Pepper opened the door of the landrover and looked at the thickets. He didn't know what he was supposed to see. Something in the nature of a nauseating blancmange. Something strange, something indescribable. But the most strange, the most unimaginable thing in this undergrowth was the people, therefore Pepper saw only them. They were walking toward the landrover, slender and neat in their movements, confident and elegant, they walked easily, never backtracking, instantly choosing the exact place to step. They acted as if they didn't notice the forest, as if they were at home in it and the forest belonged to them. They weren't pretending even, they really did think that, and the forest hung above them silently laughing and pointing with myriads of jeering fingers, while adroitly contriving to be familiar, obedient and simple - absolutely trustworthy. Until the time, the day...
"Oh what a wench, that Rita," said former driver Acey to Pepper. He was standing next to the landrover, his somewhat bandy legs set wide across a rasping and trembling motorcycle, which he held lightly with his thighs. "I'd have got my hands on her for sure if it wasn't for her Quentin, he's a sharp one."
Quentin and Rita had approached quite close and Stoyan climbed out from behind the wheel to meet them.
"Well, how is she?" asked Stoyan. "Breathing," said Quentin, closely studying Pepper. "Has the money arrived, then?"
"This is Pepper," said Stoyan. "I was telling you."
Rita and Quentin smiled at Pepper. There was no time to study them but the thought crossed Pepper's mind that he had never seen a stranger woman than Rita or a more deeply unhappy man than Quentin.
"Hello, Pepper," said Quentin, continuing to smile piteously. "Come to have a look? Never seen it before?"
"I don't see it now," said Pepper. And it was true, the unhappiness and the strangeness were impossible to pin down, though linked powerfully.
Rita lit a cigarette and turned away. "You're looking in the wrong direction, man. Look straight ahead of you. Don't tell me you can't see?"
Then Pepper did see and at once forgot about the people. It had appeared like a hidden image on photographic paper, like a figure in a child's puzzle picture "where is the rabbit hiding" and once having found it, it was impossible to lose it from view. It was very close, it began ten paces from the landrover's wheels and the path. Pepper shuddered and swallowed.
A living column rose to treetop level, a sheaf of thin transparent threads, sticky, shiny, writhing and tense, a sheaf penetrating the dense foliage and climbing farther and farther into the clouds. It had its origin in a cesspit, an oily gurgling cesspit, full up with protoplasm, living, active, swelling up in bubbles of primitive flesh, busily organizing and as quickly decaying, pouring out the products of decay onto its flat banks spitting gluey foam... And at once, as if unseen sound-filters had been switched on, the voice of the cesspit stood out from the chugging of the motorbike: gurgling, splashing, sobbing, bubbling, long drawn-out swamp groans; a heavy wall of smells drew nearer of raw sweating meat, pus, fresh bile, serum, hot paste - only then did Pepper notice that both Rita and Quentin had oxygen masks hanging on their chests; he saw Stoyan squeamishly grimacing and raising a respirator to his face. He himself did not start putting his respirator on, he was somehow hoping that the smells might tell him what his eyes and ears had failed to do...
"It stinks around here," said Acey, revolted. "Like a morgue..."
Quentin was talking to Stoyan.
"You might have asked Kim to see about our rations. We should get danger money. We're due milk, chocolate..."
Rita was smoking pensively, dribbling smoke through her thin mobile nostrils...
Around the cesspit, bending tenderly over it, trembled the trees; their branches were all turned in one direction and drooped toward the seething mass, while along the branches thick hairy lianas wriggled and dropped into the cesspit. The cesspit took them to itself and the protoplasm gnawed around them and converted them into itself, as it could dissolve and make its own all that surrounded it...
"Peppy," said Stoyan, "don't goggle like that, your eyes'll pop out."
Pepper smiled, though he knew it looked forced.
"Why did you bring the motorbike, anyway?" asked Quentin.
"In case we got stranded. They crawl along the path - I go with one wheel on the path, the other on the grass, and the motorbike goes behind. If we get stuck, Acey nips off on the bike and gets a tractor."
"You'll get stuck for sure," said Quentin.
"Course we will," said Acey. "This is a stupid idea, I've said so all along."
"You just be quiet," Stoyan said to him. "Your part is small enough... Is the eruption soon?" he asked Quentin.
Quentin looked at his watch.
"Well now..." he said. "It reproduces every eighty-seven minutes. So in ... in ... in nothing, there, she's starting already."
