Bond’s heart pumped like a steam hammer as he fought to stay in control of his senses and hold the Q-craft head-on to the racing water. The spray stung his face like hail and the roar of the falls threatened to burst his eardrums. Ahead the frothing white water was giving way to an apron of smooth cream as the river stretched itself over the lip of the precipice. What lay below was swathed in a heavy pall of mist. Bond’s numb fingers reached up and grasped the metal rod that ran beneath the awning of the Q-craft. To the left and right were two levers, sculpted close to the shape of the rod. Bond waited and felt the hull of the boat rasp against rock. He was now inside a cloud of spray, and below him was a sudden unnerving glimpse of what lay beyond the falls. It seemed like a great hole in the middle of the earth down which water from every side was disappearing. A hole so deep as to have no bottom. Bond pulled down the levers and immediately felt the awning come free and the wind attempt to tear it from his grasp. He clung tightly to the rod and as the Q-craft tilted over the edge of the falls what was now apparent as the wings-like structure of a hang glider swept him up over the terrifying drop.
14
THE HIDDEN CITY
Blinded by spray, Bond felt that he was as good as dead. The enormous flow of water going over the falls set up air currents which acted like an undertow on a swimmer. His frozen hands clung to the bar and he dangled, terrified lest any attempt to throw his feet backwards should destroy his already precarious balance. An up-draught carried him away from the lowering cloud of spray and he saw that what had seemed like a bottomless pit was in fact a deep gorge which sucked in water from three of its sides. Ahead of him, beneath a suspension bridge of misty rainbow, the reformed river escaped as a cataract between towering cliffs. Bond’s heart fell fractionally faster than the hang glider. A down-draught was carrying him below the lip of the falls. He struggled to find a current of air, but knew that it was hopeless. He could never reach the surrounding jungle. He would have to follow the river down the gorge and hope that some landing space would appear before he ran out of supporting air. One look at the raging torrent, and his chances of survival seemed remote. The sides of the gorge were sheer save for occasional patches of vegetation, and the river raced through a shattered honeycomb of snag-toothed rocks. As the distance to them narrowed, he saw the battered shell of one of the launches breaking apart like a bundle of kindling. That was the fate that awaited him. It was like a nightmare in which with a jolt one is suddenly suspended in mid-air, drifting down, down, down towards a hostile landscape, twisting and turning but unable to arrest the descent. Bond felt a coldness which did not only come from fear. Beneath the level of the cliffs the atmosphere was glacial. The rocks glistened with spray and a bird rose upwards sharply, as if terrified by this strange intruder in its turbulent kingdom.
Now the bottom of the gorge was fifty feet away and all the air seemed to belong to the rushing water. There was nothing Bond could do to stay up. Only prolong the agony for as long as possible. A sheer rock face loomed up before him and he veered away at the last moment, dropping a heart-stopping ten feet with the suddenness of the turn. Angry spurts of water snapped at his heels and the gorge closed in above his head. The torrent jinked to the left and another wall of rock threw itself in his path. Bond forced his right arm up and pulled with his left. As the water rose high to whip against the cliff, he saw a scatter of jagged rocks and stones on the other side of the stream. An untidy mane of creepers strained against the current. Bond veered left away from the full force of the water and braced himself for impact. He came in close enough for the tip of wing to scrape against the cliff and fell clumsily into a frothing mill-race of water.
The first impact drove his knees against his chest and the freezing water cut him to the bone. The battered framework of the glider was torn from his grasp and bounced away like a broken rainbow. Bond narrowly avoided being disembowelled on a submerged rock, and snatched at a cluster of creepers. His hands started to slip down the slimy tendrils, stopping at a joint to which he clung with desperation born of the threat of imminent death. The current swung him to the side so that he was within reach of a narrow beach of water-washed shale. Feeling the current relax its hold, he kicked sideways with his feet and threw out an arm to grab at a twist of root which projected from the rock face. His fingers brushed against it and then gripped. A last muscle-wrenching effort, and with both hands clinging to the root, he pulled himself from the maelstrom of pounding water. He lay on the wet stones and sucked in mouthfuls of air, thankful and surprised to be alive.
The roar of the water around Bond was still terrifying. Tucked on a ledge of shingle, he seemed almost to be beneath it. As he looked back upstream, the full might of the falls was hidden by the bend in the river, but a thick cloud of spray and mist hung in the air, grey and foreboding against the black mass of rock. The water only needed to rise a few inches to sweep him away again. As if prompted by the terror behind the thought, it began to rain. Bond knew what this could mean. A sudden storm upstream and the mighty weight of water being swept over the falls would rise by feet in seconds. He began to look around him desperately. The rock swelled out above his head and before him was an untidy jumble of glistening stones, the residue of a cliff fall. As Bond’s eyes reached up, they narrowed incredulously. It was scarcely possible to believe what he could see through the fine net of spray and the falling rain. Revealed through a fading rainbow was a beautiful girl standing on a promontory of rock. She wore a long green robe split to the waist and a head-dress like a cap with streamers before and behind the ears. She looked not at Bond but upstream towards the falls. Bond turned away as the water surged against his foot alarmingly and when he looked back the girl had gone. Had she really been there? Had the journey and this terrible gorge begun to play tricks with his imagination? The roar of the water dinned into his ears and the cold pinched his limbs. If he could not find his way to higher ground within seconds he would be dead. The rain was now falling heavily, driving in under the rock. Bond edged along the thin shelf of glistening stones with the cliff face scraping his back. He could not see what lay directly above him, but his view of the opposite side of the gorge was depressing. A sheer cliff face loomed out like the bow of a ship, pitted only by horizontal contours of erosion. To climb it in his present condition would have been impossible.
Bond reached the end of the shale and launched himself clumsily at the lowest of the boulders. The shifting stones made an indifferent springboard and he was hard-pressed to get a handhold and haul himself up. A glance behind showed him that he had acted only just in time. The small beach had disappeared and the trailing tentacles of creeper that had saved his life were invisible beneath an angry white froth of wild water. Bond continued to climb, wondering how far the swollen stream could pursue him. Every surface was wet and covered with a green slime that felt like the skin of an eel. The cliffs towered above him like the walls of a deep tomb. He hauled himself up to the spot where he had seen the girl and rested, shivering uncontrollably.