Truth Lake Read Online Free Page B

electrified at the top and the sharp shine of electric cabling disguised artfully with palm fronts and bougainvillea.
    Adam had absconded to a local bar almost as soon as they'd disembarked from their journey: making the most of a fabulous ‘doper-tunity’, he'd called it. Running away from me ? was what she'd wanted to say.
    Desultorily, Sara switched on the television. She didn’t normally watch the box, preferring an eclectic selection of novels and music, but here she had no library, no cd collection to fall back on. Discovery was screening a 30-minute documentary on 'ethical tourism'. She stared at the screen unblinking for a few moments, then scrabbled for the remote control, mouth working in panic, a sense of déjà vu clutching at her stomach as his face appeared before her, large as life. He was saying something about the vast challenges that lay ahead for India, the manifold ways in which tourism, rightly handled, could be the saving of the country. A scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen identified the speaker as 'Cameron Croft'. When had he given that interview? Why hadn’t she known? God! He looked so well there, chatting to the camera in that breezy way he had. She clutched at her stomach.
    Collapsing against her pillows, Sara switched off the set, pressing the remote button until it was imprinted upon her thumb. Then she remembered when he'd been interviewed; recollected his purpose and destination.
    Unbidden, images of the Himalayas flashed across her mind, the thrilling magnificence of the outer scenery and inner anticipation, the isolation, the disquiet, and finally the terror. With a shudder, she buried her face in chill linen and gave herself over to unquenchable weeping.  
     
    Karmel too woke weeping on the sixth night of his climb. Stretching out blinded fingers, he touched smooth canvas and rope. His hand fell to the ground beside him and he turned on his side, curling around the lumpy earth beneath his bag. 
    He was no good at this. The darkness intimidated him and the isolation was becoming an affliction, but that was not what had brought tears. Rather, some bizarre dream of privation and loss had carried him back to a boyhood usually too terrible to recall and, unable to switch on a radio or dispel the dream in city ways, he was forced to dwell on it. The Manek Foundation for Boys always acted like a dead star on his imagination; the absence of light inside his tent seemed a fitting mantle for thoughts of that era.
    Nine years of bowel-gripping sickness caused by infected food, fighting off rape by older boys, by assistants, watching younger boys stripped and molested, finding their poor crushed bodies when they couldn't take it any more – and still deciding to go on, that it might be worth it some day, that one could only get stronger, that God might exist – these years did not show on Karmel's face, nor in his eyes or around his mouth. The wounds on his scalp had healed long ago; abundant hair served to keep the scars from prying eyes and few were allowed close enough to see the other mutilations.
    Throwing off his bag and unzipping the flap, Karmel crawled out of the tent and gazed into the darkness around him. His watch made it twenty to four and daylight was just beyond the horizon, even though he could see neither. Working by touch, he began to pack up his things.
    By eleven a.m. he had descended several kilometres into another wooded valley. Two days ago the whole mission was beginning to seem utterly ridiculous. The problem was, he had not seemed any closer to reaching Saahitaal than he had been in Dilghum.  Passing shepherds who stopped to chat or share their tea with him all said the same thing, ' much easier to reach from the north-west ' or ' bear west' . He felt as if he had climbed and descended thirty hills, although it was more like seven.
    It took him all of the second day finding his way out of a strange tropical wood that contained sighing bamboo and sharp thorny