The Digging Leviathan

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In the silver light of the midnight moon the mangroves looked animate. Twisted roots arched out into brackish water at the mouth of the Rio Jari, stretching away north in tangled profusion toward Surinam where pipid frogs chirped and paddled in slack water. South, not five miles distant, rolled the black silent expanse of the Amazon, nearly forty miles across. The night was warm, and the moon seemed to cover half the sky, bathing yellow mangrove blossoms in watery beams and playing across the mottled bark of an enormous orchid-hung trunk that lay half submerged in the river.

Basil Peach gripped the ragged end of a broken limb, steadied himself, and flung a weighted net into the river. A paraffin lantern burned on shore, but the dirty yellow glow was lost almost at once in the opalescent moonlight.

William Ashbless wrote poetry and watched Peach fish. Peach hadn’t said anything for three hours. Above, on a bit of sandy bank, slept Professor Russel Latzarel and the lepidopterist, Phillip Mays. It was nearing two in the morning. Ashbless would have been asleep himself, but the moonlight was conducive to poetry, and he had suspicions about Basil Peach.

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