The Bridge That Went Nowhere

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The full moon, impersonal and serene, shepherded its scattered flock of lamb’s-wool clouds as they slowly munched their way eastward; beneath its cool eye the jungle fretted through its usual uneasy rest, still steaming from the torrential rains that had swept through at midnight. From the raised plateau where the twin-engined plane huddled on the now-abandoned airstrip, the roof of the jungle stretched beyond sight, a sea of shadowed green with taller stands of striated palm and giant white cetigo rising like eerie islands, standing guard above the ruffled surface.

A deeper band of black curved through the darkness at the western edge of the cleared space, marking the sheer chasm where the river ran far below, twisting its way over jagged rocks; the high canyon walls held its sound to a murmur, scarcely heard over the usual night noises of the restless selva. In the moonlight the pale reflection of the bridge glimmered faintly, as if aware, somehow, of its strangeness in this primeval wilderness, and even more aware that its majestic architecture deserved something more impressive than the rough dirt trails that twisted their way from its approaches to disappear into the brush. It spanned the depths below gracefully, a monolithic monument to modernity in a jungle as ancient as time; the jungle had withdrawn from its roadway as if to calculate some means of absorbing it, as it had all other attempts at intrusion into its domain.

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