It’s forty degrees and I’m halfway up Maderas. Snatched
glimpses through the forest canopy reveal the island of Ometepe
– from here the water turquoise, and Concepción, the other
volcano, still rumbling with dragon-fire or so they say. Howler monkeys – can
you hear them shriek? – are lurking at the tops of trees. They cry like the
world is ending, and maybe it is, judging by the ants; they’re carrying whole
leaves in strange processions down the mountain, a more reasonable direction to
be going by far, I think.
Truth be told, as I climbed higher up the mountain, things got uglier. First there was Kate – who effortlessly skipped up the mountain without struggle. If her plane ever crashed over the Amazon and Kate was kidnapped by an all-woman tribe, she would quickly rise to queen. What I wouldn’t have given for a single stumble from her, sure-footed and beautiful mountain goat! Then, as the forest gave way to rainforest, the dangling vines looked like poisonous snakes. We’d pause for (my) breath after scrambling straight up boulders, and we’d get to one of the scenic viewpoints where hikers were supposed to be thrilled by the view and get some kind of recharge by the “beauty of nature”. And the scenery was gorgeous, I could admit intellectually, even as I fantasized about the entire island getting engulfed by a tsunami and sinking back into the sea.
You may think that I’m a miserable bastard, but read on.
Sweaty does not describe my plight. I was
projectile sweating. Other hikers were drenched just by being in vicinity.
Steam rose off my haunches like an abused horse; every time we stopped I
squeezed a litre of juice from my sweat rag. With water running low we started
to ration it, and my mouth gummed shut from paste. Even when we stopped I
wasn’t cooling down, and as Kate ooohed and aaahed at a nimble monkey or tropical
tree covered in mossy fungus, I started feeling nauseous. And faint. And weak.
Like my boots and the mountain had a strong magnetic bond.
I sat down on a log, failing to catch my
breath. Looking over I saw… Death. He was smoking a cigarette. He was holding
the smoke between long, skeletal fingers and when he wanted a puff he would put
the fingers inside his black cowl to inhale. Though I wasn’t really thinking
straight, I felt a pang that the image of Death I’d conjured in my last moments
had been such a cliché one.
Producing a clipboard, Death started
describing my life in a sonorous voice, “Matt Jones. 32. Was a sailor, a
veteran, a scholar, a poet. In a move of astonishing arrogance, he tried to
keep up with his Amazonian girlfriend, overheated and died on a mountain. Just
like her last four boyfriends. Hmmmm. What would you like on your tombstone?”
Death brandished a pen made from a human ulna.
Through the paste in my mouth, “How about, ‘here
lies the bones of Matt Jones.’”
Death says, “Very funny.”
“Let’s see you do better.”
And suddenly I could hear Kate’s voice. She was excited
about something. I think it was the rain. Was it the rain? I could feel…
something. Little drops. Little drops on my face. Rain so cool. So cool. Death
fading. Kate shaking me, more water. A tablet of electrolytes. A bag of nuts.
More rain, more water. Oxygen. Sun hiding behind a cloud.
We were twenty minutes from the summit and I was alive and
the rainforest was all around me. The moss and the vines and the trees and the
insects and monkeys were all frantic gluttons scrambling for energy and
sunlight. Trees grew out the side of trees. Vines wrapped around each other
like a dance. As the rain fell the moss shone with captured moisture – the
jungle shone. A few more minutes of scaling rock; the magnetic pole of my boots
had reversed; I hauled myself up a cliff with a vine.
The summit. The crater. The top. The clouds cleared long
enough for a few pictures, but mercifully, the rain kept pattering down. Kate
endured a sweaty kiss. We ate chicken sandwiches and laughed, giddy in the
altitude. Below us, the volcano, its lush rainforest and waterfalls.
