nicholas in vietnam

I could show you exactly where I am on the map – for I am at the confluence of two rivers: rivers whose names are unlikely to appear on the map but which names I know. And these rivers are now in thunderous spate; I look up the tight throat of Hra Lang and see tea-coloured waters churning themselves into frenzy. Not a few hours ago I washed my face and arms in a thin clear pool as a big black butterfly, a Great Mormon, frantically sucked at the salt from my palm. Now lightning flashes over the flanking hills of the valley of Hra Lang and the sky is a colour I would flounder in naming; a stern peaceful colour, a divine grey speaking first of sword blades and second of eyes and third of an other morning ever breaking under the prow. In an arc down over me a looping lady of a tree proffers hard red berries before my face. Should I reach out to take one and slip, I would not stick long in the stream’s gullet but be mashed to a pulp in the ten-yard stretch before I even entered the wide pool where Duc and I once swam. That pool which, though now foam-flecked, is still calm by comparison. No, better for me to crack and eat the three tart little forest rambutans I have brought down here with me – the kind whose flesh is yellow – and to toss the husks and seeds into the chundering flood.

At time like these the little grasses which grow on wet rocks and are like miniature bamboo stand out in the stormy light. the whole forest, as green as still as ever above the furious water, seems to be waiting  for something.

Were it not for the fact that this prow of stone between the streams was home to a colony of tiny black ants whose nest I disturbed earlier when searching for a place to put my feet – were it not for this fact, this might seems a good time to review what’s happened in my life these past few months and think, in awareness of the power of stream and sky and under witness of the forest, what is truly right about what I have done and what is small, twisted or simply not enough. But striking out deliberately on such a venture would be foolhardy – a fact I ought to know from experience – so perhaps I ought to thank the ants and their perpetual inquisitiveness even in the presence of powers which, if awesome to me, ought to them to be ten thousand times more so. In the book I am now reading the author has just stopped and taken stock of his ship at a point where – though the voyage in the story is already underway – the voyage of that story is just beginning. The author as much as admits that he is scared of that voyage, uncertain he can complete it and, in his typical magnanimity towards himself, makes a virtue of this: for all human things must be imperfect and this book is but a draught or a draught of a draught and he prays that never should complete anything. To me this roughness makes the adventure much more exciting.

And then I look up again to where a graceful, almost leafless tree stands slender against the green and white, her branches like a deco candelabrum, her eyeless gaze seeming a ray of pure pain, the pain a ballad only approaches, against a sky that now has turned white and bullyish. A butterfly heads downstream, held over the chaos by its own paper wings, each of which bears a radiant stigma of electric blue that flashes in the stormy light, preternaturally bright, making one think of secrets known in outer space and written in nebulae. The little sisters have found me again. I shall move and shell another rambutan.

I have not gone far, though this seat is a little uncomfortably tilted towards the flood. At lunchtime today I made a good decision. We had arrived at the camp which was to be our final destination of the day and I was asked – by Tung the student, whose name means ‘pine’ – if we should not press on and perhaps make it back to town by nightfall. I rather wished he had not asked because I felt again the driving duty to be on with my work and not to spend this whole afternoon in this scrappy forest doing nothing.

Scrappy forest, I say! True it has been logged in this place but the tree-clad hills still rear over the passing clouds, bronze-blooming and unblemished. True there’s a trapline running back from our camp and the Saola is probably eliminated already from these environs but… And there I stop because I have become and arbiter when my aim was to deny my right to judge.

So too, in the meeting before I came out here and for which I delayed my trip, the meeting at which, to my surprise, the national director of WWF was present, the meeting for which I prepared abysmally, being stressed and, beyond that, frightened and there being a power cut in the office all afternoon. In this meeting from which I am still trying to exonerate myself in these pages above the raging stream I said, perhaps to the surprise of those present, that I did not want to be employed by WWF to manage this project further – though perhaps I should have added ‘at least not beyond the end of this year’ – that I was not best suited for the role and should work in the capacity in which I was engaged – if engaged I ever truly was – namely that of a researcher.

I do not like being in command and though I sit now, at the prow of this rock (though a little askance for fear of the ants)I would sit at the prow as pilot or as lookout not as captain. So when Tung asked me, after stump-slithering down a straight-cut logging trail with a twenty-kilogram rucksack in the now unimaginable noonday heat, if I wanted to go on, I could only sit and pant then commence worrying and thinking of my duties and all I must get done before my next trip back here – which indeed is very soon. Thinking of these things in a painful, indistinct, hammering sort of way I said that, yes, if we could make it, we should go on. Though we would have to spend the night in Khe Tre, still we could be in Hue tomorrow in the morning. Tung seemed to favour this idea (though he asked if I was tired, which of course annoyed me – but that’s another strand of the story). Bao, our guide, did not seem best pleased with the idea but then, his being paid a daily rate meant that I could not be entirely sure of his motives. I said that we should eat noodles and go on, feeling sorry that we should not enjoy the meal of fresh-caught fish Bao had promised, and then I looked at the sky and saw there was no doubt but it would rain. Our way home follows the river; what we would have done – assuming we had escaped the flood itself, which came  most quickly – if caught in this, out in the forest, our path now become  raging barrier, I do not know. We have no tarpaulin, it having been left at Gur A Xang for our next visit. Yes I am most glad I decided not to risk the rain this time. Yesterday I was not so sensible and made us hike up A Xang stream in the afternoon with the rain making work impossible and progress dangerous. Bao and Tung had to go back there this morning while I stayed in my hammock feeling exhausted. I t may be that Tung, for all that he is a microbiologist, is more limber than the run of students, or it may be that a couple of months in the city have left me out of shape but however it is, I was this time the slowest of our party which I did not really like. I got annoyed as always with the response of Vietnamese students to counter my attacks of grimness with extreme goofiness and also I was annoyed by Tung’s overbearing helpfulness – rushing across the stream with a  shout of ‘No!’ when he saw me use my teeth and not my fingernails to open a rambutan, a matter which might be considered one of personal choice and not infallible law.

No I do not like being in command – but.  And there is a but.

And I’d better find out what it is before it does me or somebody else a mischief. Closing my eyes on the bamboo floor I imagine a Saola caught in the flood and swept downstream from it haunts on mount Hra Lang. Resigned she would be to her fate as always, bold and pure and never violent as we now perceive whales to be. Melville declares the Great Sperm Whale to be without doubt the greatest living creature on the planet. In his long list of whale species he believes to be mythical he last of all names the Blue. Spots of rain have started again and there are violet flashes in the sky over the valley of Hra Lang. The light is dim and unknown frogs are rustily cheeping from the herbage. It’s time to quit this prow of stock and leave it to the next watchman, whoever that may be.

I have yet one rambutan.