Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue. Andrew Martin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ another route’. Leyden himself had been ordered to leave, and he had been destroying important papers prior to doing so. The Chaukan Pass had been recommended to Leyden. He admitted that he had heard bad things about the Chaukan, but he had reason to believe a rescue party would be sent into it from the Assam side, a theory apparently based on radio messages, or rumours of radio messages. In fact, at about the time Leyden was writing this chit, RAF planes sent from Assam were dropping messages in the vicinity of Sumprabum specifically forbidding entry into the Chaukan Pass, it being considered impassable. But these messages were never picked up, just as letters and radio messages giving the same warning were never received.

      Rossiter, too, had heard bad things about the Chaukan Pass, but it seemed that Leyden’s message convinced him, or half convinced him. He mustered his own party, with supplies of food but no elephants. The party consisted of Rossiter, his Shan wife and child, Millar, Goal Miri and twenty Indian ‘subordinates and servants’, plus an unspecified number of porters. On 11 May, as mentioned, they teamed up with Sir John and the railway party at the spot called Hkam Ho, fifty miles short of the Chaukan Pass. On 13 May, they were joined by Leyden, who brought some porters of his own, and a man called Ronald Jardine, who was forty-five but, being white-bearded and already haggard, looked older. He was an employee in Rangoon of Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturers, and, although not currently very fragrant, he had married into Coty, the French perfume dynasty. (Jardine’s wife, too, had already been evacuated.)

      On 14 May, by which point they had progressed about fifteen miles towards the pass from Hkam Ho, trudging along a rocky mule track winding through fine soil – dust, really – and dried scrub, Sir John’s two elephant men refused to go any further ‘as the road is so bad and there is no fodder for animals’. Sir John paid them off, and they and their elephants turned back to Hkam Ho.

      On 17 May, the monsoon proper started, and Sir John was getting into his rhetorical stride: ‘The day’s march was a most loathsome one, carried out under the most disgusting weather conditions along a jungle track which went up hill and down dale with slopes as steep as 1-in-1 in some places, the track itself being in many places a stream of liquid mud inches thick.’ It brought them to a village of bamboo houses, called by Sir John Hpaungmaka: ‘This camp is full of winged insects of every description, sandflies and blood blister flies, abounding in myriads, were a pest to everyone.’

      The going had become next to impossible, and they weren’t even at the pass yet. It was therefore decided to dispatch three of the younger, fitter men as an advance guard, together with porters. So it was that Millar, Leyden and Goal Miri set off with their dozen porters, with the idea, as Sir John fate-provokingly put it, ‘… of doing double marches per day, get to Assam as quickly as possible and to send a relief force to us with rations and medical stores at whichever point we might have reached on the route’.

       The Footprint

      It was cold at dawn in the jungle on 1 June, and still raining. Leyden was definitely not at all well, and he kept insisting that Millar go on without him. ‘I was unsympathetic,’ Guy Millar wrote, ‘and even uncouth, I’m afraid.’

      With the rising sun came heavier rain. There was no food for breakfast, so Millar lit a cigarette and he made a decision: he and the young elephant tracker, Goal Miri, would make a last dash for a village, while Leyden and the Kachin porters would come through at their own pace.

      The two set off, marching all day ‘at a hard pace’ through thick jungle, and making tree cuts – incisions in the bark – on the way so that Leyden and the Kachins might follow. Eventually they came to what Millar called ‘a small river, the Debawng’. But the Debawng, or Debang, river is small only by the standards of upper Assam. It occupies a gorge about 200 yards wide. In the dry season, a few shallow streams – each as wide as an ordinary English river – meander through the white rubble of the river bed. In the monsoon, things are different: Millar and Leyden were staring at white rapids. It was probably shallow enough to wade through, but there was the question of tree cuts. How would the following Kachins and Leyden know where they resumed on the opposite bank? At four o’clock, the rain stopped. In two hours, it would be pitch dark. Millar contemplated the river, then he looked at the red mud of the riverbank, and he saw a footprint.

      At first, he didn’t point it out to Goal. He just sat and stared at it: ‘… the first signs of man for nineteen days over a journey of a hundred miles.’

