Matter of paradise

Abstract

“The jungle closed behind them like a tomb, and after hours of increasingly weary but also frenzied rowing through incomprehensibly labyrinthine salt-water channels overtowered by the cathedral-arching trees, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were hopelessly lost; they turned time and again to the buddha, who pointed, ‘That way’, and then, ‘Down there’, but although they rowed feverishly, ignoring fatigde, it seems as if the possibility of ever leaving this place reduced before them like the lantern of a ghost; until at length they rounded on their supposedly unfallible tracker, and perhaps saw some small light o f shame or relief glowing in his habitually milky-blue eyes; and now Farooq whispered in the sepulchral greenness of the forest: ‘You don’t know. You’re just saying anything’.”