Savage is the Dawn

Up-River

The river glittered and shimmered in the midday sun. Glittered as it flowed by broadly without a murmur. Across the way on banks of golden sands where the joyous light wasn't overshadowed by prehistoric gloom, camen sunned themselves sheets high. Motionless beast, antediluvian carnivores untouched by season, years, or extinctions. Creatures immune to both time and love. I watched them for a while and then looked further off beyond the river to a twisted canopy that clawed ever higher towards the low hanging clouds.

"You ready to head out?" Kip was behind me fiddling with his backpack straps.

I had packed Laurence's bag in lieu of my own. I packed it with his food, his loose-fitting clothes and some filtered water. Most of it was empty space as I expected to carry a large amount of medical supplies back from the most accessible point of that horizon... actually, I wondered how far it really was. We had till dawn the next day and we'd be going by night alone and on foot through the muck of endless growth, if we had to. Ravenhill knew this and eyed me weary as he laced up the straps on his pack. His bag was still damp, a vivid reminder of how much misadventure had fallen on to our shoulders in such a short amount of time.

I looked distractedly back to the edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green, it was almost black. There came following the golden sunlight a faint, but constantly creeping mist. The land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Every now and then, I thought of the eminent Dr. McIntyre. I didn't think of him too much, I was simply curious to see whether this man, who had come out to this jungle equipped with some kind of moral mission, would climb that long, tall, tangle of vines to the top, and what sort of work was to be done once he became king of this jungle?

"What's on your mind?"

"Nothing, it's just."

"Just what?"

"Just this place. It's changed somehow... the savagery of it all... the utter savagery, feeling it's closed all around you, clutching at your throat the way tears often do. All the mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wildmen like us."

"Yeah, everything's alive out here."

"Also it's this journal I've been reading... it's got me in a brutal vendetta kind of mood. There is no initiation either into mysteries like this... just madness mixed with the worship of nightmares." I went on as if he hadn't been speaking, "You have to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, the incredible, which is also most detestable. Like he does. And it has a kind of fascination, too, that goes to work upon your soul immediately like being in a room with a psychopath. The fascination of the abominable ~ you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate of just being in all that." I pointed out across the river.

"Are you having a stroke? Are you a painter or a poet, Jack?"

"I'm a wanderer and to go where I will and without purpose. That has always been my stage... but now, we're going somewhere I desperately don't want to go and we have the most urgent of purposes to do so. It's the same jungle I walked out of, but now after everything... it feels the jungle itself has gone mad... and yet I'm drawn in too. A sort of heartbeat like the steps of a wild horse. It raps my imagination and calls us forwards for some dark purpose of its own."

"Yeah, see, that's enough of that sort of talk... hell your blue-balls really go to your head. Look, Laurence is coming to say his goodbyes we'll be off after that, you sure you got everything?"

"Everything."

Laurence stepped placidly towards us. At his side was the bitter and callous native we called Sila and the downtrodden Rook.