The Anomaly(12)

“You have unexpected depths, brother.”

“No, I’m a twat. So are you. Now get your head straight and let’s go find this fucking cavern.”

“We’re not going to find it, Ken, you know that.”

“It matters not, mate. Isn’t that what you always say?”

He picked up the pace, and I followed him and the others down into the canyon.





Chapter

7



That’s the boat?”

It was well after midday now and very hot. You could have lit a match off the inside of my mouth. The trail had remained manageable, though increasingly narrow and broken-up, slowly winding down through a series of gullies for much of the time, at others a more precarious progress along sheer wall.

The first hour or so had felt glorious and intrepid. The air was still cool and the experience of slowly descending into the canyon—stretched out like a painting of Mars on the jacket of a 1960s science fiction novel—was genuinely magical.

It is, however, characteristic of the human mind that custom will stale life’s infinite variety. The next several hours had gone on a bit, if I’m honest. I’ve always been of the opinion that if a hike takes longer than, say, forty minutes, there’s an argument you should have parked closer to your destination.

The final section perked up again as we wound closer and closer to the river. Now, only a hundred yards away, we’d turned a corner around a huge outcrop—and there, on a beachy area below, lay a large pastel-blue craft. The front quarter consisted of low rigid structures in white plastic. The rest was inflatable. A much smaller dinghy was lashed to the back.

“Well, yes,” Molly said.

Ken peered down. “It’s got no fucking engine, Moll.”

“No. It’s a rowing raft. For rowing.”

“Are you having a laugh?”

“No,” she said patiently. “I explained this the other night. We were supposed to have a boat with an engine. That’s what I booked. But now we’ve got this instead, which is twice as big, and means as well as sleeping bags, it comes with several small tents. Which is a bonus.”

“But it has no engine. Is my point.”

“You win some, you lose some.”

“So we have to row it?”

“It’ll do you good.”

“Fuck’s sake.”



Twenty minutes later we stepped off the end of the trail down onto the rocky bank of the river.

“Wow,” Feather said, turning in a slow circle, looking up. “Unbelievable. Awesome. Wonderful.”

The walls of the canyon had been towering over us for most of the morning but reaching the bottom multiplied the effect a hundredfold. Nearly a mile of rock face above, and down here, a river only a hundred feet wide. You felt as if you were somewhere secret, strange, and old—an environment that predated human expectations, and a place where unusual things might be true.

A man came striding toward us from where he’d been waiting in shade. He was immediately identifiable as one of those gung-ho guys who’s so brim-full of testosterone that he’s going bald at thirty. He introduced himself as Dylan, and appeared to be South African, for some reason.

After shaking hands with everyone he turned to me. “So you’re the Indiana Jones figure, hey?”

“Something like that.”

“Awesome. One thing, though. On the river, I’m boss. We’ll get most of the way this afternoon, camp tonight, and should make it to your target area after a few hours tomorrow. It’s plain sailing apart from a stretch of rapids later today, which are bouncier than usual because a tremor pulled some rocks down last year. But even when it’s calm we don’t mess around when we’re this far from civilization, okay? Do you have a lot of experience in boats like this?”

“Not much,” I said, aware of Gemma’s eyes on me.

He cocked his head. “So how much experience would that be, exactly? Just to be clear.”

“Exactly? None.”

“Best do what I tell you, then, and we’ll all have a ball. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t bother to explain that if he felt the need to establish dominance he should have been addressing Ken, or Molly. He’d find that out soon enough. I could, however, have done without seeing Gemma pull out her notepad. I was confident that, whatever else her piece might eventually contain, this exchange would make the final draft. Probably as a pull quote.

Dylan spent the next half hour demonstrating how to stow our stuff in the waterproof lockers, wear life jackets, and use rowing gloves to prevent blisters; explaining the relevance of oars in relation to the waterborne propulsion process; and generally patronizing us as thoroughly as possible. Pretty soon he antagonized Pierre sufficiently that Pierre started dropping in references to annoyingly intrepid experiences he’d personally undertaken in watergoing craft. I wandered off to have a cigarette while they waved their penises at each other.

Ken joined me, glaring at his phone. “Barely a single bar of signal,” he muttered. “It’s the fucking Dark Ages down here.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Because who knows what secrets our forebears cherished, the deep spiritual insights they shared, when not enslaved by technology’s endless grip upon our—”