The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

THE BOYS WHO LEFT HOME TO LEARN FEAR

I did not intend to tell our story here. This notebook was meant for notes of a technical nature only. I assumed that we would be able to give our individual accounts at our own pace and in our own words when we returned home, but I am now the only person who can tell those stories and unless a miracle comes to pass I will not be returning home.

There are people who will find some of what I have written distressing. I offer them my sincere apologies but I cannot dissemble. Leaving a true record of recent events is the sole remaining ambition I may be able to achieve.

I have one personal request of whoever finds this book. Please ensure that a copy of this one page at least is forwarded to Christina Murchison, formerly of Dundonald Street in Edinburgh’s New Town in Scotland, if she is still living. I care for her more deeply now than I have ever done. She will be my final thought. My greatest fault was to give insufficient weight to her misgivings.

I have lost track of the passing of days so I can no longer be certain of dates. Nevertheless I know that our final troubles began just over a week ago when we heard a faint roar and spied sunlight directly ahead of us. Emerging from the trees we found ourselves at the edge of a deep gorge of schist and migmatite. The far bank, where the jungle continued, stood some sixty feet away. Between the two banks the sides of the gorge fell sheer and slick to rapids which tumbled and foamed on jagged rocks. Downstream a rainbow hung in the spray.

After a month of laborious progress through dense, unvarying jungle I felt drunk with space and light and had to sit down while my head spun. It was now a fortnight since the death of Nicholas’s brother, and images of Christopher’s last hours had haunted me ever since, but this panoramic view of our one, shared sky connected me to other people and other places and thereby lifted my spirits a little. I only hoped that it might do something similar for Nicholas himself.

Bill attached a pan to the end of a rope and lowered it to the water, measuring the drop at two hundred feet and retrieving a gallon of liquid which tasted better than champagne. Edgar and Arthur then hacked their way through the undergrowth along the edge of the gorge in one direction while Nicholas hacked his way through the undergrowth in the opposite direction. They returned after an hour having discovered no easier crossing point. I built a fire and set myself to brewing tea and skinning and roasting one of the little monkeys we had caught the previous afternoon, and Bill applied his mind to the problem of engineering a bridge.

His solution, like his solutions to all of our previous practical problems, was elegant and efficient. We felled and trimmed two ungurahui trunks, lashed ropes around one end of each, heaved them upright, threw the ropes over a high branch then cantilevered them across the gorge beside one another to make a rudimentary bridge.

The monkey was gamey and fibrous but we were in a jovial mood so it mattered little. We finished our meal, repacked our equipment and began our crossing. Bill insisted that he be our canary and go first. The oily wood bounced a little but held firm and he gained the far side to universal applause. I followed him and was granted, midway, the most extraordinary view upriver to smoky, mauve highlands as if I were a bird suspended on the very air. I felt the giddiness coming back and dared not turn round to take in the opposing view. Edgar shouted out to me to “get a bloody move on, man” and I completed the journey looking only at my feet. I was followed in turn by Arthur and Edgar, leaving only Nicholas on the other side.

When he was halfway across, however, the left-hand trunk cracked and split. As he dropped he threw his arms around the right-hand trunk and clung to it as the broken spar separated into two sections which fell beneath him into the rapids, bouncing several times, booming loudly upon each impact, before lodging themselves between the wet rocks.

Every detail of the following minute is imprinted sharply upon my memory — the wood bending like a bow under Nicholas’s weight, his feet circling as if by sheer force of will they might conjure steps from the empty air. To my shame I stood motionless not knowing what to do. Arthur, however, threw his own pack to the ground, urged Nicholas to hang on, climbed astride the remaining trunk and began shifting himself out over the drop. Were he unburdened Nicholas might have been able to inch towards us, hand over hand, but he was carrying a heavy pack. It was Arthur’s intention, I believe, to cut the straps with his clasp knife. He did not arrive in time. The two men were still some ten feet apart when Nicholas’s remaining strength failed him. He looked towards us with what appeared to me to be an expression of embarrassed apology, his fingers loosened and gravity took him. I cannot help but wonder whether, if his brother had still been alive, he might not have clung to life a little longer.

He seemed to fall very slowly. Perhaps it was a trick of the mind but I have a very clear memory of sketching out the elements of the letter we would have to write to his grieving parents during the one or two seconds of his terrible descent.

I assumed that he would be swept instantly away but he struck a large, flat boulder which lay midstream dividing the current. He came to rest in a sitting position so that if you had not seen what went before you might have thought he was simply taking a rest while crossing the river, except that his thigh was folded sideways just above the knee. He did not move for half a minute and I hoped earnestly that he was dead for it was not possible to survive a wound of that nature this far from civilisation (his brother had died from an infection contracted after being scratched by a thorn, an injury which would have been utterly unremarkable in England). Then he began to move, rubbing his face and looking around like a man waking from a doze, surprised at where he had slumbered.

Bill untied the rope from the remaining ungurahui and looped it around the nearest palm. Edgar asked him what he was doing and Bill replied, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Edgar told him not to be a fool.

