MICHAEL CRICHTON

this three or four times in all their years together. She plucked out the dart with asad expression. Peter no like Amy.“Sorry,” Peter Elliot said, and ran forward to catch her as her eyes rolled backand she collapsed into his arms.Amy lay on her back in the second boat at Elliot’s feet, breathing shallowly.Ahead, Elliot saw Munro standing in the first boat, leading the way as the Zodiacsslid silently downstream.Munro had divided the expedition into two rafts of six each; Munro went in thefirst, and Elliot, Ross, and Amy went in the second, under Kahega’s command.As Munro put it, the second boat would “learn from our misfortunes.”But for the first two hours on the Ragora, there were no misfortunes. It was anextraordinarily peaceful experience to sit in the front of the boat and watch thejungle on both sides of the river glide past them in timeless, hypnotic silence. Itwas idyllic, and very hot; Ross began to trail her hand over the side in the muddywater, until Kahega put a stop to it.“Where there is water, there is always mambo,” he said. Kahega pointed to themuddy ‘banks, where crocodiles basked in the sunshine, indifferent to theirapproach. Occasionally one of the huge reptiles yawned, lifting jagged jaws intothe air, but for the most part they seemed sluggish, hardly noticing the boats.Elliot was secretly disappointed. He had grown up on the jungle movies wherethe crocodiles slithered menacingly into the water at the first approach of boats.“Aren’t they going to bother us?” he asked.“Too hot,” Kahega said. “Mambo sleepy except at cool times, eat morning andnight, not now. In daytime, Kikuyu say mambo have joined army, one-two-threefour.”And he laughed.It took some explaining before it was clear that Kahega’s tribesmen hadnoticed that during the day the crocodiles did pushups, periodically lifting theirheavy bodies off the ground on their stubby legs in a movement that remindedKahega of army calisthenics.“What is Munro so worried about?” Elliot asked. “The crocodiles?”“No,” Kahega said.“The Ragora Gorge?”147