      It was not a boot print, but a footprint. It pointed left, in the direction of the bigger river towards which the Debang was flowing, in other words the Noa Dehing, the river that Millar and Leyden had been shadowing all along, and whose tributaries they had been crossing, and falling into. Millar pointed out the footprint to Goal Miri; they lit a bamboo fire as the light faded.

      A fire ought to go with food, but there was none. After an hour or so, they heard the sound of twigs snapping in the jungle. That meant people. Animals did not break twigs as they walked. The beam of an electric torch shone through the trees: Leyden and the porters had arrived. Leyden could hardly walk, and seeing Millar by the river he lay down immediately. Millar wrote, ‘The pangs of hunger were now acute. The [porters] sat around glaring at each other, thinking, I suppose, the end was in sight.’ Nobody seemed very impressed by the footprint. After a while, the Kachins made flares of burning grass. They took these to the water’s edge in order to hunt for crabs – which they did not find. When they had left his immediate vicinity, Millar realized he could still see the footprint quite clearly. Moonlight. The moon was full –

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAgkAAAMgCAIAAAAm1GblAAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAH aWlDQ1BQaG90b3Nob3AgSUNDIHByb2ZpbGUAAHjalZVZVJMHHsX/35KVkEAIEJDlg7AbSEBkFQqE VfZVwJUkHxAJJCZhq2LpqIjiAlYsVRAVpI4riFAcl0pFK+JYgQq44AZapVgVR9SplnngzLEvnXPm Pv3OPee/PN0LQOcFh4aEoUEA+QU6TVJECJGekUnQhgEDFJhAA+csmVYNfy0EYHoIEACAQVdplERS n+958Fhz2DQvv641kcXNh/8thkyt0QFQewCgV05qZQC0agBYV6xT6wDgJQDwNClJEgAEB6Csz/kT S//EmvSMTABqJQDwcma5HgB40lluBQBeekYmMXv208+yQk3RrIeeBQAmGIM1uIAnBEIUJMNSyAUN lMFGqIF6aIFWOAOX4AbchnF4Ae8RDGEjfESAuCLeSAgSgyxCspA8pAgpRzYjtUgjchg5hZxHepFB ZBR5ikwhH1EaaohaoA6oGPVHw9AENBMlUTW6Gq1Aa9B69BDajn6P9qHD6Bj6Av2A0TFjzBYTYQuw KCwNk2Ma7AtsK7YHO4x1YZexm9g49hpHcUPcBhfjQXgCvgJX4+V4Db4fP4lfxH/GH+NvKXSKOUVI CaQkUGSUQkolZQ/lOKWbcpPylPKBakC1o/pQY6lZ1CJqFXUftYPaR31AnaaxaAKaLy2elk0ro+2k HaVdpN2hvabr0QV0f3oKPZ9eQW+kd9EH6JMMKoNg+DFSGSrGZsZBRjfjLuMdk8cUM2OZCmYFs4l5 gXmP+buemZ63XqqeTm+HXpveDb2XLA5LxIpnqVjbWa2sftaUvpH+fP00/RL93frn9O+zUbY9O4qt ZFezT7FH2B85NpxwTh6nhtPJuWuAGjgZxBsUGTQY9BhMGhoZ+hvKDbcYdhje49K47txM7nruce4t I9xIZJRptMGozWiUx+B58WS8at453oQx3zjcWGfcZDxggpiITVaYVJtcMHlpamOaZLrOtMP0Cd+M H80v47fyx8xMzRaarTVrN/vF3MI80bzC/Kz51BynOcvn1M65ZoFb+FtoLY5YjFtaWqZZbrfstcKs AqyKrU5aPbd2tpZb77MeJcyINOIrot+GYxNrU2Vz1ZZhG2lbaXtFQBdECTYJ+uxYdnF21XYD9sb2 6fZ77O87CBxyHI46vHL0clzj+IMT3SnOqdbprrOds9L5lPMHlzCXbS4jc23nKud2ChFhjLBOOOYq dl3j2utm4iZza3ObEcWJGkSTYn9xlfiuu9C9zP26B+Gh8eiZZzpv5bxznoa СКАЧАТЬ