Black Pearl Read Online Free Page B

considered …’
    â€˜Very witty, darling. Moreover, Max, the infrastructure between them hasn’t been touched for forty years. It’s all just jungle now. As far as I know the only way along your twelve-lane highway is by motorbike and on foot. God knows what’s happened to the railroad. Don’t fool yourselves, either of you. You’d need to start from scratch.’
    â€˜It’s as though we haven’t just come up the river,’ added Richard thoughtfully, ‘it’s as though we’ve gone back in time! It’s like Jurassic Park down there.’
    â€˜Robin!’ laughed Max. ‘Get a grip! And you, Richard – Tombstone …
Jurassic Park
! I ask you!’ But for once the booming Russian’s confident tone sounded a little hollow. For the last two hours there had been nothing to see other than the jungle, and that had been depressing enough. But now they were coming over the deserted suburbs of Cite La Bas.
    After an hour’s flight at maximum cruising speed they were nearly three hundred kilometres from the River Gir now, approaching Cite La Bas from the south-west, so they were confronted at first by the stunted overgrowth of secondary jungle that had developed exponentially in the years since the gas cloud had killed those who had survived the eruption and the lava flow. City block after city block was literally running to seed. Plants burgeoned everywhere, given gigantic expansion by the rainforest climate. It was hard to see most of the houses, draped as they were with ivies, creepers and lianas. Huge trees rose, not only in gardens but through entire dwellings. It was hard not to see the secondary jungle as a living thing ruthlessly reinvading the land that humanity could no longer defend.
    Awe-inspiring though this huge destruction was, it shrank to insignificance beside the utter devastation of the north-eastern suburbs. Here everything was black instead of green. Starkly, gauntly dead instead of threateningly fecund. Even after all these years – and after all that nature had dealt it, cars stuck up out of the cinder-black ground, half buried, frozen in place. All of them battered and rusting, many of them burst open like obscene flowers where their petrol tanks had exploded. Buses, trucks, lorries, pantechnicons stuck up like toys thrown on to an ash heap. Richard’s eyes swept over the devastation almost unbelievingly. A black-throated pit appeared, seemingly leading halfway to the centre of the earth; big enough to make him wonder if this was an offspring of the volcano itself.
    â€˜That must be where the avgas tanks went up,’ said Max, who had read the report prepared for the government in the months after the disaster, when the international community had been throwing money, aid and volunteers at the place. Before it became obvious that almost nothing was getting past ex-president Liye Banda’s venal clique, who were growing fat while the dwindling survivors up-country were simply wasting away. And there was precious little that could be done in any case, especially in the face of the marauding Interahamwe, the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Army of Christ the Infant. Before they all pulled out again and left Benin La Bas well alone. ‘The explosion took out all the airport buildings and everything on the apron, so it says in the report.’
    Richard just shook his head, beyond speech. He glanced at Robin. Her grey eyes were wide and full of tears. The state of the once-great city emphasized the point she had been making about the country’s infrastructure more powerfully than any words ever could have done.
    â€˜Damn,’ said Max. ‘I’d hoped we could land on the runway at the airport or – at the worst – on the lava itself. The government report said the shield was flat, like the flows in Hawaii.’ He swung round, glaring at the experts cowering down the length of the cabin behind