At their feet, Douglas stiffened into a full body spasm as he bellowed a blood-curdling scream. Mia stared in horrified disbelief. The wound was pulsing before her eyes, the dilated veins writhing like sago grubs thrown on the coals for dinner. It was impossible, like a Hollywood special effect. She went to assist, but the witch doctor put his gnarled hand out and pulled her back.

‘His wok nau. Let him fight the spirit.’

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Once they crossed the border and entered Indonesian airspace, the banter quickly dried up. Hartono kept low, hugging each bend of the river, while Sura scanned frequencies on the radio. Jammed into the rear seat beside Nash, Boerman trained his binoculars on the unfolding landscape. It was clear they feared detection by Indonesian forces; the question remained why.

They flew on, and the hazy ramparts of the looming central massif resolved into a wall of seemingly unbroken grey rock. Now close to its headwaters, the Sepik had changed from brown to milky green. On each side of the speeding helicopter rose thick walls of green rainforest, occasional super-trees erupting from the canopy like skyscrapers. On a tight bend, they surprised a colony of fruit bats, and several hundred cat-sized animals tumbled in their wake like a cloud from a giant explosion.

‘Tuhanku,’ breathed Sura, as the mouth of the Hoosenbeck Gorge came into view.

It was as if God had taken a knife and carved two perfectly vertical seams through the rock to create a gigantic gateway to a magical kingdom, half-hidden in the mist beyond. Erupting from this half-kilometre-wide mouth, the turquoise Hoosenbeck River ran deep and swift, colliding with the Sepik in a foamy broil.

As Hartono swooped into the gorge, Nash felt his pulse quicken. They really were going to the Hoosenbeck. Any boat – he assumed it had to be a boat – which had made it up here must have one hell of a story to tell.

On either side of the gorge, dense rainforest clawed its way up the mighty cliffs – gravity-defying trees which had never felt the axe. Nash could only imagine the rainfall required to sustain such a precarious existence. It had carved dendritic side passages, insanely deep slot canyons snaking away into gloom where no vegetation could live, venting torrents of raging white water into the fast-flowing Hoosenbeck flashing below their skids.