“So we are to stand here and watch him die?” asked Bill.

Edgar drew his handgun and I thought for one awful second that he intended to shoot Bill for his insolence, but he did not point the gun at Bill. Instead he turned towards the gorge where Nicholas sat swinging his head slowly from side to side in the manner of an injured bear.

Arthur cried out, “No!” but Edgar did not pause. The shot was perfect. Nicholas seemed to shudder as the bullet entered the top of his head, then he rolled sideways off the rock, the foam was briefly pink and he was gone.

No one spoke. The echoes of the shot died away until there was only the roar of the river and some nameless bird calling from deep in the jungle like a rusty wheel being turned. Edgar slotted his handgun back into its leather holster and refastened the buckle.

“Dear God in heaven,” said Arthur.

“It would have ended in no other way,” said Edgar. “Better that it was swift.” His voice did not waver. I heard neither sorrow nor regret, though Nicholas was a man he had called a friend for many years. “Perhaps one of you would like to say a prayer to mark his passing.”

After a pause Arthur slowly removed his hat, took a deep breath then proceeded to recite Psalm 39 in its entirety and, as far as I could tell, without a single error. “I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue. I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight…”

When he had finished I asked him how he had been able to remember the words so perfectly. He said, “I wish I could forget them. My sister died of scarlet fever two years ago. I attend her funeral every night in my dreams.”

“We should keep moving,” said Edgar. “We have only three more hours of daylight left to us,” and I had the unsettling sensation that he had removed a mask he had been wearing for many years.

I began our expedition thinking that Edgar’s ambition, his sangfroid, his bravery and self-belief were admirable. I see now that it is possible to demonstrate these qualities to such a degree that they become an illness, dangerous both to oneself and to those around one. I came to understand that he had never possessed any genuine interest in the professed purpose of our travels and that if we were to find Carlysle and his men still alive deep in the jungle it would please him only if this involved some further adventure, such as rescuing them from violent aboriginals. The entire expedition was for him simply an arena in which he might try his courage and strength to their limits, and the greater our difficulties the more he relished them. He reminded me of no one so much as the eponymous hero of “The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear,” one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm which I had read as a boy.

I realise now that when Arthur and I had rooms on the same staircase as Edgar at Oxford we did not really know him. In truth it would be more accurate to say that we were simply two among many people who were in awe of him. His not being an intellectual did not matter because he was the kind of man who made other men wonder whether being an intellectual was perhaps a little shameful. I can vividly recall the five framed Punch cartoons of his uncle, all of them featuring a globe, spinning on the man’s finger, crushed beneath his foot, served to him on a plate or subjugated in some other symbolic manner. Edgar talked repeatedly of his intention to surpass his uncle in some way and none of us doubted that he would succeed. He was almost comically handsome. He had a scar down the side of his face which he had acquired falling downstairs when he was four years old but he carried himself with such martial dignity that everyone thought of it as a duelling wound, even those of us who were party to the secret. He had been awarded Blues in both rugby and fives and was, in short, one of those men who take it for granted that they are liked and admired, that wealth and opportunity will flow naturally to them and that this is simply the nature of the world. Consequently they never learn how to make a compromise or earn respect, they never need to imagine how the world might appear from the point of view of another person, they never truly love and they are never truly loved.

I did not understand these things until two weeks ago.

The following morning, after a night of shallow and restless sleep, while Edgar was relieving himself and Arthur was shaving, Bill asked if he might discuss something with me. Bill was the only non-university man among us and we rarely shared small talk so I feared bad news.

He sat close enough that Arthur might not overhear. “I fear that Mr. Soames has lost his mind and we’re here only so long as we’re useful to him.”

I was shocked to hear him talking about Edgar in this manner.

“I no longer think we can trust him.”

I reminded Bill that whether he trusted Edgar was neither here nor there. He was, ultimately, an employee. I softened my rebuke a little by adding, “The drop was two hundred feet. The rope was two hundred and twenty. There was insufficient slack to form a belay and a cradle.”

“Did he know that?” asked Bill.

I said, “You would both have died. You may dislike him but you owe him your life.”

Bill, I realised, was testing the ground in case he fell foul of Edgar. Might I be an accomplice, a co-conspirator? I found his presumption distasteful. I asked him what he would have done in Edgar’s shoes.

“I would have discussed the matter at least,” said Bill, “before putting a bullet through a man’s head as if he were no more than a racehorse with a broken leg.”

I said that democracy was not necessarily the best model for governing an expedition of this kind.

“So we submit to a tyrant?” said Bill.

“When your name is on the front page of The Times I suspect that you will not care greatly about what kind of dispensation we were briefly living under.”

Bill got to his feet. “I have spoken out of turn. Forgive me. I did not mean to place you in a difficult position.” He turned and walked away.

A few days after Nicholas’s death our compass readings began to go awry. Divining true north by means of the stars, however, a process which involved Arthur ascending tall trees, monkey-like, at night to broach the canopy, we were able by degrees to make our way towards the epicentre of the magnetic disturbances.

