The Promised One (13 page)

‘I
think the Miracle Man is coming round, Julian.’ Richard heard the woman’s voice as though from a great distance. He could feel a burning sensation as she dabbed at him with something. The left side of his face felt like a football and when he tried to open his eyes he could not open the left one. With his tongue he could feel gaping holes where his upper left molar teeth used to be. He put his hand up to touch his face and experienced an excruciating jab of pain in his middle finger.

‘Don’t do that,’ said the woman who was now coming into focus. ‘I think you’ve broken that finger.’ Richard was now fully alert and desperately trying to recall where he was. He could remember being chased by a jaguar and running towards a sunlit gap in the bushes but after that his mind was a complete blank.

‘Where am I – and who’s the Miracle Man?’

The woman laughed. ‘Why you, of course! You just fell nearly a thousand feet down an almost sheer cliff face and are still here to tell the tale – and we’re dying to hear it.’

Richard sat up and managed to prop himself against the
wall behind him. Every muscle and bone in his body seemed to ache; he felt as though he had just done three rounds with a heavyweight boxer who wasn’t too fussy about the rules. He was relieved to find he could move all four limbs and if he kept still the only parts that really bothered him were his upper jaw and his finger, both throbbing with pain, and his left side and left arm and leg which were stinging and burning. Gingerly turning his head he saw that his skin was raw and bleeding down that side: the biggest graze he had ever had or was ever likely to have.

He was in a cave, which looked out over a plain stretching to a line of dark hills on the far horizon. Here and there were dense clumps of forest but there was a great deal of open savannah dotted with herds of grazing animals. He had two companions: a man, and the woman who had spoken to him, both in their early forties. She was kneeling next to Richard and dabbing at his torn skin with gauze and spirit from a first-aid box, which Richard recognized as being from a plane – there’d been an identical one in his own plane. Her companion was tall and powerfully built, and his hair and beard were unkempt. He came over, smiling, and shook Richard’s uninjured hand.

‘Hello. I’m Julian and this is Helen, my wife. Welcome – if that’s the right word – to our crater. We never thought we’d speak to anyone else again.’ Richard introduced himself and then started to ask some questions but Helen interrupted him.

‘Sorry, Richard, but we can talk later. We must see if you can walk;we have to get back to the plane before nightfall.’

Julian and Helen helped Richard struggle to his feet and they moved slowly out of the cave. Helen, who was limping badly, was clutching her first-aid kit in her free hand and Julian held a formidable spear fashioned from a three-metre stake of wood. The end had been sharpened to a point and was blackened from being hardened in a fire. Looking back Richard saw that the cave was at the base of an immense escarpment. Julian pointed to a spot a little way along, where some broken trees lay on the ground at the foot of a giant vertical crack in the cliff face and a vulture-like bird walked about poking among a pile of bones.

‘That’s where you were lying. Those trees came down with you – they broke your fall and undoubtedly saved your life.’

‘How on earth did you find me?’ said Richard, looking along the immense cliff stretching into the distance.

‘We’ve found two or three places along the cliff where animals are most likely to fall – we think the edge at the top is hidden by the undergrowth in some way at these places. The place you fell is the nearest one to our plane. We come here because occasionally a wild pig falls down and it’s an easy source of fresh meat. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for this spot. Hunting on my own –’ he glanced at his wife’s foot ‘– with makeshift weapons would be difficult and dangerous, and fishing is out of the question.’ Richard wondered why, but
Julian continued without pausing.

‘Searching for fruit and nuts sounds fine in storybooks, but actually finding enough food to live on every day is extremely difficult. Foraging is also dangerous because of the …’ He paused almost imperceptibly and looked again at his wife, ‘… wild animals, and we daren’t go too far from the plane. Fortunately there is a banana grove quite nearby, but to have an occasional gift of fresh meat land virtually on our doorstep has been a lifesaver.’

