Dark Heart

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The orchid was a Ghost: the rarest in the world. Perhaps even among the most priceless. It should have been nestling high in the Florida Everglades, not resting trapped in the fork of an anonymous African freshwater mangrove overlooking the sullen heave of the Great River on the lower edge of the inner delta in the newly recognized West African state of Benin la Bas.

Like thirty generations of its ancestors, the orchid had been seeded in the distant, derelict wreck of a greenhouse away in the montane high forest of the impenetrable jungle that clothed the slopes of a ridge of volcanoes a thousand miles inland. What little was left of the greenhouse stood beside the mouldering, overgrown framework of a long-abandoned facility on the shores of a lake that occupied one of the smaller bowl-shaped calderas on the side of Mount Karisoke, greatest of the volcanoes.

In the long-ago boom years of the seventies, when there had been high hopes that the heart of Africa would make much of the continent and more of the world rich, a Japanese company created the facility. They built dams and sluices to control the flow of the young river running through the lake, seeded the warm, shallow, volcanic waters with oysters and drew up plans to harvest freshwater pearls. Not just any workaday Mikimoto freshwater pearls, so popular at the time. For the lake was silted with rich jet and ebony volcanic mud, and the oysters that crowded the fecund beds would in time, it was hoped, produce lustrous, priceless, pure black pearls.

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