Shortly after breakfast one morning Edgar called for us to come and look at a boot which he had found lodged at head height in a mass of creepers and vines choking a rubber tree. He took it down and turned it over in his hand, wiping away with his hat some of the feathery lime-green mould which had gathered on the putrid leather.

Edgar spread his outstretched hand along the sole to gauge the size. “It must have belonged to the boy.” He put the boot back into the crevice between the vines as if he were a shop assistant and a customer had decided not to make a purchase. “Let us press on. If our luck holds we may find the cave by nightfall.”

Later during the morning, as the two of us were walking together, Arthur said, “There is a possibility, of course, that they killed one another.”

I said that after all this time, in this heat and this humidity, even if we were to find the bodies their manner of death would be exceedingly difficult to ascertain.

“You would be surprised,” said Bill who was walking behind us. “I’ve seen many corpses in my time. They are more eloquent than you might expect.”

I cast my mind back to the asylum, to Nat Semperson sitting in the director’s library, November rain lashing the casement and the panes rattling in their leads. His morning dose of laudanum had been postponed in the hope that this might sharpen his mind, the director explained; even so he very much doubted that we would be told a comprehensible story. Semperson rarely spoke, he continued, and remained as feeble-minded as he had been when the HMS Cadogan deposited him at Falmouth. He often cried out in his sleep and seldom slept a whole night without waking.

Edgar asked what had happened to Lord Carlysle and the rest of the men. What point had they reached on their journey through the jungle? Were they still alive when he last saw them? If not, how had they met their end? Semperson watched the rain and seemed blind to Edgar’s presence and deaf to his questions.

“He sometimes talks about a terrifying creature,” said the director. He had the air of a ringmaster, I thought, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat, a voice slightly too big for the room. I wondered how much of the story was concocted for our benefit in the hope of a second monetary donation. “He claims sometimes to have seen it approaching across the fields. Sometimes he is certain that it has broken through the doors and that we must arm ourselves.”

Edgar pulled up a chair and sat in front of Semperson so that he was able to look directly into the man’s eyes. He explained that we were planning to travel to Jamanxim in search of Carlysle and the rest of his party. “The family will not rest easy until they know the whereabouts of their son. We will spend sixteen weeks in the jungle. If there are predictable dangers I would like to be forewarned. I do not wish our party to come to a similar end.”

“To my knowledge,” said the director, “he has never spoken of what happened to his companions.”

After a long pause Edgar got to his feet and replaced his chair. “This is a great disappointment.”

Only I knew how great. Carlysle’s family would fund an expedition only if there were dependable evidence. Semperson was our last hope. We would now be forced to return to London and, within the month, Edgar would reluctantly take up the job at his great-uncle’s bank which he no longer had a justifiable reason for postponing.

Struck by a sudden inspiration I asked the director if I might borrow a sheet of paper and a fountain pen. I removed the tea set, placed them on the tray and placed the tray in Semperson’s lap. He looked at them with his head cocked to one side the way a dog does when it is listening to a faint and distant noise.

“Children learn to talk before they learn to write,” said the director. “I strongly suspect that we lose those faculties in the reverse order.”

But Semperson had taken up the pen in the shaking fingers of his right hand.

“Go on,” I said gently.

In my memory the room fell silent though this cannot be true for the storm did not abate until the evening, a fire was crackling busily in the grate and the tall-case clock ticked loudly in syncopation during our entire visit. Semperson’s pen began to move. The director, Edgar and I stood as still as if we were watching a stag enter a glade, knowing that it might bolt at the slightest disturbance.

He drew for five minutes then laid his pen down.

“If I may…?” Semperson did not respond so Edgar picked up the paper, carried it to the table and set it down in order that we might both inspect it. Whether Semperson had once drawn well I do not know. He now drew like a child. On the left-hand side of the paper was a map showing a tiny village, a forking river, two cataracts and a range of jagged mountains. Midway between the river and the peaks he had sketched a large X in the manner of a boy playing a game of buried treasure. In the centre of the paper was a separate drawing of a hill with a lopsided elliptical hole in its flank and a group of rudimentary figures in the opening which made me think of the Pied Piper stealing away the town’s children. On the right-hand side of the paper was a third drawing, a sketch of a monster — part man, part bear, part lizard — so preposterous that it made me laugh out loud. The whole was signed in the bottom left-hand corner.

Edgar took from his travelling bag the slim volume belonging to the Royal Geographical Society. He opened it at the bookmark and laid it beside Semperson’s sketch. The maps were not identical but they were close enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“And how do we navigate through the jungle?” said Edgar. “This is a vast area.”

“There is a natural lodestone in the cave,” said Semperson. His voice was small and timid. “Your compass will become useless as you draw near. The effect extends for some twenty miles about. It is quite extraordinary.”

“What happened to Carlysle?”

Semperson said no more. His eyes became vacant and I saw that he was weeping.

“If you gentlemen are finished,” said the director, stepping between the two men, “then I will give Mr. Semperson his laudanum.”

“I think we have what we need,” said Edgar. “Thank you, Dr. Fairweather. Thank you, Mr. Semperson.”

