Читать книгу Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue - Andrew Martin - Страница 11

May the twenty-sixth 1942, and it was still raining heavily in the jungle. With at best five days’ food left, Millar and Leyden continued to follow the Noa Dehing, but had now moved to lower terrain. They were covered in sores, and their boots had fallen apart. At first, they had tried walking without boots, as the Kachin porters did, but that lacerated their feet. So they wound canes around their feet like bandages, and wore belts of reserve canes around their waists.

As they walked beneath the trees near the roaring river, they saw a tiger walking ahead on the same path. Even to ‘jungly’ Englishmen – and Millar was more one of those than Leyden – the sight of a tiger would prompt an instinctive glance around for the cage from which it had escaped. The tiger walked on, and so did they ‘for some distance’, not trying to catch it up, but not particularly lagging behind either. Millar was carrying his favourite single-action revolver; Leyden was carrying a rifle. In 1885, Major MacGregor had reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘A few tigers had also taken up their abode in the valley, a fact which came unpleasantly home to our coolies, two of whom, poor fellows, were carried out of camp at night by a man eater, who was, I am glad to say, eventually shot.’

Millar and Leyden’s tiger having veered off the path and jumped into the river, they came to a clearing where they saw a herd of sambhur, which are hairy deer. Sambhur don’t look as if they belong in a jungle, or even a jungle clearing. They look as though they belong on a Highland moor in Scotland. The teeming rain added to the effect, even if the suffocating air detracted from it.

There were twenty-six sambhur. They had probably never seen a man before, and they continued to graze even as Goal Miri – who had requested the first shot – took Leyden’s rifle and aimed. The porters ate their meat while it was still warm, and Millar and Leyden built a fire to cook theirs. The twenty-five surviving sambhur ‘just stood around in an interested sort of way, some lying down on the stones only sixty yards off’.

When the tribes who live in the jungle clearings enter the jungle proper to hunt, they make obeisance to the spirits of the jungle, the nats. If something then goes wrong – say, a man is bitten by a snake – that shows permission had not been asked in the right way, or had been withheld or withdrawn, and the hunters leave the jungle. Of course, Millar and Leyden had not consulted the spirits before killing the sambhur, and they did not have the option of leaving.

They set off again reinvigorated. But an hour later, Leyden’s spaniel was no longer behind them. Misa, at least, liked the jungle, and would frequently charge off into the undergrowth, but they called, and waited and … nothing. After a long search – reckless in the circumstances – they concluded that she must have fallen into the Noa Dehing gorge. Later still, when they were crossing a small river, Leyden was swirled off his feet, and cracked his head against a big rock. He said he was all right, but Millar kept a close eye on him from then on.

And the day still wasn’t over.

When they lit the fire that night, Millar and Leyden discovered they had two days’ less rice than they had thought. So they now only had enough to last them until 29 May. Then again, they calculated from the only two-inch map they possessed that had not been turned to pulp that the confluence of the Noa Dehing and the Dapha couldn’t be more than six miles away. They ought to be there by the next day, the 27th.

That was, as Millar put it, ‘a dismal mistake’.

On the 27th, it finally stopped raining, but their eternal companion, the Noa Dehing, chose that morning to present its steepest gorge yet, requiring from Millar and Leyden ‘the skills of trained climbers … Our fears for porters carrying loads were not without cause,’ Millar adds, without going into detail. The Dapha river did not appear that day, or the next; or the next.

On 31 May, their food had run out, ‘not a crumb of anything remained’, and there was still no sign of the Dapha. To save strength, Millar and Leyden had jettisoned everything that was not essential: cooking utensils, binoculars, cameras. On 31 May, Leyden stopped and sadly pitched his rifle into the gorge of the Noa Dehing river, then Millar did likewise with his ‘favourite single trigger gun’. A gun is the most prized asset in the jungle, second only to a decent stash of opium and a few grains of quinine. But Millar did retain a rifle, a decision that would prove of the greatest importance.

The Noa Dehing still showed very heavy water, and remained uncrossable. They remained stuck on the right-hand side of it, with the Dapha surely looming. That river was like a prima donna, putting off its appearance to maximize the final effect. ‘I felt inwardly certain,’ wrote Millar, ‘that we could not ford it at this date.’

At 2 p.m. on 31 May, Millar and Leyden began to hear a louder river sound; it was the sound of two rivers, almost like the sound of a rough sea. At 3 p.m., they came to what Millar described as ‘a delta’ – the vast and foamy confluence of the Dapha and the Noa Dehing, and here was the moment of truth. Both rivers were hundreds of yards wide. Both carried leaping jungle debris in the form of whole 100-foot trees, complete with all branches and roots, to the intersection where they rotated in a giant, misty whirlpool. Looking at the confluence, Guy Millar felt sick.