The 13th Valley

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

Long before the soldiers arrived the life forms of the valley had established a stable symbiotic balance.

At the most central point of the valley, in a dark and dank cavern created by the gnarled roots of an immense teak tree, a spider reconstructs its damaged labyrinth of silken corridors and chambers. Upon the outermost threads dew glistens from a single ray of sunlight seeping through the valley mist, creeping through the shadowing jungle.

The spider—its body blood-red translucent large—stills, then jerks. The web twitches violently. The creature seems to leap forward on an arc of jointed webbed legs. A pointed claw grabs a mosquito caught in the web. Around the spider vestiges of tunnels and prey traps encapsulate dried crusted exoskeletons. The spider perceives its home through simple clear red eyes and through a sensory bristle of exceedingly fine red hairs. At one time the home was good, food was plentiful. The spider had never needed to extend its world beyond the limits of the cavern.

The teak tree shades the spider and all the life below. From the hillock upon which it is perched, the tree reaches up for over two hundred feet, straight, massive and durable. The teak is wide at its base and gradually becomes slender as its huge branchless torso protrudes skyward, finally bursting in an imposing umbrella of boughs and leaves. For countless monsoon seasons, when the sky has broken angrily and lashed the earth, the tree has shielded plants and animals, and, for a time, the spider from the beating rain. The teak’s root system has preserved the knoll into which it sinks, of which it has become a part, from the ravenous river crashing endlessly against the knoll’s east side. The tree is the oldest life in the valley—older, even, than the flood-plain valley floor which has washed down the river from the mountains and which is alive with mosquitos and leeches.

The knoll, tenacious, solid, reinforced with the unseen strength of the teak, forces the river to swirl and bend back upon itself. It is long and high, with steep embankments circling the crown, and it is strong: strong enough to hold the tree and the spider aloof from the affairs of the valley floor, strong enough to alter the course of the mountain river.

The river carries soil and rock from upland watersheds to the base of the knoll. Where the knoll forces the waters to bow, the river has deposited much of its cargo to form a beach. Sticks, branches, bamboo, whole trees have been brought down the waterway, and, catching, have formed a massive snag at the beach’s north end. Riverwaters roil in the snag, back up then boil over, rushing first then sliding into the deep channel around the knoll, then lazily flowing into the broad plain beyond. Each monsoon season the river has overflowed and flooded the plain; each dry season the waters have dropped below the mud bluffs of the deepest channel.

From the muck plain of the valley floor and from the rolling hummocks of mountain erosion, elephant grass grows to twelve feet and dense bamboo thickets choke the earth to the river’s edge.

The headwaters of the river are in the very rugged terrain to the east where the valley is narrow. There the mountains rise to summits of nine hundred, one thousand, and eleven hundred meters. As the river flows west down the mountains, the valley widens. Four kilometers from its origin is the knoll which causes the river to bend. At that point the valley floor is almost six hundred meters wide. The north ridge is steep, dropping quickly to the valley floor. The south ridge is lower and gentler of slope. From the numerous peaks along the ridges, small ribs extend toward the valley center and form canyons which guide sporadic rivulets to the river.

The Khe Ta Laou river valley is difficult to enter, hard to traverse. For a very long time it had remained isolated. Life in the valley is highly organized and each plant and animal form aids and is dependent upon the entire system. The equilibrium is sharply structured—a state, perhaps, which invited disruption.