II
Many of the villages Rebecca passed were too small and straggling to have name signs. She had to stop every few miles to ask for Andranohinaly, only to be pointed further down the road. Eventually she reached it, however, and set about looking for the orange wayside stall. She passed a broken-down, one-room shack. In the hazy midday sun it looked nut-brown, but she could imagine it might look orange at sunset. She pulled in. Several planks bore peeling flecks of orange paint. If this was it, there should be a turning to the right immediately afterwards. Sure enough, a thin track led off the road fifty metres further along,but it was rutted and narrow, more footpath than proper road.
She pulled into its mouth, sat there clutching her steering wheel for the best part of a minute before deciding it couldn’t be right. She pulled back out on to the main road, drove on for another four kilometres before cursing out loud, swinging around and driving back to the track. She lurched along it to the base of a wooded hill, then snaked upwards in increasingly steep hairpins. Her doubts grew stronger and stronger, but she was too late to secondguess herself again. The surface kept deteriorating; the vegetation grew thicker, branches reaching out at her, thorns screeching on the Jeep’s flanks like fingernails on a blackboard. This couldn’t be it. It just couldn’t. She wanted to turn around but the track was too narrow; and the hillside was too steep and the corners too sharp to make reversing practicable. She pressed on in increasing dismay until she reached a heap of broken rock and loose debris left across the track by a small landslide. She crossed it at crawling speed, leaning almost sideways in her seat. Her relief at making it safely to the other side lasted only to the next hairpin when the track turned back on itself and she reached the place from which the landslide had fallen. The surface was completely gone. There was no possible way forwards. She was trapped.
She gave a yell of frustration. Her cry echoed forlornly. A wild dog barked. Her father and sister were depending upon her, and she was already grotesquely late. She needed to get back to the main road right now. With no way to turn, she had no choice but to try reversing. Negotiating the hairpin backwards was a nightmare. She kept hauling on the hand-brake and leaning out the window to check her wheels weren’t over the edge. Even after she’d successfully made it, she still had the buttress of rock to cross. It had been difficult enough going forwards. In reverse it was unbearable. Pebbles cascaded from beneath her wheels, clattering down the steep hillside until they were netted by the undergrowth. Each time she heard another miniature avalanche, her heart leapt. The Jeep was tilted so far over by now that she was pressed against the driver door, could see nothing in her mirrors.
And then, perhaps inevitably, the steady trickle of earth turned to a cascade, and the ground simply sheared away beneath her, and the Jeep began sliding down the hill like a ship launched sideways into the sea.