The Game Read Online Free Page A

just seen – and “sidewinding”, usually observed in desert snakes. They are able to travel much faster over rough surfaces than smooth. This snake was in no hurry. If it were, it would progress in a sideways, curving movement, to take advantage of the surface. Contrary to earlier belief, movement is produced, not by the ribs, but by successive contractions of groups of muscles …’
    A diagram of the muscular contractions of the anaconda was followed somewhat abruptly by the apparition of Simon, who stared anxiously out from under the shade of some canvas hut or shelter where he sat cross-legged like the Buddha, surrounded by his snake-trapping instruments. He expatiated, with nervous fluency, on the muscular structure of the snake, bending with his hands first a closely-knot metal chain and then a dead snake, twisting them double, turning them, to demonstrate the superior flexibility of the snake. Cassandra watched his hands, hairy, with huge knuckles, and his face, pulled into an intent pout. Her knees shook slightly. He produced a small boa from a canvas bag, looped it about his wrist, and went on to explain how the muscles were used in constriction.
    ‘An economic use of power in a creature which has no exceptional mobility. Most stories of rapid pursuit by snakes are fantasies. There are other fallacies – snakes do not deliberately break bones, nor do they, on the whole, “reshape” their prey – although I have seen snakes tease out a chicken or a monkey into a more easily apprehensible form. Death is due, not as might be imagined, to suffocation, but to constriction of the heart. Constriction of the heart. The constrictors seem to know exactly when death takes place, and will not release any victim before it is dead. Mere unconsciousness does not impress a snake …’
    Simon’s face took on a puzzled, faintly anxious expression which was familiar to Cassandra, who clasped her hands suddenly and defensively in front of her.
    ‘Constriction, like poison when we study it, loses its aura of peculiar terror,’ he said. ‘Coming close to anything – mortality amongst mortals – changes our attitude to it, changes it, in our minds. Whether we are butchers or doctors or simply scientific observers. Familiarity doesn’t make things less mysterious – it does make them less vague. You might say, we learn a
real
fear, instead of a mystical fear. Out here, you might say, one has a chance to begin again – this part of the world has been less documented, either by naturalists, geographers or social scientists, than any other. It’s a real Garden of Eden, and wehave to find our own bearings – map out for ourselves, not good and evil, but what life and death are really like, since we are not immortal. And what is
really
to be feared. Here, that is not the constrictors. Fire and flood. Certain insects. Bad water. Bathing with a cut finger. Even bad teeth. You have to learn to organize your own survival at first hand. You have to be very close to things that at home you can afford to forget. But, in compensation, they do appear
real.’
    He smiled, a slow, diffident smile, which Cassandra in moods of irritation had been used to call smug. He always believed, she thought now, that he had discovered everything himself, at first-hand: the banal, the platitudinous, the startling truth, indiscriminately mixed. This occupation was a logical enough end-product.
    ‘And the scientist with a camera,’ he said urgently, ‘can, as it were, rediscover innocence. The innocent eye, not ignorant, but trained, detached, seeing everything for itself, for what it is, with no apprehensions and very fluid preconceptions. Once one has one’s own feelings in hand – once one’s fears are real fears and one’s needs are real needs – everything else can be seen with that pure curiosity which is one of the highest human qualities. And I would call it innocence. An achieved, an informed innocence.’
    ‘Consider the