The director handed his patient a small willow-patterned cup of suspension. While Semperson drank it I leaned close to Edgar. “I doubt the Carlysles will pay a thousand pounds on the evidence of a map drawn by the man who also believes that this higgledy-piggledy manticore stalks the Gloucestershire countryside.”

Edgar folded the paper neatly, took the paper-knife from the desk and ran it along the fold, excising the monster. “I have no memory of the animal to which you are referring.” He laid the creature on the hot coals and it became briefly incandescent before it was swallowed by the flames. “Gentlemen, you have been generous with your time. We must bid you good day.”

We found the cave towards the end of the afternoon. The trees thinned, the earth gave way to rock and we walked up a shallow slope to find ourselves on a low, stony plateau some five or six acres in size. At the far end the granite rose vertically, and cut into this cliff was a hole shaped almost exactly like the lopsided parabola in Semperson’s drawing. We had taken the picture literally, however, and misread the scale by a factor of eight or more. Hazlemere House would have sat comfortably within its maw.

We could see the sides of the moss-covered vault receding into the dark but they did not narrow noticeably and beyond a hundred and fifty yards all light was swallowed up. The air emerging from the interior was fetid and chill and seemed unwilling to mix with the warm vapour rising from the jungle and as we moved around we passed in and out of rank, wintery currents.

I walked to the edge of the plateau and looked out across the jungle, the uninterrupted green canopy blurring in the vaporous distance. The space should have offered me some relief but I felt nothing of the dizzying elation which had overtaken me on the bridge over the gorge. I could hear no animal cries of any kind, nor any birdsong, not even the buzzing of insects.

Arthur and Bill returned from a brief reconnaissance having found the dark star of a long-dead fire burnt into the rock. Edgar appeared only vaguely interested. It was the cave itself which had now captured his imagination, to which end he suggested that he and I make a short foray inside to gauge its size and ascertain whether it was the lair of any creatures against which we should protect ourselves overnight.

I armed myself with a machete, Edgar clipped his handgun to his belt and we stepped into the dark. The temperature dropped rapidly as we made our way down a gradual slope in the dying light and I was soon shivering in my sweat-soaked shirt. If we paused we could hear only the occasional splash of water dripping from the roof onto the wet floor. Here and there a sour, chemical smell became particularly intense and I found it difficult to shake the suspicion that some beast was only inches away, shrouded completely by the near-absolute dark. Our weapons, I realised, would be of little use against such invisible adversaries.

We were clearly in a chamber of extraordinary size. The echoes coming from the walls on either side of us were like those one might hear in an empty cathedral, but we could hear no similar echoes returning from walls ahead. I pictured the trees above and thought that one might correctly refer to this as the underworld.

After a quarter of an hour or so Edgar suggested that we save our resources for the morning and when we turned we saw, suspended in a great, starless dark, a droplet of bright green light within which tiny figures moved and I had the uncanny sensation that this was the world in its entirety and that I was looking upon it from the moon.

We re-entered the day to find Bill holding a broken shovel with a bent and rusted head. He and Arthur had also found a rudimentary cross, but a good deal of dense undergrowth would need to be cleared before we knew where to begin digging in search of a grave, if indeed there was one.

Edgar announced that Bill and I would do this in the morning while he and Arthur undertook a proper exploration of the cave. In the meantime we would pitch camp on the rock. A brief silence fell and I realised that I was not alone in the unease I felt about the place. Bill suggested that we spend the night instead in a clearing through which we had passed some twenty minutes before arriving at the cave, but Edgar replied that if we were to be attacked in the night he would rather see our assailants coming across a hundred yards of open ground than dropping from an overhanging branch. He untied his pack, extracted his canvas, poles and mosquito net and the subject was closed. We headed off to the tree line to find rocks and logs with which to hold our guy ropes down.

After we had erected our own shelters Bill and I built a fire and plucked and roasted the large flightless bird we had trapped the previous night. The sparse flesh was surprisingly good despite a strong aftertaste of aniseed. We followed it with several chunks of Quiggin’s mint cake, watery coffee and two shots each of the ten-year-old Glenturret which Arthur had brought, wrapped in a blanket at the base of his pack, to celebrate the midpoint of our journey.

I felt unwell on account, I assumed, of so much rich food after weeks of meagre fare, and was therefore in no mood for conversation. I offered my apologies and slipped away to the edge of the rock with my battered Ovid whose fine pages were now speckled with mould. I found it difficult to read, however. So I put the book down and watched the sky. Night fell fast at this latitude, and while I would be denied the spectacle of the sunset by the position of the hill into which the cave was cut, I would, in compensation, be able to see the Milky Way in all its glory for there was no trace of cloud and, apart from our fire, no other light for three or four hundred miles.

