Country Of The Falcon

Declan nodded. ‘The Velhijo is quite a long river. I didn’t just happen upon you, if that’s what you mean. These men——’ He indicated the Indians who had been his crew. ‘They come from this village. It’s useful for me to have transport to reach Los Hermanos. There is no landing strip there.’

Suddenly it was all beginning to make sense, but still she hesitated. ‘Do we—have much further to go, then?’

‘About three hundred miles,’ he stated calmly, and she gasped.

‘But that would have taken days by boat!’ she protested.

‘Didn’t you know that?’

‘No!’ She shook her head dazedly. ‘Santos was always very vague when I asked about the length of the journey.’

‘I’ll bet he was.’ Declan pushed her forward. ‘Go on! The head man of the village is waiting to greet us.’

They were invited to share a meal with the community before continuing their journey and Alexandra looked rather uneasily at Declan when he explained this.

‘Don’t worry,’ he remarked dryly, as rush mats were spread out for their use. ‘You won’t get food poisoning.’

In fact the meal of roasted venison was remarkably enjoyable and Declan explained that they were honoured in being offered meat. The forests were not teeming with game, and the Indians’ main source of protein came from fish.

Afterwards they were escorted to the aircraft and Alexandra felt a surge of excitement as Declan loaded their luggage and helped her inside. It was a beautiful little machine and she wondered to whom it belonged. There was room for the pilot and three passengers and Delcan strapped her into the seat directly behind his.

‘All right?’ he enquired, levering himself behind the controls, and she nodded eagerly.

‘Okay. Here we go!’

Declan put on headphones and Alexandra heard the crackle of static as he contacted air control at Manaus. There was a brief interchange of Portuguese and then the powerful little engine sprang to life sending the propellers spinning wildly. Declan released his brakes and taxied slowly to the end of the narrow runway and then turned to make the take-off.

It was a hair-raising experience. The trees seemed to be rushing towards them as they sped down the strip and Alexandra was convinced they would never clear those towering canopies of leaves. But just as she was closing her eyes, sure that her end had come, the small aircraft lifted and surged upward and over effortlessly. She breathed a sigh of relief and Declan glanced round at her.

‘You’re going to give yourself heart trouble before you’re thirty if you don’t stop anticipating the worst,’ he remarked, turning back to his observation of the open sky ahead of them. ‘You don’t suppose that’s the first time I’ve lifted off there, do you?’

Alexandra felt weak. ‘No, I suppose not. It was just—all those trees!’

Declan cleared himself with air control and pushed back the headphones. ‘You’re a mass of nerves,’ he said callously. ‘I don’t know what they teach you at that school of yours, but it surely isn’t helping you none.’

Alexandra looked down at the thick carpet of trees below them, intersected by the winding maze of rivers. She marvelled that anyone could navigate the area without getting totally lost. There seemed few landmarks that she could see and even fewer signs of habitation. But it was possible from the air to see the undulations in the landscape and the varzea lakes she had read about, trapped in the folds of the hills after the flooding of recent weeks. She was trying not to let what he had said upset her. They were almost to their destination, and the last thing she wanted was for her father to find them hostile towards one another. She had still to discover who this man was, what his occupation was, and exactly how well he knew her father.

They flew low over one of the larger lakes and Alexandra tensed again until Declan said: ‘Can you see the herons on the shore there? They nest in the trees at night. It’s quite an unusual sight.’

‘They have such long legs!’ she exclaimed, quite forgetting her earlier annoyance, and Declan nodded.

‘I imagine they consider the safety of the upper branches worth the effort,’ he commented dryly, and eased back on the stick so that the small plane rose higher again.

Clouds were lowering ahead of them, and Alexandra wondered where they would eventually land. At least it was cool up here, away from the moist heat of the valley floor, and had it not been for the tropical forest beneath them they could have been almost anywhere.

‘I think we’re going into rough weather,’ Declan said suddenly, as his headphones crackled and he lifted them to hear what was being relayed. ‘There’s a pretty bad storm up ahead, but it isn’t forcing aircraft down yet, so I’m going to try and beat it in.’