Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Hear that, Fido? He's going to show us how to make camp. Like he showed us how to keep the bugs away. You've got to hand it to these kids."

"Charlie know how," Francis said.

"He's a hamburger," Father said. "He's got your number."

It was clear that Father had not planned to camp out. We had eaten most of the food. We had no tents or mosquito nets, no lanterns or blankets, and only one mess kit. The water bag was almost empty. But there were several things in our favor — it was the dry season, so we would not get rained on, and there were fewer insects up here, and all day we had seen pacas and birds on the mountainside — we could eat those. Father had traveled light in the hope of rushing the mountain, but we had failed, and now it was evening.

"Don't just stand there," Father shouted to the Zambus. "Improvise!"

The Zambus built a fire, while Jerry and I made a lean-to out of sticks we had found nearby. Then we gathered dry grass and made a bed inside and tried not to disturb Father, who was cursing, hacking at a sapling with his knife.

He was no good at making temporary camps, and he was surprised at how quickly and well Jerry and I put up our lean-to. It did not need to be waterproof — it was only to protect us from the wind, which was strengthening up here as darkness fell. When Father saw our bed-nest of grass he said, "You planning to lay an egg?"

He cut five saplings, saying. "I'm going to make a proper shelter!" He started to lash them together, but before his first frame was complete it was pitch dark, which was a shame because his shelter would have been much better than ours if he had finished it. At last, he kicked it apart and said, "What's the use!" Seeing me with some yautia plants, he said, "Picking flowers, Charlie? That's the idea — you can put them into your scrapbook. Won't Mother be pleased?"

I told them they were yautias and that their roots were as tasty as carrots.

"Eddoes," Bucky said. Eddo was his name for yautia. He had speared a paca rat with a sharpened stick and was roasting it over the fire with the same spear.

"I'm not hungry," Father said. "Anyway, I don't eat rats and weeds."

He watched us eat and he told us how, traveling in Eastern Europe, he had been disgusted to find that everywhere he ate, the silverware was dirty. He had smeary knives, and stains on his spoon, and the tines of the fork always had bits of yesterday's food between them. At another place, he had found a hair in his milk. He went on describing the filthy silverware, and he made the Zambus laugh, but I kept thinking how strange it was that we were squatting here on this mountainside in Honduras, eating a burned paca and burned yautia with our fingers, while Father complained about the dirty forks in Bulgaria. Normally he did not talk about food at all, and he said it was indecent to praise it while you were eating it. But that night on the mountain, all he talked about were the tormenting meals he had eaten and the cutlery that had not been washed properly.

Finally he said, "You're melting my ice," and ordered us to put the fire out.

The Zambus obeyed. They had made their beds beside low windbreaks of boughs. They were not the men I was used to in Jeronimo. Here, on the mountainside, they had become silent and simpler and a little wild-seeming.

"I'm not tired," Father said, as Jerry and I crawled into our lean-to. "I'll just sit here and cool my heels until you're ready to move out."

He sat cross-legged near the ice. He had combined the two blocks to concentrate their cold. I could tell from the hot glow of his cigar that he was sulking — maybe thinking about dirty cutlery. But I also suspected that he was guarding the ice. He had warned us not to touch it. The Zambus muttered for a while, and then they sighed and lay like logs on the ground. "I wish Ma was here," Jerry said, but he was soon asleep.

The wind hummed in the bushes and dragged against the rocks and dry grass. That was the only sound, the wind, but later I heard another noise in this humming of wind. It was a plink-plink-plink, as if someone were striking the highest key on an old piano. It was the ice melting, waterdrops hitting the tin pan of the mess kit. I was painfully hungry and still thirsty, and the sound of water made me thirstier.

I poked my head out of the lean-to and saw Father beyond the dead fire, sitting in front of the ice block. The block with is clumsy cover was about a quarter of its morning size, but silhouetted in the starry sky it still looked like a tombstone, and Father like a white corpse that had crawled out of the grave. The starlight made his face like a skull's and gave him bony arms.

"I want to sleep in my own bed!" he screamed.

I tried to think of something to say. I decided, after all, not to ask him for any water.

"What are you looking at?" he said fiercely. "This is the first time since creation that ice has ever melted here. Think of it! And you're saying that's nothing?"

I WOKE UP tired in damp clothes and remembered we were still on the mountain — Father, Zambus, and ice. Father had fallen on his side and, slap on the ground, had gone to sleep with his arms folded and his baseball hat squashed against his cheek. But he woke quickly and denied that he had even dozed off. He said he had got bored, watching us snore. He said, "No, we haven't failed!" and told me to fill the canvas bag with the water that had dripped into the mess-kit pan.

"Don't bother to get harnessed." He was peeking under the cover of the ice block. He shoved the cakes of ice into the knapsacks. Each cake was about the size of a football, speckled with brown broken leaf, and had the rotten texture of a hard sponge. This was all that was left of the great ice block we had dragged out of Jeronimo.

"Don't say anything. Don't ask me any questions. I don't want to hear a peep out of anyone. Now let's march!"

He sprinted up the path, his knapsack rising and falling, bumping his back, whop-whop. Francis Lungley followed behind with the other knapsack, then Bucky and John, empty-handed, and Jerry and I, trying our best to keep up. I carried the long water bag. It slapped against my knees and prevented me from running.

It was a bright cool dawn, washed in light, with parcels of cloud lying against the mountainside like ghosts of dead mackerel. Up ahead, Father had halted near an outcrop of rock. I thought he was waiting for us, but I saw that he had reached another ridge of the mountain. It was the last ridge. Below us — but it was a plateau, not the deep valley we had expected — was all of Honduras.

Such an empty world. I did not think wilderness could look so sad.

This was a different country from the one we knew: limitless jungle, volcanoes, and no ocean. No rivers that we could see, no water at all. It was a surface of treetops and skimming birds. Its vastness made me feel small and puny. No smoke, no roads, nothing to say that people lived here. It was Olancho, but that was only a name. It was anybody's.

"It looks so desolate," I said.

"You've never seen Chicago!"

The treetops beneath us continued to the horizon, and the unbroken greenness gave it such a strong suggestion of depth that it hardly looked like forest at all. It was a brimming ocean of wild leaves, a tide so high it had risen to the mountain range. Father was smiling at it all, and yet it was Father who had told us that the deepest tides tricked you with their flatness — if you stuck your foot in them, they would drag you out and drown you in their undertow.

"It's all downhill from now on." There was no path. Father set off, running beside the trickle of a stony creek.

The Zambus said we were to look out for more bees. The Indians here were beekeepers and always had hives near their huts. And dogs — half-wild ones — they kept those, too. But we smelled smoke before we saw either bees or dogs, and when the creek widened to a stream, we knew we must be near a village. The forest was darker — we were under that ocean of trees we had seen, and moving down. My senses told me more than I could logically explain. The smell of stagnant water and woodsmoke and burned meat, and a hairier, dirtier, rancid-yam smell of latrines and dogs — all boiled together. It was a stew-stink I now associated with human habitation — not ours but other people's. Jeronimo's cleanliness educated my nose to these sharp odors.