The Valley of the Flame

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FAR OFF IN the jungle an animal screamed. A river-moth flapped against the screen, nearly as large as a fruit-bat: And very far away, subsensory, almost, Brian Raft could hear the low pulsing of drums. Not unusual, drums on the Jutahy, in the great valley of Amazonas. But these were no signal messages.

Raft wasn't an imaginative man. He left all that to Dan Craddock, with his Welsh ghosts and his shadow-people of the lost centuries. Still, Raft was a doctor, and when those drums throbbed in the jungle something curious happened here in his little hospital of plastic shacks, smelling of antiseptic. Something he couldn't ignore.

When a sick man's blood beats in rhythm with the distant drums, slow or fast as the far-off echoes set the pace, a doctor has reason to wonder….

The great moth beat softly against the screen. Craddock bent over a sterilizer, steam clouding up around his white head so that he looked like a necromancer stooping over a cauldron. The drums throbbed on. Raft could feel his own heart answering to their rhythm.

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