The Pale North by Hamish Clayton

Author:Hamish Clayton [Clayton, Hamish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742539195
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

IN DARK ARCHES

The Ghosts of Gabriel North

I

Something happens in a forgotten corner of the world and then, years later in another corner, something else which seems random and unconnected. And yet a chain is made between them by chance; a pattern emerges and meaning is inferred.

On the morning of May the 29th 1925, in the south of the Amazon rainforest, the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett wrote what turned out to be his final letter home. He was more than two hundred miles north of Cuiaba, at the edge of the uncharted heart of the South American continent. His plan was to strike north-east into the depths of the Amazon, into Xingu country, where, he believed, a lost city or its ruins lay hidden in the thickest jungle on earth.

For the previous nine days Fawcett had machete-hacked his way north from Bakairí Post, a tiny settlement comprising little more than a collection of huts and which the Brazilian authorities had nicknamed with double-barrelled meaning ‘the end of civilisation’. With some luck furnishing his skill as a bushman and cartographer he’d led his small expedition to the same clearing where he’d once made camp four years earlier. He recognised the particular configuration of trees, their enormous bare trunks climbing miles into the squawking green sky. When he searched the long grass he found the bones of the horse he’d left behind, whitening and sinking into the soil. North of this point lay terrain unexplored even by Fawcett himself.

The expedition made Dead Horse Camp sometime during the afternoon of May the 28th. They spent the night there and the next morning Fawcett wrote his last missives home. These included, as well as the letter to his wife, reports of his progress which would be published in European and North American newspapers several weeks later. He sent them all, along with the bulk of his supplies and animals, back to Cuiaba in the care of the Indian guides who had accompanied him thus far. Conditions were too treacherous to take the bulkiest gear any further, he deemed, and beyond Dead Horse Camp the jungle would become even more oppressive. His only companions into the dark green beyond of the Amazon would be his eldest and favourite son, Jack, and Jack’s close friend, Raleigh.

In spite of the dangers, the spirits of the three adventurers were high on the morning of the 29th. The day was bright and clear, and looking to the north from their clearing they could see the rows of mountain ranges where no European had been before. They must have felt as though they were standing on ‘the doorstep of myth’. An hour or so after breakfast Fawcett bade his guides farewell, sending them back along the way they’d come, back to Cuiaba, and turned to address his young companions.

When I try to imagine what Fawcett could have said in those moments, now so heavy with dramatic irony if not complete historical import, for some reason my mind goes to the story I’ve heard about the deerskin pouch of tobacco that always hung from his belt.

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