I was beginning to discern the faintest points of light against the darkening indigo of the eastern horizon when I became aware that Edgar, Arthur and Bill had fallen silent. Something was about to happen but I was ignorant of how I knew this. There was a brief pause, then a faint susurration from the mouth of the cave, like the long receding of a wave on a gravel beach. An object of great size was moving swiftly towards us out of the subterranean dark. I briefly considered running but no one else had moved and I was unwilling to be judged unmanly. The susurration became a roar and I could feel a cold, ammoniac wind being driven from the cave’s mouth by the mass of whatever was speeding behind it. The fire, I recall, began to burn with a fierce green light. The noise continued to rise in volume until it was almost unbearable, at which point the very darkness inside the cave erupted into the surrounding air and the sky went black. I pressed myself to the ground, covered my head with my hands and felt something like hail pummel my exposed back.

I have no clear memory of how long I lay in this position, only that after a period the noise and the smell abated somewhat. I opened my eyes, got to my knees and saw Arthur standing in the light of a fire that was glowing once more with a reassuring orange flame, exclaiming, excitedly, “Bats. Dear God in Heaven. Bats.”

We walked over and saw, strung between his hands, a furry body the size of a field mouse at the junction of two segmented, translucent wings. “Some near-cousin of Tadarida brasiliensis,” he said, “plucked from the air by my own hands.” The struggling animal possessed the face of one of the demons in the illustrated Bible which had given my younger brother nightmares when we were children. “There was, after all, some point to those tedious afternoons at deep square leg.”

“Arthura brasiliensis,” said Bill. “You’ll go down in history.”

“Tadarida arthuriensis,” replied Arthur. He broke the neck of the creature with a sharp twist and dropped it into his pocket. “Brasiliensis is the adjective. And you may call me greedy but I’d prefer a more substantial memorial.”

“A bat would suit me just fine,” said Bill. “A flower, a tree…”

I returned to my bed, lay down and watched the Via Galactica reveal itself, the sky so clear and dark that I was able to discern the colours of individual stars, each one burning with the light of a different spectrum according to the peculiar combination of elements which fuelled its monstrous furnace. I fell finally into a doze and was woken, as was everyone else, by the return of the bats just before dawn.

While we were eating breakfast I rolled up my trousers and discovered a raised purple lump on my left calf. The cotton duck of my trousers had not been punctured so it must have been the bite of some creature, perhaps one of the brown spiders through whose webs we had been walking repeatedly over the last couple of days. I showed the lesion to Arthur, the only one of us with any medical knowledge now that Nicholas was gone. He advised me to wait and see if the swelling and discoloration went down before risking any further intervention.

He and Edgar then prepared themselves for their journey underground, donning all their clothes against the cold and equipping themselves with the remaining rope, two belay devices, the two handguns, a machete, water, food and both our oil lamps.

“We shall press ahead for two hours at most,” said Edgar. “Then we will return. If after four hours we have not reappeared you must decide whether to search for us or attempt the journey home alone.” There was relish in his voice as if he might enjoy playing any of the roles in such a scenario.

We wished the two men luck, bid them goodbye, gathered the spade and the machetes and made our way to the cross which Bill and Arthur had discovered the previous day so that we might dig for bodies and find some clues as to the fate of our predecessors. I was very grateful indeed not to be entering the cave. I was convinced that something would go wrong and the fact that my sense of impending doom was without foundation made it no easier to bear. If Bill and I were lucky enough to uncover Carlysle’s body, however, and identify it by means of his signet ring, for example, we might soon be heading home.

I was unnaturally tired and after half an hour of labour Bill suggested that I sit to one side and resume the work when I felt stronger. By this time we had uncovered two graves. Bill put down his machete, picked up the antique spade and began to excavate the second of these. Within a very short time he struck a human femur. Digging more carefully now he rapidly produced a skull complete with a jawbone and a nearly complete set of teeth. Sinews and muscle were stretched around the whole like ageing strings of India rubber. He brushed the earth away and handed it to me. It seemed fake, a theatrical prop or a desktop memento mori.

I remained incapable of significant manual labour. Bill said that there was no hurry and that my exhausting myself would be to no one’s advantage. Within half an hour I was handed a second skull, this one incomplete, the dome shattered and absent on the left-hand side of the head. These dead men were the reason we had made this laborious and fatal journey yet I could summon little interest. Bill returned after a few minutes carrying a handful of broken fragments. He laid them out like a jigsaw and fitted them together, the final shape mirroring the hole in the skull I still held in my hand. “He was killed by a heavy blow to the head.”

I asked Bill how he could be certain of this.

“If a man were to fall from a cliff he would crack his skull at most. To do this you would need to hold him down and stave his head in with a rock.”

“Then he was killed by one of his own party.”

“Or someone was already here and did not want company.”

“And it was they, perhaps, who buried the bodies and spirited away the expedition’s equipment.”

Something had caught Bill’s eye. He picked up one of the machetes and began cutting back a mass of vines and creepers which had climbed the side of the rock before petering out for lack of damp soil. He pulled back the foliage and I could see letters scratched into the rock. I got slowly to my feet and walked over so that I could read the inscription.

“I assume you can tell me what it means,” said Bill.

I confessed that my Greek was poor but that the word repeated in the first line almost certainly meant “flee,” from the same root as “fugue” and “fugitive.” As for the meaning of the second and third lines I had little or no idea.

