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Gil WilliamsonEXTREME CARTOGRAPHYThe river here cannot be seen from the air; our aerial photographs just show a crease in the trees. Though we are in mid-stream, decadently exotic blossoms dangle above us, implausibly elaborate technicolor butterflies land on our shoulders and drink the moisture. The overwhelming noise of tons of water disputing with smooth rocks precludes conversation. It's 1959, and we are mapping this river for military purposes - trouble is brewing with Indonesia, and the British Army wants better charts. We have a schedule of points, usually branches on the river, but sometimes high points, that we have to reach at certain dates and times, to co-ordinate with aerial photographs and altitude measurements. The schedule, most of the time, is relaxed, because there is contingency for accidents. But the tension is there because, although the river reaches the sea in friendly territory, we are now so far upstream that we are actually thirty miles behind the Indonesian frontier, eight days into the expedition. I'm eighteen, a part-time Royal Engineer, and I'm at the controls of a glossy American outboard engine on a dug-out canoe. We've tried to use our British Army assault boats and engines on tropical rivers, but waterlogged treetrunks propelled downstream at speed always win in a collision, and engines perfected for use in the grey waters of The Solent are unhappy in the heat and damp of Borneo. The headhunters have the solution, and we're using it. There are four of us in the boat. The leader, Jim, is an experienced interpreter of aerial photos, a veteran of twenty such expeditions. Then there's Alex, a young soldier who does what he is told, but little else. He is reading a paperback book amid the glories of tropical Borneo. The man on whom we all depend is Umbang, an Iban, tattooed from head to foot, a lean, strong, resourceful, gentle headhunter under contract, and the only man who is armed - with a knife of terrifying proportions and an ancient, apparently hand-made, fowling piece which accepts army issue ammunition. Umbang stands in the bow with a pole, signalling moment to moment changes of direction to me and levering us away from rocks when we come too close. I am trying to force twenty feet of treetrunk against the current, using a high-powered engine fixed asymmetrically to the stern. You get used to it. We are dressed in shorts and trainers. "Jungle Green" army issue is great as pyjamas, but since we spend a lot of time in the water we have to be in a position to see any leeches on each other. We all smoke constantly, as mosquito repellent and as leech countermeasures. If you touch them with a cigarette, they let go. If you pull them off instead, the wound often goes septic. ...We see one arm raised above the water... The engine is nearly at full throttle, and we are making a cracking pace through the water, but we are losing ground against the current. At this bend in the river, there is shingle on the inside of the curve, but the main body of water is plunging through a narrow gap on the outside. The drill here is to ground the canoe on the shingle and drag it by hand past the difficult bit. We've done this a dozen times today. Umbang signals, I drive the boat into the shingle, Jim shouts "Everybody out" while I hold the engine power to keep the bow on the shingle, and Alex, still half-reading his book, gets out of the wrong side, straight into the torrent - six feet deep and as powerful and fast and loud as an intercity train. He's gone in a breath, doesn't even utter a surprised yell. We see one arm raised above the water, then he disappears around the curve. The most likely thing is that he will be brained on a rock. But perhaps he will only be drowned. No danger of crocodiles here because the river is too quick. We swing out into the flow and chase downstream. A lot of the time, the engine is roaring in reverse because we need to watch the water carefully. We expect to find his broken body lodged in a crevice between rocks. Every time we reach a calmer pool between rapids, we patrol around, looking for a floating corpse. Despite the methodical slow search, we roll back a day's upstream progress in an hour. I am fretting. I should have held the boat further from the edge of the main stream. Jim is muttering alternate curses and regrets and is on the point of aborting the whole expedition when we tumble out of a particularly rough set of rapids into a sand-bordered pool where we ate lunch yesterday. Alex is sitting on a rock, uninjured, unmoved, reading his sodden paperback. Zane Grey - Riders of the Purple Sage, if I remember correctly. A cadmium yellow butterfly is perched on his knee. Written by Gil Williamson. 3:59 PM - 8/5/2006 - post comment
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