Soon they topped a small rise and the plane came into view about a hundred yards away on a flat plain. As far as Richard could see it had not crashed but seemed to have used the flat plain as a landing site. A mile beyond the plane was a strip of dense forest which wound its way into the far distance and, as Richard correctly decided, marked the course of a river. The heat haze of the day had disappeared and the evening was still and clear.

Richard looked across to the other side of the valley where in the distance he could see a forbidding and uninterrupted range of cliffs.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to judge distances with only one eye working but this valley must be ten miles across.’

‘You’re right,’ said Julian. ‘It is very wide – but it’s not a valley. Remember we’ve had the advantage of seeing it from the air. It’s actually a giant crater – a bit like the one near the Serengeti national park in East Africa.’ Richard nodded. He’d been there as a medical student in Tanzania. The great Ngorongoro crater with its teeming herds of game was like a world within a world on the vast African plains.

‘Except,’ Julian continued, ‘this crater is a very curious shape – that’s why you think it’s a valley. From the air you can see that the place where we are standing now is only one half of a super oval-shaped crater – divided down the middle by that range of cliffs you are looking at now.’

‘That means …’ said Richard, looking along the length of the ‘valley’ in both directions. ‘Yes,’ interrupted Julian, ‘it means that both ends are blocked – but the crater is so large you can’t see them from here. We don’t know how this curious geological formation occurred, but it created twin valleys and we’re trapped in one of them. It’s an enclosed space that looks roughly the shape of a bath from the air – and there’s no way out. The cliff is unscalable at any point so far as we can tell. That’s why we’re still here after three months – not that we could go anywhere even if we could get out; when Helen’s foot got worse we didn’t even think of trying to leave any more. She seems to have picked up some chronic tropical infection following an insect bite and her foot is gradually getting more swollen and painful. There’s nothing but wild dense jungle in every direction outside the crater and we’d be lucky if we lasted a couple of days out there.’

Richard noticed as they made their way to the plane from the cave that both Julian and Helen were ill at ease. They kept a constant lookout and frequently turned as if to check whether anything was following them. At one point on their little trek there was a crashing sound in a stand of trees quite some distance away and Richard assumed it must be a tapir making the noise, pursued perhaps by a predator. Considering how far away the trees were, however, the noise was certainly very loud and both Helen and Julian stopped in alarm and gazed intently in the direction of the noise before continuing on to the
plane at a faster pace than before.

Eventually they reached the plane, an unusual design that Richard hadn’t seen before with large pods slung under each wing. Helen and Julian were clearly relieved to be back and they helped Richard into the cabin.

‘Not much room, I’m afraid,’ said Julian with a crooked smile, ‘but we’ll all have to cram in at night.’ He made as much space for Richard as possible and offered him a drink of water, which he took gratefully. His face throbbed relentlessly and he was sure he had fractured his cheekbone.

‘We’ve got some paracetamol too. The first-aid box was full of it – the pilot must have had a permanent headache.’ He handed Richard the painkillers. ‘Then, if you feel up to it,’ Julian continued, ‘we’re dying to hear your story.’

Richard swallowed the tablets and settled himself as comfortably as possible to tell the tale of his adventures. Despite the pain in his jaw and his side, however, the exhaustion of the day was catching up with him. Helen and Julian watched him in amused silence as his head began to nod and within minutes he was fast asleep.

Richard slept for over ten hours and awoke to a gentle shake on the shoulder from Helen. Julian had already been out for water and bananas, which Richard started to eat, slowly and painfully, for his injured jaw had swelled up during his sleep.

‘Where did I get up to last night?’ he said eventually, as he finished his last banana. The others both smiled.

‘Nowhere,’ said Helen. ‘You fell straight asleep which we thought was pretty rude of you considering we hadn’t spoken to anyone for three months.’ They all laughed and Richard felt himself warming to these nice people.

‘Better late than never,’ he said. ‘I’ll have another go, and try to stay awake this time.’ He then told them about his adventures up to his arrival at the crater. Just as he finished he remembered something that might save them.

