Fear Drive My Feet Read Online Free PDF Page A

the roof doesn’t leak.’
    After his mosquito-net, the bed-sail is probably the New Guinea traveller’s most
useful item of furniture. It consists of a double sleeve of canvas about seven feet
long and three feet wide. Two stout poles are inserted along either side to make
a rough stretcher, and the poles are supported at the ends by a couple of stout sticks
lashed together at the top like shear-legs. The result is a tightly stretched canvas
bed, cool and springy, raised two or three feet off the ground. It can be erected
in a few minutes, and the canvas is practically no weight to carry. Moreover, in
the daytime, on the track, it forms a useful waterproof wrapper for blankets.
    The boys summoned by John unwrapped the roll of bedding and ran to fetch suitable
poles, while Achenmeri thrust himself importantly forward to supervise this weighty
operation. John raised his eyebrows at the antics of this bumptious and comical constable,
but he said nothing, while I groped in my haversack for some mail I had brought.
    He glanced at the handwriting on the envelopes and smiled, before tucking the three
or four letters into the breast pocket of his shirt, to be read and enjoyed later,
alone. It was the first mail he had received for weeks. There was a paper for him,
too, and he slit its wrapper at once.
    ‘It’s the Bulletin !’ he exclaimed with a grin of pleasure as he unrolled it. ‘I
like to read that – it’s my Bible, the Bulletin .’
    ‘Isn’t that a pretty old copy?’
    ‘No, not very,’ he said in a surprised voice, looking at the dateline. ‘Only a couple
of months. I’ve had it a lot older than that.’
    I began to understand life at Bob’s when I saw how excited John became over a two-month-old
copy of a newspaper. Cut off by rivers and mountainous jungles, these men were isolated
not only in a physical sense, but had their own time-scale as well.
    I had found towel and soap in my patrol-box. ‘How do I get to the Wampit, John?’
    ‘Follow that gully straight on past the main track, where you came in, and keep going.
It’s about a hundred yards.’
    ‘O.K… I’ll be back soon.’ By the time I had gone ten yards Bob’s had vanished so
completely from sight and hearing that I stopped and had to resist deliberately the
desire to run back and reassure myself that the place was really there and that I
had not been dreaming.
    By the time I reached the Wampit bank the sun was already below the treetops, and
the palms and wild breadfruit-trees were outlined black against the brassy shine
of the sky. The foliage rustled lightly in the breeze that blew upstream. I sat down
on a log at the water’s edge and slowly unlaced my boots, then pulled off my green
shirt and shorts and let them fall in a sweat-soaked heap on the little beach of
black sand.
    The river here, in its lower reaches, was swift and muddy, but the water was cool.
I waded gratefully in to thigh-depth and washed myself. New life seemed to return
with cleanliness. At this somewhat open point the breeze was too strong for the mosquitoes
to be a pest, so, having dried myself, I squatted naked on the log and looked downstream.
    Not far away the Wampit almost lost itself in a vast flat area of swamp and sago-palms
before emptying into the mighty Markham. Over the trees and across the Markham (which
of course I could not see), I glimpsed again the Saruwageds. Filtered through an
almost invisible haze of dust, the evening light cast a delicate softness upon them.
They were blue, every conceivable shade from ice-blue to deepest purple. I knew that
even the foothills were at least twenty miles away, but the mountains showed with startling clarity, mounting up and up, fold upon fold, until the tops disappeared
into a level bank of cloud. I studied them intently, knowing that the next few weeks
would find me somewhere in their remote blue fastnesses.
    ‘Somewhere over there is Jock,’ I thought. ‘And somehow I have to find him.’
    It was nearly dark.