Bill looked at the sun. “Four hours have passed.”

I had become so preoccupied by the graves, the skulls and the inscription that I had forgotten about Edgar and Arthur. We made our way back up onto the top of the rock, Bill striding comfortably ahead, the muscles in my legs protesting at the incline. Our little camp was empty and the two men were nowhere to be seen. My premonition had been correct.

“So,” said Bill. “We have a decision to make.”

It had not occurred to me that Bill might take Edgar’s instructions literally. For a moment I was tempted. Then my senses returned. “There is no decision to make.”

We dressed as warmly as possible. There were no more lamps so I lit a fire while Bill hammered and split the ends of two staves of firewood to make brands. We took up a machete each, oiled and lit the brands then entered the cave.

The walls, illuminated now, were rippled and bulbous as if formed from a substance which had hardened suddenly in its melting. I had expected irregularities — overhangs, narrows, drops, forks, subsidiary chambers — but there were none. There were patches of moss but otherwise surprisingly little vegetation for so fecund an atmosphere. The temperature dropped swiftly to that of a cold January day in England. We passed the point beyond which we were able to see the entrance to the cave and shortly thereafter we could no longer see the roof above our heads. I guessed that the cave must have been at least five hundred feet high at this point.

The previous year I had listened to a speech at the Royal Geographical Society given by Alois Ulrich who had been exploring the Hölloch in the Swiss municipality of Muotathal which appeared to be at least ten miles in extent. I wondered if we had stumbled upon something commensurate. There were no longer any echoes as such, only a sibilant background to every noise, like a stiff brush dragged across a drum skin. Every so often we stopped and called out, standing in silence afterwards, letting the reverberations die slowly to silence and listening for any answering cries, but none came.

We walked on and the cave grew larger still for we had lost sight of the wall to our left. We adjusted our direction of travel in the hope of regaining the centre of the cave but found ourselves, after several minutes, in a place where we could see neither wall. Around our feet lay two overlapping horseshoes of dancing yellow light from our lit brands. Beyond them was a darkness so complete it felt like a physical substance. We tried to retrace our steps to regain a view of the wall but cannot have done so accurately. Without thinking we spun round, scouring the dark for any clues, and within a few moments we had lost all sense of direction.

Even if we now succeeded in finding a wall the slope of the floor was so shallow that we would not know which wall it was and be therefore ignorant of whether we should follow it to the right or the left to regain the entrance. A hand reached into my chest and fastened itself around my heart. I believe that Bill felt something similar for he confessed that we were in “a bit of a bloody pickle.”

We began walking in what we hoped was a widening spiral in search of one of the walls when my brand guttered and went out. We took a spare brand from my pack and tried to light it from Bill’s but with no success. The air was too damp and too cold. Some minutes later his own brand went out. We watched the final embers die in the dark. My strength began rapidly to ebb. I told Bill that I needed to sit down for a few moments and did so. He told me that he would carry on searching for a wall. He would bang his machete on the rock every so often and I should do the same, and in this way we would not lose touch with one another.

I heard his individual footsteps distinctly for a while and then they merged into the single, indivisible noise of the cave. However close I held my hands to my eyes I could see nothing. I tried to imagine that it was a moonless night and that, while staying with my brother-in-law, I was out walking on Salisbury Plain but my mental powers were insufficient. Bill banged the rock briskly three times and I returned the call.

After a time I began to see swirls of red and green particles moving upon my retina, the same colours and shapes one sees if one closes one’s eyes and presses hard upon the lids. But I could neither dispel them by opening my eyes and looking at real objects nor close my eyes and cover them with darkness. They became heavy and liquid, a great tide of light, not just red and green now but all the colours of the rainbow, gathering and twisting like murmurations of starlings.

I do not know how to describe my state of mind from this point onwards without seeming affected or sensational. I expected my fear to increase but this did not happen. On the contrary I became very calm. My fear of earlier melted away and I felt completely safe. I possessed no body and existed at no point in space, and if one is both nothing and nowhere how can one be attacked? How can one suffer, how can one die? Gradually the coloured phantasmagoria began to resolve itself into images. I was standing on the balcony of a higher sphere, looking down upon my life — my childhood in Chittagong and Patna, the snake that fell onto the breakfast table, the punkawallah with the deformed leg, my ill-matched father and mother, my terrifying Northumbrian grandfathers (“Gog” and “Magog” as my brother styled them), the house in Canterbury, my mother weeping at the rheumatic weather to which she would now be subjected…all of it charming and tender and utterly unimportant, a world of toys which would be swept away and leave no trace. The thought filled me with a sense of peace such as I have never felt before. It was perhaps that state of mind sought by certain Hindu fakirs and Buddhist monks.

Then I saw a group of boys from the village bathing naked in the pool where the river slowed and pooled downstream of the mill. My clothes fell away and I was tumbling in a puzzle of white limbs and cold water and silver bubbles. I recognised Solomon, the blacksmith’s boy, who kept a knife in his boot. I recognised the ginger boy whom my grandfather had caught trapping rabbits and had beaten with a switch. I recognised my cousin Patrick who died in a house fire at the age of nineteen. I was struggling to keep my head above the surface and frightened suddenly that I might drown. Then Edgar appeared in front of me. I reached out and he put his arms around my chest and I was raised up into the light and the air.

