The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [215]
"Smells like a nigger woman," Wilson announced.
Brown guffawed nervously. "When the hell'd you ever have a nigger?" But he was troubled for a moment; the acute stench of fertility and decay loosed a fragile expectation.
The stream wound its burrow into the jungle. Already they had forgotten how the mouth appeared in sunlight. Their ears were filled with the quick frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets. They sweated terribly; although they had marched only a few hundred yards, the languid air gave them no nourishment, and black stains of moisture spread on their uniforms wherever the pack straps made contact. In the early morning, the jungle was exuding its fog drip; about their legs the waist-high mists skittered apart for the passage of their bodies, and closed again sluggishly, leisurely, like a slug revolving in its cell. For the men at the point of the column every step demanded an inordinate effort of will. They shivered with revulsion, halted often to catch their breath. The jungle dripped wetly about them everywhere; the groves of bamboo trees grew down to the river edge, their lacy delicate foliage lost in the welter of vines and trees. The brush mounted on the tree trunks, grew over their heads; the black river silt embedded itself in the roots of the bushes and between the pebbles under their feet. The water trickled over the stream bank tinkling pleasantly, but it was lost in the harsh uprooted cries of the jungle birds, the thrumming of the insects.
Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes, slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream. Their packs became heavy, their arms grew numb and their backs began to ache. Most of the men were carrying thirty pounds of rations and bedding, and with their two canteens of water, their ten clips of ammunition, their two or three grenades, their rifles and machetes, each of them had distributed almost sixty pounds of equipment over his body, the weight of a very heavy suitcase. Most of them became tired in walking the first few hundred yards; by the time they had gone perhaps half a mile they were weary and their breath was short; the weaker ones were beginning to have the sour flat taste of fatigue. The density of the jungle, the miasmal mists, the liquid rustlings, the badgering of the insects lost their first revulsion and terror. They were no longer so conscious of the foreboding wilderness before them; the vague unnamed stimulations and terrors of exploring this tunnel through the jungle became weaker, sank at last into the monotonous grinding demands of the march. Despite Croft's lecture, they began to walk with their heads down, looking at their feet.
The river narrowed, and the ribbon of shallow water contracted to a strip along the bank, no wider than a footpath. They were beginning to climb. Already the stream had dropped from a few minor waterfalls, had churned over a short stretch of tumbled rocks. The pebbles underfoot slowly were replaced by river sand and then by mud. The men marched closer to the bank, and at last the foliage began to whip at them, obstructing their way. They proceeded much more slowly now.
Around a turn they halted and surveyed the stretch ahead. The foliage grew into the water at this point, and Croft, after considering the problem, waded out to the center of the stream. Five yards from the shore he halted. The water was close to his waist, swirling powerfully about him. "We're gonna have to hold to the bank, Lootenant," he decided. He began to fight his way along the edge of the stream, holding to the foliage, the water covering his thighs. Laboriously the men followed him, strung out along the bank. They proceeded for the next few hundred yards by grasping the nearest bushes, yanking and tugging themselves up the stream against the current. Their rifles kept slipping off their shoulders, almost dipping into the water, and their feet sunk loathsomely in the river mud. Their shirts, from perspiration, became as wet as their trousers. Besides their fatigue and the dank moist air, they were sweating from anxiety. The stream had a force and a persistence which seemed alive; they felt something of the frenzy they would have known if an animal had been snarling at their feet. Their hands began to bleed from the thorns and the paper-edged leaves, and their packs hung heavy.