cap sideways, we would realize that we had come the wrong way. Or we were in a swamp that was packed as solid as land, or a lagoon surrounded by black trees, or knocking against stumps. Then we had to go back and suds our way through the thick flowers and logs we had taken for a bank Once past these barriers, we would travel on what seemed a new river or a tributary, now narrow, now wide as a pond and no opening So the sun went round and round, and Father cursed and said why did you have to go fifty river miles to advance five land miles?

He mapped the river as we went, marking the shallows and the bends and the false turns, the sandbar crescents on the reaches, the swamps and lagoons — all the deceptions of its straggling course. It was more than a crumpled shape. It was a bunch of knots, tangled like worms in winter, that made no sense. Even Father, who liked complications, called it a so-and-so labyrinth and said that if he had a dredger and a barge full of dynamite he would twist the bends out of it and knock it straight, so that you could see daylight from one end to the other.

This was the subject of his speeching. When we were led into a swamp by the temptation of open water, Father said, "I'm going to do something about that" — and the islands—"I'll sink them, first chance I get" — and the ponds—"Strap a channel through here, canalize it — all I need is dynamite and willing hands."

Father was now at the bow with Clover, while Mr. Haddy took his turn on the pedals. "Clear all this obstruction away — make some kind of scoop that cuts this sargasso weed at its roots and lifts it free. Get this mess into shape. How very American, you're all saying — the man wants to bring permanent changes to this peaceful jungle! But I didn't mention poison, and I certainly don't intend to make it commercial. Gaw, I like to get my hand on this," and he grinned at the tangles and bends. "It really makes me mad!"

He was getting redder in the face, and, being tall, he looked uncomfortable squatting at the needle nose of this narrow boat. He kept his hands on his hips and swayed like someone riding a bike with no hands. Every so often, he poked his head into the storage vault and said, "At least the ice is holding up, which is more than I can say for the crew. Pedal, Mr. Haddy! Stop catching crabs. Are you looking for avocados, too?"

We passed a semicircle of huts. Francis Lungley called it a village.

"I see signs of corruption," Father said. "I see a tin can!" At another group of riverbank huts, he said, "It's all gum wrappers!"

There was only one more village, and it was hardly a village — a few open-sided huts and a stand of banana trees. This made Father hopeful. Two men sat at the river's edge clumping submerged stones with boulders. Francis Lungley said the men were fishing — stunning the creatures under the stones. They turned the stones over after they clumped them, and pulled out squashed eels and tadpoles and frogs.

"We must be getting close," Father said.

Francis slapped himself on the head. "I forgit! Them mahoganies!" He smiled at the trees as if he expected them to smile back. "It near here."

Father looked satisfied. "They didn't cut them down. Nothing to cut them down with. Primitive tools. Nothing to use the trees for. Just sit back and watch them grow. Now that's a very good sign."

Here, grass spikes grew out of the water, and the trunks of short cut-off trees stood in pools. Clumps of spinach bobbed in the river, and the lianas were black and dangling, like high-voltage wires blown down by a storm. It was all green wreckage and might have been the mess left by a subsided flood. In what was supposed to be river, there were shoots of fountainy leaves, and the land steamed with crater holes of scummy water. Mud and mosquitoes — and it was hard to tell where the river ended and the land began. There was no definite riverbank, and if it had not been for the tall trees behind it all, I think we would have turned around and gone back — we certainly could not have gone any further. Many of the smaller trees were dead, and on the deadest ones were brown pods, quiverine under the branches. "Bats" Mr. Haddy said. "Thev's bats." He repeated his bloodsucking story to Clover, but she said, "You can't scare me."

Staring at some bushes, I saw human faces. The faces were entirely still and round and staring back at me with white eyes that did not blink. I was not scared until I remembered that they must have been there the whole time, watching us thrash our boat through the spinach and the weeds.

Father saw them. He said, "I've got a little surprise for you."

At his voice, and while we were still looking at them, the faces vanished. They did not move, they just disappeared — goggling at us one minute, gone the next. They had turned into leaves, but not even the leaves moved.

"Out to lunch," Father said. "Get the duckboards. We're going after them. You first, Charlie."

"Why me?" But I knew I should not have asked.

Father said, "Because you're the bravest one here, sonny."

This was not true. But the risks that Father made me take were his way of showing me there were no risks. On the rock in Baltimore, up the kingpost of the Unicom, climbing through Fat Boy — it had all been a kind of training for times like this. Father wanted me to be strong. He had known all along that he was preparing me for worse, for this tiptoeing through the spinachy swamp on duckboards, and teetering past the scummy pools and the vine tubes.