Mantheo said: “Surely there can’t be many, with plants like this around?”
Simeon shook his head. “If the Delta was like any other place on earth, you’d be right. But the Delta is a kind of evolutionary melting pot.” He gestured around him. “These things are all experiments. If one of them can’t survive, it’s scrapped and something else takes its place. So there’s a continuous turnover of new life forms.”
The flesh of the pink flower was particularly satisfying to the stomach; it also seemed to contain some kind of mild stimulant, for it left behind a glowing sense of exhilaration. As they resumed their journey, they were all feeling more cheerful and confident. Although the ground was covered with many varieties of bush and flower and creeper, these formed no real obstacle to their progress. If they raised their feet and planted them firmly, the vegetation crunched underfoot, producing a sweet, sappy odour with a touch of the scent of roses. After the experience of the previous day, Niall was on his guard; but a deliberate effort of relaxation made him aware that this vegetation was making no attempt to transmit the vibrations of the Delta, and was therefore harmless. But he found it difficult to maintain this state of relaxed awareness, for everything he passed had its own type of consciousness, from the drowsy benevolence of giant orchids, whose only purpose was to lure bees to disseminate their pollen, to the baleful menace of the strangler trees, whose trailing lianas, like the tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war, twitched with a horrible desire to grip and throttle. At first it was invigorating to experience these many varieties of awareness, and to recognise that his own narrow human consciousness was only one type among many; but after half an hour or so, he felt replete with new impressions, and experienced relief as his consciousness returned to its usual restricted and limited state.
It was clear that the path they were following must have been made by animals, or perhaps by one single large animal, for there were places where great trees had been pushed over at an angle, while smaller ones had simply been flattened. After half a dozen miles or so, the path began to curve downhill, and they became aware of a rise in temperature. Now they could hear the continuous faint hum of insects, and the vegetation became more dense. A thick purple creeper suddenly wound itself round Manetho’s leg and, when he hacked it off with one blow, twitched and writhed like a bisected worm, a dark blue liquid oozing from the severed end. There was a high, whining noise that made them all jump with alarm, and the wriggling segment was carried away by a long-bodied flying insect with green eyes and a pointed sting protruding from the tail. Simeon identified this as a member of the Tabanid or horse-fly species. The foot-long specimen that had seized the creeper was a male, and therefore harmless to humans — the male preferring to feed on nectar; Simeon described the female, which sucked blood, as one of the most unpleasant pests in the Delta. The juice with which they had rubbed their bodies should afford them protection from horse-flies, as well as from the anopheles mosquito; but in case the effect had worn off during the past twenty-four hours, they halted and rubbed more of the juice on to exposed areas of skin, as well as impregnating their tunics. They had become so accustomed to the sharp, ammoniacal smell that they no longer noticed it.
Now, at last, the path between the trees ran directly downhill, and they could see across the valley of the Delta. Directly ahead of them, perhaps a dozen miles away, lay the hill with its tower-like projection. Its shape was striking; it might have been a giant head, whose lower part dissolved into a flowing beard and mane that blended with the forest below, while the tower-like projection looked like the spike on some fantastic helmet.
Niall asked Simeon: “Do you know what that is?”
“No. I’ve never been close enough to find out. In fact, I’ve never been this close.”
As they descended the slope, the smell of rotting vegetation was stronger; the ground under its carpet of leaves became moist and spongy. When another purple creeper grasped Milo by the ankle, Doggins raised his Reaper.
“Why don’t we just blast a path through it?”
Simeon shook his head. “Not yet. This place is alive. You can never tell how it might react.”
Doggins looked at him with mild astonishment, as if he doubted his sanity; but he lowered the Reaper.
Ten minutes later, they finally saw the creature that had made the path through the trees. The path ahead of them turned a bend, and as they approached it, Niall observed a sudden swaying in a treetop a few hundred yards ahead. He laid a hand on Simeon’s arm, and they all halted, then advanced cautiously. They rounded the bend, and stopped in amazement. The enormous green creature that moved slowly towards them might have been a giant caterpillar, but the reflection of the sun on its green scales revealed that it was a millipede. This was confirmed when it withdrew its head from the vegetation and looked curiously towards them, revealing the blunt head and tiny wriggling legs that arched sideways like the pinchers of a crab. Doggins raised the Reaper again, but Simeon gently pushed it down.
“They’re quite harmless. Unless it walks over you.”
The body of the millipede filled the path, which was about eight feet wide; it must have been at least twenty yards long. The strange, flat eyes regarded them mildly for a few moments; then the creature lowered its head and continued browsing. Its jaws made a continuous crunching sound, and the head moved slowly from side to side, gathering the flowers and creepers with the thoroughness of a harvesting machine. It ate so fast that it moved ten feet towards them as they stood staring at it. When some succulent flower lay slightly beyond its normal reach, in a glade beside the path, it simply moved the upper half of its body sideways, and there was a tearing, creaking sound as trees were pushed aside. Then, having cleared the glade efficiently of its carpet of flowers, the millipede would resume its slow forward progress.
They all looked to Simeon for a lead. He said: “We can try getting past it. It won’t attack us.”
Doggins said: “What if it rolls on us?”
“That’s unlikely. Let’s try, anyway.”
But as soon as they came within a dozen feet of the browsing millipede, it raised its head again, and suddenly exuded a stench that sent them staggering and choking back up the path. For sheer foul rottenness, it was worse than anything Niall had ever smelt in his life.
Manetho, still coughing and retching, said: “Let’s go round it. Nothing can be as bad as that smell.”
Their Reapers at the ready, they stepped off the path into the undergrowth. Creepers writhed underfoot, but made no attempt to attack them; Niall sensed that this was because of the proximity of the crunching jaws of the millipede; the creepers responded to the alarm of the vegetation that was being torn out by the roots. Manetho, who was leading the way, halted when he found his path blocked by a tree whose forest of hanging tentacles brushed the ground; but closer inspection showed this to be a snake willow, the harmless relative of the strangler tree, and they were able to push their way through without difficulty. A dozen yards further on, they encountered the strangler tree itself. To the casual glance, it looked exactly like the snake willow: a trunk covered with strange, hairy scales, and hundreds of yellow-green lianas hanging down like a woman’s trailing hair. But the lianas looked more fresh and green than those of the snake willow; this was because the snake willow attracted a kind of grey moss, which hung down in trailing beards from the top of the lianas, and which covered them with a damp mould.
While Simeon was explaining the difference, a female horse-fly , settled momentarily on the back of Manetho’s head, the lance-like proboscis poised to drive into his flesh. Perhaps disconcerted by the smell of the protective juice, it paused long enough for Manetho to reach up, grab one of its wings, and hurl it violently from him. It fell to the ground at Niall’s feet, and immediately flew upward into the hanging lianas. For a moment nothing happened, and the horse-fly blundered downwards; it looked for a moment as if it was about to escape. Then, with frightening swiftness, the tentacles coiled round its body, and vanished into the branches above. The fly gave a despairing buzz as it disappeared. A few moments later the lianas descended, and the tree again looked as harmless as its cousin, the snake willow.