Then he was no longer Edgar. He was Christopher dying, Christopher in those last hours, his sun-browned skin now red and taut and peeling, reeking of sweat and excrement, his eyes wide, as if he could see something dreadful in the distance, nonsense tumbling from his mouth—“Sit down, sit down, sit down…The key, for God’s sake…Horses this morning…” I tried to disentangle myself but he was holding on to me too tightly and I knew that he was going to die and take me with him.

Then he was no longer Christopher. He was the creature in Semperson’s drawing, part man, part bear, part lizard, rotted meat between the yellow teeth, eyes like orange marbles, lice swimming in its fur.

Then I was alone and back in the utter dark of the cave, frightened and cold, and I longed to return to my nightmare.

There was a period of time. It was not like time spent sleeping, after which one is aware of the world having carried on in one’s absence, but an absolute vacancy, as if a chapter from the book of myself had been torn out and thrown away. I was naked and wrapped in a canvas sheet. It was night. I could see my clothes hanging in the light of a fire. I was simultaneously hot and cold. Two poles held up another canvas sheet over my head as a rudimentary shelter. I was not well. My life came back to me, as if I were examining a large diagram, homing in on the tiny figure that bore my name. I remembered that we had gone into the cave to look for Edgar and Arthur.

Bill said, “We did not find them,” so I must have spoken the question out loud. He was squatting beside me. “Drink this.”

I took hold of the warm enamel mug and sipped. He had melted the remains of the mint cake into hot water. “How did we get out?”

“I waited for the bats. Then I knew the way.”

I said, “I owe you my life.”

He said, “I’m going to lance the bite on your leg.”

The lump was the size of a chicken’s egg and nearly black.

“I fear it contains something more than putrefaction.” He straddled my leg so as to hold it down and keep the cut both small and accurate. He heated the tip of his clasp knife in the flames of the fire. “This will hurt.”

On the contrary I felt only a faint nick and warm liquid splash over my leg. Bill cut the sleeve from a spare shirt, washed it and used it to bind the wound. “You should sleep now.”

I woke to sunshine which was some compensation though it did not drive the cold from my bones. There was no blood seeping through the bandages but my foot was numb and I could not stand. Bill served a breakfast of peanuts and a bitter yellow citrus fruit which I had not seen before and which I found hard to keep down. My mind was cloudy. I asked if Edgar and Arthur were dead.

“We were in the cave for five hours,” said Bill. “It is now twenty hours since they entered.”

I felt neither sadness at their loss nor any satisfaction at having risked our lives trying to save them, only a dull wretchedness.

Bill left to investigate the graves further. I attempted to read more of the Ovid but my mental powers were not up to the task. Instead I took up this notebook and glanced through some of my entries — a sketch of a terrapin, a description of St. Elmo’s Fire, a rudimentary calculation of the volume of water passing over a nameless cataract — recalling the stories evoked by these details. After several hours Bill returned in possession of a new skull and a signet ring bearing the initials “JDC” engraved as three interlocking curlicues. “There are six graves in all,” he said. “This was in the last.”

He departed on a second errand and reappeared carrying two bladders of water and some palm hearts. He roasted the latter and I ate them with a mug of weak coffee while he boiled and strained the water before pouring it into all our receptacles. He then set about sorting our equipment into that which was now dead weight and that which remained useful. I bridled to see him make himself so free with objects, some of them intimate, which had belonged to Edgar and Arthur but I was too weak to argue.

Bill carried on working throughout the afternoon. He filled two packs with nuts, roots and more palm hearts. I assumed that he was preparing for our forthcoming journey home. Only when he was making supper did he say, “I have provided you with food and clean water for a week though I do not think you will last that long. I will leave you the whisky. I am only sorry that I cannot leave you a gun.”

I felt like an idiot for not having predicted this turn of events. I had to think about it only for a few seconds to realise that it would be impossible for me to travel anything but the shortest distance through dense jungle. I said, “You are leaving me,” and was embarrassed to hear myself sounding like a child.

He leaned forward and tenderly unbuttoned my shirt to the navel. “Look.” My torso was peppered with livid red spots. “My whole life since the age of ten I have served other men for small wages and smaller thanks. The coming few days are worth more to me than to you.”

I recalled how I had upbraided him for questioning Edgar’s sanity, reminding him that he was merely an employee. I came close to apologising but even here, even now, I felt myself observed and judged by an invisible audience composed of those people whose good opinions I have always sought — my father, my schoolmasters, Christina, my friends — and I did not want to be seen as craven or obsequious. For the briefest of moments I was on the verge of tears, then I gathered myself and wished Bill luck on his journey. He seemed thrown somewhat and I felt stronger as a result.

