Sixteen Flies on a Rope

Priginally published 5/14/08 on Desicritics



The white canvas tent was stained the color of mud and clay on its bottom. Touches of greasy hands had left their marks on the fabric which in turn had become magnets for dust. A capricious Nepali child, with charcoal in hand, had drawn two pictures at the back of the tent, perhaps of the owners of it, as the men depicted were too tall and all had strange hats on their heads. But the tent, when pitched under a tall Deodar Cedar looked inviting and spoke of restfulness, an escape from weary muscles, aching joints, a place into which one crawled for quietness, sleep, a place that smelled of often used sleeping bags and socks, almost stiff from use, stuffed into the bottoms that waited for the next hot springs to be washed and pounded a grey-clean.



The tent’s ropes were anchored to stakes pounded into the soil, three on each side, one in the front and one in the back. During the day, the front rope was untied and hung loose, making entry to the tent easier, or if perchance a small tree grew nearby, it could be tied up high enough so that the occupants did not need to bend down to enter. This rope was a light brown color, not from dye but from the stains of a hundred hand-holds, hands that had just finished eating the leg of a Monal Pheasant, hands that minutes earlier had held the blood stained skinning blades now lying on the small folding table with bird specimens in various stages of being skinned and stuffed, hands that had held ink pens that leaked onto fingers that wrote the day’s diary, ‘Jumuson-Nepal, September, 1949.’



These ropes, still wet from the light rain during the night, now sagged from the weight of their wetness, but when the sun shone bright and brilliantly, would once again shrink and resume their tightness.



It was on this rope, tied to a small tree, that visitors arrived daily. When the men had left for a daily hike or hunting expedition to the lake near Pokhara, sparrows landed on the rope, a mother sparrow and a fledgling baby bird nearly the size of its mother, which sat and begged with a wide open yellow mouth to be fed; then waited for her return. Sitting fat bellied on the rope it defecated a white sticky dung ball which stuck to the cord. A small green caterpillar hanging from a gossamer thread swayed back and forth in the breeze until its perigee from some distant branch, brought it to the rope where it rested momentarily, then arched its green slender body and began the long, inching journey the length of the rope all the way to the tent, where it hesitated, then dropped again on a silken thread to be carried away by the breeze to another juicier landing place. The lizard, not more than two inches long, crawled out onto the tent rope and did two little push ups, then sat motionless waiting for flies.



In spite of the open front flaps of the tent the temperature inside the tent became hot and humid and all the odors and aromas on bags, clothing and old boots filled the tent with fetid air. I looked up from my sleeping bag, now half out of the tent, resting on the ground in the shade, and studied the rope above my head. Sixteen flies were now the owners of the fiber highway, and from where I lay in the partial shade they looked like dark knots until one or another flew off, or until without foreplay or warning two mated for a frenzied moment and then remained in a coital bind that held them together until the female flew off, carrying her conjugal partner on her back to land on the tent flap some six feet away. Sixteen! I counted them again and now noted that all sat horizontally on the rope, all facing away from the tent. Some compulsion moved them to wash their ‘hands’ and then stroke their eyes and heads with their front feet as if ridding them of some unseen taint. All were common house flies except for one which was larger, a brilliant shiny blue-green. When this green bot rose in flight, its wings hummed and sang a tune known well to all who use the great out-of-doors as their toilet; all who remember with amazement that these ‘shit flies’, invisible, until fecal deposits graced the floor of the jungle, arrived in aggressive numbers, intent on some ghoulish quest. Fifteen; and one preening green blue-bot fly.



A shadow of a flying vulture passed across the rope and in an instant the flies were gone, leaving the rope alone and lonely, but not for long. The breeze caught the opening of the tent and the sides billowed, pulling the rope taught each time air blew into the tent. The roof canvas now flapped and snapped and dust swirled near the entrance, filling my eyes and blowing sand into my sleeping bag so that I was forced to turn away with eyes tightly closed. Then as abruptly as the wind arrived, it left and there was a still, an almost breathless waiting until the next current found its way to my campsite. A bright red dragonfly, the largest I had ever seen, landed on the tent rope, less than three feet from my eyes. I watched it sitting motionlessly, noticed that its head was in constant motion, its compound eyes staring, first one way, then another, watching for flies. The sun reflected from its wings, yet shone through the diaphanous lace throwing a glow onto the rope beneath it as if igniting the fibers in pink splendor. I blinked and the creature was gone, for an instant, to return with a green fly in its mouth, held with two tiny legs as it consumed its prey. A vulture circled high and the pink dragon was gone with a flip of its wings.



The tent-rope now looked black against the white snows of Annapurna behind it. The black line sliced the massif in two, as if a willful child had drawn a dark crayon across the picture in a travel book. Annapurna! From where I lay it stretched for some thirty miles and soared into the azure sky with its six major peaks, its summit reaching 26,538 feet, the tenth highest mountain in the world. ( Annapurna, in Sanskrit, Goddess of the Harvests; in Hinduism a symbol of fertility and a manifestation, an avatar of Durga.) The late afternoon sun shone against the snow-covered surface, now a slight orange- saffron tint. High, near its summit, strong winds blew a snow plume, like the plumed crest of a snowy egret which wavered and swirled in the late sunset.



I could hear their voices now. “Kaseru. How has the Barkat Zaman* sahib done today? Did you feed him?” Dr. Carl Taylor, the expedition’s physician, strolled into the clearing and headed toward the tent. “Harold. How’s it going, old man?” He reached down to feel my forehead and withdrew his hand, his face slightly frowning. “Did you take the medications I set out for you?”



“Yes,” I replied. “There were sixteen of them on the rope. The blue one got eaten. The baby shit on the line.” The words came tumbling out all at once.



Later I could hear the other members of the Nepal Ornithological Expedition talking as they ate their meal that Kaseru had prepared.



“No. It is really a mystery. Fever’s still at 104 degrees. Dangerously high. Until we get down to the plains, to Butwal or later in Ludhiana and have blood work done, I can only guess. Hemorrhagic fever, perhaps carried by the rats in the place we stayed in Jumosum, or typhus, or some strange parasitic disease.” Doctor Carl sipped the hot coffee in his mug. “Poor chap, hallucinating again. Rectal bleeding. All he could say this evening was, ‘Today about sixteen of them on a rope and the green one was eaten.’ Poor chap.”



“Well,” said Dr. Robert Fleming, the expedition leader, “we may just have to have him carried out on a litter; Pokhara to Tansing, then on to Butwal. That is going to be some feat, carrying him over the Himalayas in a litter.”