The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [220]
Croft was the first one across, carrying Hearn's pack and carbine besides his own. Slowly, one by one, the men struggled across the river, holding to the vine. Some of them lopped their pack straps about it, and pulled themselves along hand over hand, their legs thrashing in the surf of the rapids or floundering anxiously to fend themselves off the rocks. The water would have reached only to their thighs if they had been able to stand upright, but all of them were drenched by the time they reached the other bank. They collected in a little eddy ahead of the rapids, and sat in the water panting, enervated for the moment.
"Jesus," one of them would mutter from time to time. The force of the rapids had been terrifying. Each of them as he had negotiated the line had expected secretly that he would be drowned.
After a rest of ten minutes they began to march again. There were no more rapids for a time but the river was flowing down a chain of stone ledges, and every ten or fifteen yards they would have to climb a waist-high shelf, tread forward cautiously along a rock platform over which a few inches of water was flowing, and then scramble up to the next ledge. Almost all of them wet their guns at one time or another, and their grenades, wedged by the spoon handle into their cartridge belts, kept spilling out into the water. Every few seconds one of them would swear dully.
The river became narrower. In some places the banks were not more than five yards apart, and the jungle overhead grew so close to the water that it brushed against their faces. They continued on for a quarter of a mile, squatting under the foliage and bellying over the ledges. Crossing the rapids had drained them, and most of the men were too weary to lift their legs. When they came to a new shelf of rock, they flopped their bodies over the edge and slid their legs up behind them with the motions of salmon laboring upstream for the spawning season. The river was dividing into its tributaries; every hundred yards a rill or tiny brook would trickle out of the jungle, and Croft would halt, examine it for a moment, and then move on again. After his solo across the rapids, Hearn had been content to let Croft manage the platoon again for a time. He plodded behind with the others, still unable to regain his wind.
They came to a junction where the stream divided in two. Croft deliberated. In the jungle, unable to see the sun, it was impossible for anyone but Martinez or him to know in what direction they were traveling. Croft had noticed earlier that the larger trees leaned toward the northwest; he had checked it with his compass, and decided they had been wrenched that way in a hurricane when they were young. He accepted it as a reliable guide, and all that morning as they had moved up the river he had been noting the direction in which they marched. He guessed that they must be very close to the end of the jungle; they had walked more than three miles, and the river generally had moved toward the hills. But here it was impossible to determine which stream to follow; both veered off at an angle, and it was conceivable they might meander for miles through the jungle, parallel to the open hills. He and Martinez talked about it, and Martinez selected a tall tree off the stream and began to climb it.
He clambered up by grasping the vines that circled about it, using the nodes of the trunk for his footholds. When he reached the highest fork, he crawled out on a limb, edging himself forward cautiously. High up, he halted and surveyed the terrain. The jungle spread beneath him in a green velvet nap. He could no longer see the river, but not more than half a mile away the jungle ended abruptly, and a progression of bare yellow hills mounted toward the distant slopes of Mount Anaka. Martinez drew out his compass, and determined the direction. He was feeling the satisfaction of doing a job at which he knew he was proficient.
He climbed down, and talked to Croft and the Lieutenant. "We follow this one," he said, pointing to one of the tributaries, "maybe two-three hundred yard, then we cut trail. No river in the hill right there." He pointed toward the open country he had seen.