The Night Circus - ANTHEA

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER EIGHT
Rush sat back in the banquette. “Have you heard of the Sudd?”
Logan thought a moment. “It rings a distant bell.”
“People assume that the Nile is just a wide river, snaking its way unimpeded into the heart of
Africa. Nothing could be further from the truth. The early British explorers—the Richard Burtons
and Livingstones—found that out the hard way when they encountered the Sudd. But take a look
at this—it’ll describe the place far more eloquently than I can.” And Rush gestured to a book on
a nearby table.
Logan hadn’t noticed it before and now he picked it up. It was a battered copy of Alan Moorehead’s
The White Nile. It was a history of the exploration of the river; he vaguely remembered leafing
through a copy as a child.
“Page 95,” Rush said.
Logan flipped through the book, found the page, and—as the saloon throbbed around him—began
to read.
There is no more formidable swamp in the world than the Sudd. The Nile loses itself
in a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that foetid heat there is
a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning
of the world: it is as primitive and hostile to man as the Sargasso Sea. The region is
neither land nor water. Year by year the current keeps bringing down more floating
vegetation, and packs it into solid chunks perhaps twenty feet thick and strong enough
for an elephant to walk on. But then this debris breaks away in islands and forms again
in another place, and this is repeated in a thousand indistinguishable patterns and goes
on forever…Here there was not even a present, let alone a past; except on occasional
islands of hard ground no men ever had lived or ever could live in this desolation
of drifting reeds and ooze, even the most savage of men. The lower forms of life
flourished here in mad abundance, but for men the Sudd contained nothing but the
threat of starvation, disease and death.
Logan put the book down. “My God. Such a place really exists?”
“It exists all right. You’ll see it before dark.” Rush shifted in the banquette. “Imagine: a region
thousands of square miles across, not so much swamp as an impenetrable labyrinth of papyrus
reeds and waterlogged trunks. And mud. Mud everywhere, mud more treacherous than quicksand.
The Sudd isn’t deep, often just twenty or thirty feet in places, but in addition to being horribly
honeycombed with braided undergrowth the water is so murky, so full of silt, divers can’t see a foot
beyond their face. The water’s full of alligators by day, the air full of mosquitoes by night. All the
early explorers gave up trying to cross it and eventually went around. It’s situated not far from the
Sudanese border, surrounded by a wide, shallow valley. And every year it spreads. Just a little, but
it spreads. It’s a living thing—that’s why we need such a narrow craft. Trying to traverse the Sudd
is like threading a needle through the bark of a tree. Every day we have a recon plane that charts
the shifting eddies, maps new paths through it. Every day, those routes change.”
“So the vessel acts sort of like an icebreaker,” Logan said. He was thinking of the strange equipment
he’d seen at the bow.
Rush nodded. “The shallow draft helps clear underwater obstructions, and the airscoop on the back
provides the raw power necessary to push through tight spots.”
“You’re right,” Logan said. “It does sound like hell on earth. But why are we…” He stopped. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. That’s where Narmer’s tomb is located.”
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