The Terminal Beach

Начало книги

All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed, and by three o'clock had covered some seventy-five miles. Fifty yards away, on either side of the patrol launch, the high wall's of the jungle river rose over the water, the unbroken massif of the mato grosso which swept across the Amazonas from Campos Buros to the delta of the Orinoco. Despite their progress - they had set off from the telegraph station at Tres Buritis at seven o'clock that morning - the river showed no inclination to narrow or alter its volume. Sombre and unchanging, the forest followed its course, the aerial canopy shutting off the sunlight and cloaking the water along the banks with a black velvet sheen. Now and then the channel would widen into a flat expanse of what appeared to be stationary water, the slow oily swells which disturbed its surface transforming it into a sluggish mirror of the distant, enigmatic sky, the islands of rotten balsa logs refracted by the layers of haze like the drifting archipelagos of a dream. Then the channel would narrow again and the cooling jungle darkness enveloped the launch.

Читать дальше →