Beck glanced at his watch. It was mid-afternoon, about twenty-four hours after the crash that had got them into this situation. That was food for thought. Twenty-four hours and they still hadn’t seen anyone else. They had to see signs of people eventually. But right now all Beck could see was jungle and more jungle.
Give it another hour, he decided, and they would call a halt for the day.
‘Listen!’ Peter stopped dead in his tracks. A faint rumble drifted down through the canopy. He looked at Beck with wide eyes. ‘That wasn’t another eruption, was it?’
‘No,’ Beck replied, looking aloft. ‘That was—’
Suddenly it started to rain.
Rain in a rainforest was like someone in the sky turning on a tap. Back home there would be a few tentative drops. They would gradually get stronger until someone noticed. Here it was either raining or it wasn’t. There was no in-between. And when it did rain, it was like every drop of moisture in existence was just dumping itself out of the sky on top of you.
‘. . . rain,’ Beck finished.
Even with the shelter of the tree canopy, it was only about ten seconds before the boys were completely soaked. Beck felt his hair plastered against his head. His clothes were as wet and clinging as if he had just jumped into a river. Peter’s glasses had turned into steamy circles.
The jungle was already dim. The rain made it even gloomier. They needed shelter and there was no point in waiting any longer. Beck decided to use the available light now – before it got too dark.
‘We need somewhere to make camp.’
‘You going to make another sleeping frame?’
‘I suppose. We’ll need more bamboo . . .’
Beck looked around. A bamboo cluster a short distance away was a likely looking candidate, but his attention was caught by what was next to it. It was a tall tree – he wasn’t quite sure what type – with a trunk so thick he couldn’t have put his arms around it. And about halfway up, in the fork of some branches, was what looked like a pile of driftwood.
‘Hey.’ He nudged Peter. ‘Does that look familiar?’
But Peter was blind with his glasses on in the rain, and was busily trying to wipe them.
‘Wait here . . .’ Beck told him.
The tree trunk was encrusted with old vines, thick and secure enough to provide footholds. Beck clambered up quickly while rain sluiced down all around him, taking care to keep three points fixed at all times. It only took him thirty seconds to reach the fork in the branches.
Where they met they formed a shallow bowl in the trunk. It was not quite flat but it was wide enough for two people. And someone – or more accurately something – had laid down a pile of logs and leaves to pad the bowl out a bit and create more room.
‘It’s an orang-utan nest!’ he called down to Peter excitedly. Rain thudded onto the branches and the leaves around him and he had to raise his voice. ‘Ready made!’
He was amused to see that the branches of a fig tree were intertwined with this one, and there were clusters of figs within easy reach. He remembered what Nakula had said about the lazy orang-utans.
The nest hadn’t been used recently. The wood was old, the leaves withered. The boys could use it without being thrown out by an irate owner who was twice as strong as them. And the position was good. Not so high up as to be really dangerous but well off the ground and out of harm’s way.
Beck started to climb back down again.
‘Not very sheltered, is it?’ Peter pointed out when Beck reached the ground. He had put his glasses away and was peering up at the nest short-sightedly. Rain spattered against his upturned face.
‘Not yet,’ Beck corrected him. ‘That’ll change. Look, could you start searching for more firewood? Like last night?’
Peter raised an eyebrow and looked around the sopping wet jungle.
‘Look in the same places,’ Beck told him patiently. ‘Under bushes, under leaves – some of it will still be dry. Put it straight in your pack to keep it that way. And I’ll see about the shelter.’
The nest was going to need a roof, and the narrow palm leaves Beck had used the previous night probably wouldn’t do the trick. While Peter looked for dry wood, Beck scouted about until he found some wild bananas. The banana bush was matted and intertwined with half a dozen other types of plant, but the leaves made it stand out. They were almost as long as he was, and nearly as wide. He cut off a cluster of them and brought them back to the foot of the big tree. Then he went back to pick a couple of bunches of wild bananas. They were smaller than the bananas back home but grew in much bigger clumps, twenty or thirty at a time.
‘Plenty of energy,’ he explained to Peter. ‘And we’ve got plenty of water to wash them down with!’
Peter eloquently looked up at the rain that was still falling out of the sky. ‘But we’ve got to catch it somehow.’
‘I’ve got an even better way.’
Beck turned his attention to the bamboo cluster he had seen earlier. The segmented stalks were old and large. The waxy wood had mellowed from green to yellow. He tapped one of the sections experimentally, and it made a resonant bonk. He tapped another, nearer the top. This one had broken off higher up and he could see the jagged end above his head. Its noise was slightly different. Bunk!
‘You going to play a tune?’
‘They sound different because one of them is full of water,’ Beck explained.