Journey to the River Sea

She would have done anything to be back in the gloomy bungalow eating tinned beetroot and being glared at by the twins. Trying to pull herself together, she walked faster. The stream she was following was quite big; a river really and the current was fast: it must lead to Manaus.

Blinking away tears, she trudged on. Then her foot caught in a liana, a long branch hanging like a rope from the top of a tree, and she fell.

It was a heavy fall; her foot was trapped – and in putting out her hand to save herself she had clutched a branch of thorns. Furious with herself, hurt, lost, she lay for a few moments helpless.

When she sat up again something strange had happened. The stream by which she had fallen disappeared behind her in a curtain of green; more than a curtain, a wall of reeds and creepers and half-submerged trees. Yet from this green barrier there had appeared a canoe, coming towards her silently like a boat in a dream.

The canoe was being poled by an Indian boy who stood in the prow and was steering it in an unhurried, easy way so that the water seemed scarcely to be disturbed.

Maia watched for a moment, not quite believing what she saw; then she stumbled to her feet.

‘Please can you help me?’ she shouted, stupidly in English, then desperately in her few words of Portuguese.

The boy looked at her; he seemed surprised by her look of agitation. Then he brought the canoe silently alongside. Still he did not speak.

‘I have to get to Manaus. I have to,’ Maia said, and pointed to where she thought the city was. ‘Manaus is there?’

The boy smiled, and suddenly he seemed just a boy of about her own age; not a mysterious and possibly threatening stranger, emerged from a curtain of green.

He shook his head. ‘Manaus,’ he said, and pointed almost in the opposite direction.

She was utterly crestfallen. So much for her map, her understanding of the jungle – and her hand was bleeding.

‘I have to get to Manaus. I promised a friend ... amigo . . . I have to ...’ she repeated. What little Portuguese she had learned seemed to have gone from her. She could only look at him and entreat.

The boy did not answer. He was dressed in the work clothes worn by the local Indians: a blue cotton shirt faded from washing and cotton trousers – but round his head he wore a broad band which partly covered his thick, coal-black hair, and a pattern of red zigzags was painted on his cheekbones. His skin was a light bronze and his eyes the same colour as Maia’s own, a deep dark brown.

For a moment he stood upright in the canoe, thinking. Then he stretched out his hand and made a movement of his head which was unmistakable. She was to get into the canoe.

‘Will you take me? Oh will you!’

She did not know if he understood, but her instinct was to trust him. As he pulled her into the canoe, she winced and he looked down at her hand. Then he took out a big thorn embedded in her palm and she thanked him.

‘Sit,’ he said in Portuguese.

He took the pole and the boat moved with surprising speed down the river. As soon as they were under way, she thought what an idiot she had been. He would hit her on the head ... he would take her off to his tribe as a slave ... or worse ...

I am thinking like the Carters, Maia told herself.

The boy had stowed the pole now and was using a paddle. She moved to take the other one but he shook his head, pointing to her injured hand. As he pulled on the paddle, she saw on the inside of his wrist a small, red mark, like a four-leafed clover. A good luck sign? The mark of his tribe?

But even this sign of his foreignness couldn’t frighten her for long. He moved so gracefully; he was so quiet and companionable. She was an idiot to trust him but she did.

‘Thank you,’ she said – in English, in Portuguese. She even remembered the word for ‘thank you’ in the Indian language that the servants spoke. ‘I have to go to the theatre. The Teatra Amazonas.’

He nodded and they glided on down the river. Sometimes they moved between lush green trees which leant so far over the water that she felt as though they were travelling between the roots of the forest. Birds rose as they went past: scarlet ibis, white herons flapping in slow motion ... As they took a side branch of the river, Maia cried out because the boy was steering between gigantic leaves from which piebald frogs flopped into the water.

‘That’s the Victoria Regia lily, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’ve read about it.’

It was difficult to believe that he did not understand her; he had such a listening face.

Then in an instant the worst happened. The boy gave a wild shout; a shout of pure rage. He put down the paddle, threw himself on top of her, pressing her down against the floorboards of the boat, and kept her there pinioned. She felt his breath on her cheek.