第6章 The Valley of the Blind River

They were let through the pier at twenty past five and they were on the west bank by dark, and the column went north-west up out of the river and stopped at about the ninth hour, eleven kilometres from the water, on a shoulder of the ridge with a hundred and forty feet of drop behind it and a whole night's rain coming down on top of them. Ito walked the last kilometre on his own, after the others were down, because there was a thing he needed to do that he did not want a light for. He went to the edge and looked down the river. There was no river. That is the thing to understand about a river that has moved. You do not stand at the place where it is and see nothing. You stand at the place where it is and see eleven kilometres of the correct shape of everything: the sand, the gravel, the old channels braided in the middle of the floor, the bars with the scrub on them, a road that runs up the side of the valley floor because in 1961 a man drove a truck down the middle of this valley and the truck did not get stuck, and the whole of the floor of it is exactly what the map says, because the map is right about the valley. The map is wrong about the river. The river is down there on the right, a kilometre and a half south, at the foot of the slope, and it has cut a new bed into the base of that slope in six years and it has been cutting it a little further every year, and the toe of the slope on the north side is a cliff about four feet high, and the water is brown and fast and is not in the place where a man has to cross it. Ito got the sheet out of his jacket. It was folded in eight and it was soft as cloth and the ink had come off the valley entirely, and he held it down against a flat stone with his knee and looked at the blue line, and the blue line went down the middle of the valley, and he knew precisely how wide the river was in August 1961, because his father had crossed it on the same road in 1951 and 1955 and 1960 and had the same complaint about it every time. He put the sheet back inside his jacket. "Ito," said a voice behind him. He did not turn round. There were only two people on that hill who called him by his name without a rank in front of it and one of them was dead. "You are standing at the place where the map says the river is," said Tran Minh, "and there is no river there at all, and you have known that since the twenty-eighth day." "I have known it since the second day." "Then you have been carrying a sheet of paper in your jacket for twenty-nine days that you knew was wrong." "I have been carrying the only sheet of paper any of us has got." He turned round then. The colonel had his hood up and his hands inside his sleeves and there was about a foot between them. "Say what you have come down here to say, sir, because you have not come down here in the rain to talk about cartography." Tran Minh was quiet for a moment. "In 1963 I was on the general staff in the capital and I signed a document," he said. "It is not important what it was about. What is important is that there was a table in that document with a column of figures in it and the figures were wrong by about a third, and I signed it because the figures came up from a province and a province is not a man you can ring up at eleven o'clock at night." He shifted his weight, which he did very little of. "I have had thirty-one days on a mountain to think about that document and about a piece of paper with a river on it," he said, "and I have arrived at something I do not like, Captain, and I am going to say it and you are not going to like it either, and then I am going to go up and lie down for four hours, which is all I have got left in me." "Say it." "Somewhere above us on that ridge there is a man with a set, and he is listening, and he has been listening for thirty-one days, and every one of those days he has been told that the ground is falling away under him and that the ground is where the map is not." Tran Minh looked at the dark valley. "And in the next eleven days that man's chain of command is going to be told that the valley of the blind river is empty, and that is going to be true for about two days, and then it is going to be found out that it is not empty, and when it is found out then the order will come down to that man to put a smoke on this valley floor, and the reason will be a map with a river on it, drawn in 1948, and every man who dies in this valley in the next fortnight will have died because of a table somebody in 1948 could not check." There was about four seconds of rain. "And the man on the ridge is nineteen years old," said Tran Minh, "and he is going to do it, and he will be right to." Ito did not deny it, and that was the thing that Tran Minh had not been in nineteen years of signing tables — he had brought the argument to a man who could not dismiss it. "Get some sleep, sir," said Ito. "Sleep is a table too," said Tran Minh, and went up the slope to lie down in the wet, at fifty-one years of age, on a mountain, in a foreign army's boots. Rafe came down the ridge an hour later with the set under his coat and a piece of paper on the back of his hand. "Nothing since the sixth," he said. "Seven days, Captain." "Eight," said Ito. "You are counting from the wrong day." "Eight days." Rafe stood beside him at the edge in the dark with the rain on his face, and neither of them could see the other, and neither of them moved for a while. Then Rafe said, "I have been sitting up there for five weeks listening to a river go somewhere it is not supposed to be, and I have got about nineteen hours of battery and a dipole that is held on by a guy made out of an aircraft tin, and I would like to say that the whole thing is a piece of luck, and it is not, because I have been up there every night and I could hear the aerial knocking against the tree in the wind and every night it makes the same noise and I have laid it on the ground twice in different places and twice the noise has gone somewhere else entirely."