Death of a River Guide

Death of a River Guide Read Free Page B

Book: Death of a River Guide Read Free
Author: Richard Flanagan
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like a movie, right? Except that I have this one vision and it stays there while all these other things happen around it. And right at this moment, this is how it presents itself.
    First. A smell. Of flood - of earth eroding, of peat washing away, of rainforest heavy with rain. More precisely - for though lazy, I have always admired precision - more precisely: the energetic stench of decay. Then. A sound. The roar, the tumult of sounds of a river breaking its normal banks, crashing through the low-lying shrubbery, forming large rapids where none existed before; of sheets of rain driving like blows of an axe into the guts of the gorge.
    Then, breaking forth from a bizarre low angle, a ray of light shining up the gorge illuminating a world otherwise cast in darkness by the black rain clouds above. The water reflects a white brilliance. From where I am watching, the mass of glistening white is momentarily blinding. It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to this whiteness and recognise the river. The Franklin River. A world pure and whole and complete unto itself. Neither rubber condoms nor rubber tyres nor tin cans nor dioxins nor bent rusting chrome reminders of the cars they once graced nor any of the other detritrus of our world seem to abide here. This is an alien world. This is the river. Rising in the Cheyne Range. Falling down Mt Gell. Writhing like a snake in the wild lands at the base of the huge massif of Frenchmans Cap. Writing its past and prophesying its future in massive gorges slicing through mountains and cliffs so undercut they call them verandahs, and in eroded boulders and beautiful gilded eggs of river stone, and in beaches of river gravel that shift year to year, flood to flood, and in that gravel that once was rounded river rock that once was eroded boulder that once was undercut cliff that once was mountain and which will be again. And then I see them. At the top of the whiteness two red rafts, each bearing people, each person craning their eyes earnestly over the rapid, down which they are now to fall.
    Â Aljaz 
    In front of that white brilliance, there is a rock. A huge, sloping rock the size of several houses, flanked on one side by a sheer cliff and upon the other by a waterfall. And nine or so people and two red rafts pulled up on that rock. But I can’t make out the people’s faces. They are hard to clearly see in the pattern of the myrtle leaves that dance in the swirling water before my eyes. The people are gathered where the boulder edges the waterfall, and they are staring at an arm that rises ghostlike out of the waterfall only a few metres from where they stand.
    Like a spotlight in a theatre, the low ray of sunlight illuminates the arm, further emphasising its ethereal nature. The people on the rock observe in fascinated horror the way the fingers of the hand open out into the ray of light as if in question, stretch as far as it is possible for such extremities to stretch, and the fingers shiver and as they do so the hand pivots around the wrist, roaming its small and tightly circumscribed sunlit world, searching for some hope it might grasp. At the point where this mesmerising moving limb rises, the waterfall has not begun its absolute drop, which is a metre or two further downstream. Here the fall is a maelstrom of wild, confused falling water. And jammed between submerged rocks, stuck underneath that furious water, is a man to whom this arm belongs.
    Me. Aljaz Cosini, river guide.
    More precisely: the spotlit arm is my arm.
    My head, jammed between the rocks, can no doubt be made out from the large boulder above. No doubt. The blue of my guide’s helmet and the planes of my face visible to those looking down through these few centimetres. (How many? Seven or eight or nine? What does it avail? I’m a bee’s dick away from those people and that beautiful air they breathe and I can’t reach it or them, or them me.) But my body, snagged in the rock, wedged into the

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