Darkness fell and the bats came out of the cave. I would see this spectacle only a few more times and be able to tell no one about it. I asked Bill whether he was going to take the signet ring and the skull to the Carlysles. He said that he had not yet decided. There was no financial reward offered and reputation alone rarely put a roof over a man’s head. If he reached the river’s mouth he might not even sail home. He had skills which, in this country, could make him, if not a wealthy man, then at the very least a man of business. He might simply keep the ring and the skull as mementos.

We sat watching the fire. Every so often the wood spat and crackled and a bright ember was carried up into the dark as if we were cooking stars and adding them to the night sky one by one. I was going to die. I wanted very much to talk about this but I could not broach the subject. I thought of the ayah we had in Chittagong and how she would sit on my bed and ask, “What is the matter with the young master?” and I never needed to say what the matter was because the asking of the question itself was what I needed.

The bats woke me at dawn. Bill was already gone. I had a headache and loose bowels. Starting a fire proved too onerous so I ate a handful of nuts, drank a mug of tepid, coppery water and lay wrapped in my canvas sheet watching the sun come up.

I recalled the weekend two years previously during which I had returned to Merton for the Founder’s Supper. After an opulent meal I found myself walking in the gardens with Edgar. Pausing at the armillary sundial in the dying light we smoked a pair of cigars looking down over Christ Church Meadow towards the Isis. I don’t think, hitherto, that he had ever given me his full attention for more than two or three minutes. I was flattered, and when he told me the story of the Carlysle expedition and his plan to bring back news of the family’s missing son I was struck by how pitifully lacking in event my own life had been up to this point.

The memory unsettled me. I drank some more water and added a little whisky to dull the pain in my head. My eye fell on my notebook and I realised that I must try to leave some record of our expedition. If it were never read by another human being it would nevertheless summon a few ghosts and I would be in great need of company over the coming days.

And so I began to write.

Towards the end of the afternoon I relit the fire using the flint and the sealed tin of dried moss which Bill had left me. I roasted another two palm hearts and watched the sun go down. I tried to write more but could not order my thoughts. I had a fever. My left leg was now completely numb and the livid red spots had spread down my left arm. The bats came out to hunt. If I moved quickly my head spun. I drank the last of the whisky and closed my eyes and waited for sleep to take me.

I woke thinking that we were still at sea and that we had run into a storm. Lightning ripped the sky from top to bottom and a vast ocean was lit up momentarily in a burst of white light. Then the world was thrown back into darkness and the thunder followed, like barrels rolling off a cart. Lightning struck for a second time and I saw that the ocean was made of trees, that I was not on a boat and that it was not pitching. There was a little canvas roof over my head but I was lying in water. I tried to stand but I could not make my legs work properly. I raised myself onto my hands and knees like a dog. There was another flash of lightning and I saw my notebook wedged into the open mouth of a pack that was filling with water. I pulled the pack under the canvas, extracted the notebook, stuffed it into my shirt and gave myself over wholly to the belief that if I could save the book then I could save myself.

There was lightning, then there was darkness, then there was thunder. I lost the feeling in my hands and knees and feet. I fell asleep, my arms buckled and I was woken by my head and shoulder striking the hard, wet rock. I got back onto my hands and knees. I do not know how many times this happened.

Gradually the gap between the flashes of lightning and the peals of thunder grew longer and both slowly faded. Then they were gone and I was left in complete darkness and pouring rain. I was going to die at some time in the next few days. Only the thought of the notebook gave me any desire to reach the morning alive. My teeth chattered. I saw Christina and her new husband seated on a terrace, their children playing cricket on a long lawn. I saw a flotilla of Spanish ships approaching over the ocean of trees. I was lifted up and carried into the cave by the surviving members of Carlysle’s expedition.

The bats did not return. Perhaps they could not fly through heavy rain. At dawn a monochrome world became faintly visible. Over the next hour or so the downpour thinned and ceased. The low sky was dirty and grey like a cheap military blanket laid over the world. Drops trembled and fell from every object. The numbness had spread to both my hips. I was still shaking but no longer felt as cold as I had done. Whether this was an improvement in my health or the later stages of hypothermia I had no way of knowing.

The fire was gone. Every piece of wood had become a little boat and sailed away. There remained only a shallow puddle. I took a rough inventory. The moss which I had foolishly left open to the elements had vanished. I could not see the flint. The rain had carried away an entire pack of food. I took the notebook from inside my shirt and opened it. The sodden margins were soaked and in places the paper had begun to disintegrate but I had taken the precaution of writing in pencil so no ink had run and for this I was grateful.

Eventually the sun came out. The temperature rose and steam began to rise from the stretched canvas and the shallower puddles. I drank a little water. I put a handful of nuts into my mouth and chewed them to a paste so that they could pass easily down my constricted throat. I struggled out of my clothes and sat naked on the warming rock. Behind me rose the great opening of the cave. On every other side green jungle ran seamlessly to a misty horizon.

I opened the notebook and waited for the pages to become dry. Then I took up my pencil and began.

Now I can write no more. I have been blessed with a final day of brilliant sunshine. For that I am thankful. I hope I have used it well.

The night is coming.

I wish that this were a happier ending.