‘There’s something else you should know,’ he said hopefully. ‘I know where we are. I recorded the position of our plane almost constantly using a global positioning device. In my notes I still have the GPS fixing co-ordinates for where the plane crashed and I can’t have made more than a few miles on foot through the jungle. Your plane looks OK. If it just ran out of fuel or needs a spare part we can radio my base and get whatever we need dropped to us. Which one of you’s the pilot?’

‘Neither of us,’ Julian replied. ‘That’s the problem. You’re quite right about the plane, it’s fine – we made a deliberate landing here and we’ve got fuel. Those pods –’ he pointed to the wings ‘– are extra fuel tanks for remote explorations.’ He paused and Richard asked the obvious question.

‘Where
is
the pilot then?’

‘He was eaten –’ said Julian slowly. He glanced at his wife as if seeking reassurance that he wasn’t living in a fairytale and she gave him a nod of encouragement. He looked back at Richard and continued.

‘– he was eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger.’

It was mid-afternoon and the three of them were sitting outside on canvas camping chairs in the shade cast by the plane. Richard was spellbound by the story that he had just heard.

‘Helen and I are palaeontologists – fossil hunters,’ Julian had started once they were settled outside. ‘We met and married while still at college and after years of working at the university we managed to get a United Nations research scholarship to study abroad in unexplored regions of potential palaeontological interest. We’d always been interested in South America because people have thought for years that some animal species which are extinct everywhere else might still be alive in remote areas of the jungle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his famous story
The Lost World
about a land that time forgot in the Brazilian wilderness and, though that was of course just fiction, there’ve been occasional reports right up to the present day of native tribes seeing unknown creatures in the Amazon basin. Helen and I didn’t really believe that any weird and wonderful creatures could have survived, but we did think we might find a more complete fossil record here than has been found so far in East Africa, Mongolia and Arizona. We were delighted to learn that our application for a field study grant had been successful, the only stipulation being that we should study at four different sites in at least two continents so that any research
benefits resulting from our work could be spread across several different countries. We obtained a year’s sabbatical leave from our university posts and then started on our adventure, making three-month visits to West Africa, Patagonia and Colombia in turn. We saved our final
three-month
period for the task we thought would be the most exciting – the search for new sites in remote Amazonia. After only a week of flying over unexplored territory we found the crater in which we are now stranded. It’d been the first place we’d seen where the plane could land, and the landscape – mixed forest, savannah and rocky outcrops – was so similar in appearance to the famous Olduvai gorge in Tanzania that we both became excited at the possibility of finding some outstanding fossils.

‘The pilot, David, had a problem with some tricky air currents below the rim of the crater, but we eventually landed safely and decided to set up an overnight camp to do some preliminary exploration. When David tried to radio back to base to tell them what we were up to, he found he couldn’t. He thought the nearby cliff was causing radio interference so he took the radio from the plane with its back-up battery and set out alone, away from the cliff, to see if he could find a better spot for transmission and reception.

‘After a couple of hours had passed Helen and I had finished putting up the tent and began to wonder where he’d got to. We were worried he might have broken an ankle or something; anyway, we set off in the direction he had gone and the first thing we noticed were some herds of
completely unfamiliar animals. We also saw groups of large flightless birds that we thought must be rheas – the ostriches of the pampas – though this is further north than we ever thought they existed. After about a mile we saw the radio on the ground, its leather strap still partially slung over David’s shoulder. No David – just his shoulder. It was lying there with the arm, collarbone and bits of chest still attached. His entire forequarter had just been torn out of his body.’ Julian paused. Richard was listening intently to every word.

‘Our first thought was to try to find his other remains but then we realized that he couldn’t possibly have survived such an injury and that we ourselves were probably in grave danger. We decided a jaguar or puma must have attacked him: it was too far from the river for a cayman, which was the only other creature – as we then imagined – that could possibly have killed him. We slept in the plane that night – we didn’t dare stay in the tent in case the jaguar followed our tracks or scent and attacked us as we slept. It was just as well we did because in the morning the tent was slashed to pieces and our belongings scattered.’