Seek and Ye Shall Find
by A. McIntyre
“Caruthers,” I said to my wife, pointing at the newspaper. “They found his skeleton.”
“My God,” she replied. “Where?”
“In the Arakan,” I muttered. “Loggers. And still no sign of the Chimera, they mentioned that.”
I sipped the Glenlivet, contemplating the years, my memory drifting back half a century. We’d beaten the Japanese, we were there before the Americans. Then we left, and now a Harvard educated dictator was running the show.
The messenger arrived with news. Evidence that Caruthers was perhaps still out there. I ate the rice porridge, then I lay in the hammock, smoking a pipe, listening to the porters singing each other stories. I recalled our last meeting six months before, a hundred miles down river. The lean figure, blue hypnotic eyes bright with energy.
“Broderick, old boy,” he insisted. “I’ve got to go. The chance of a lifetime, you’d do the same.”
I tried to dissuade him. He was proposing to hack his way into unexplored jungle in search of a plant. A few days earlier, with great ceremony, a tiger hunter presented an unidentified leaf Caruthers believed belonged to the legendary Chimera Orchid. Drunk on banana gin, the hunter rambled on, lisping between broken teeth. The powder was said to heal wounds and prolong life. Since the war, five botanists disappeared in the region trying to find it. Some pharmaceutical companies were intereste-d.
“If it isn’t the Chimera,” Caruthers shouted, packing his gear into the boat, “At least I’ll have my name on a new species.”
His parting words, as he set off up river towards the Arakan. He waved, gaunt, unshaven. The little lion medallion around his neck shone in the sun, a gift from a priest in 1943. We served in the Chindits, the war interrupting our careers.
News of his progress became sporadic. Traders talked of the Crudhars, a giant man who glowed like the moon, he married a chief’s daughter, he had found the Chimera, he lived with the gods in the Arakan. Then nothing. Six months, no news. I assumed he was dead, even though he knew the jungle well. I mourned the loss of my friend.
We set off at dawn. The sun barely penetrating the jungle canopy all day. Silence, the occasional screech of a monkey, the splash of something large sliding into the river. Sitting in the canoe while the porters paddled, sliding over the greasy black water, I contemplated the day I saw the Blue Virgin.
“You’ve done it, old man, you’ve done it,” Caruthers shouted. “We must celebrate.”
The Blue Virgin, Lepidopter Brodericki, I searched for two years. My name on a species. With shaking hands, he opened the Glenlivet purchased months before in Umthalang.
“Reminds me of the Spey,” he mumbled, wiping sweat from his eyes.
“Have you ever thought?” I began. “The Blue Virgin?”
"Yes,” he agreed. “Very odd, the parallels.”
They called the huge blue butterfly Tarang Ma. In Natalangan, the local dialect, tarang meant blue, ma signifying girl, maiden, or virgin. The butterfly laid its eggs in dung, the larva hatching after a few days. For a week or so, before it died, the butterfly flapped about the undergrowth, pollinating jasmine. The grubs contained a substance that, when consumed, induced hallucinations lasting several hours. Apparently, one encountered Tarang Ma, the goddess of mercy. Caruthers and I experimented and, we agreed, through our dreams we communed with a lithe blue girl of tremendous beauty. I awoke, experiencing misery akin to leaving my mother to start boarding school, when I was very young. The natives claimed that ingestion of the grub enabled the girl to exist within one, bringing protection. One reason why Caruthers and I were able to travel freely in the region. Randomly, the grubs were very toxic. Caruthers and I survived. We had power. Everything was meant to be.
When I finally captured my first specimen, I realized the real significance. Besides the unearthly sky blue beauty of the creature, on the back of the wings I perceived the shape of a woman. I caught several others, finding the pattern to be consistent.
“Do you see what I see?” I asked. “Or is it just me?”
“Of course I see what you see,” muttered Caruthers. “It’s almost impossible to believe, and something so lovely emerging from dung. Dung, the dreams of men.”
Two weeks later he set off on his quest, and I never saw him again.
After two days, abandoning the canoe, we reached a clearing. Narang territory. The headman was summoned. Children screaming and laughing, women averting their eyes through modesty even though they were naked.
“I have come for the Crudhurs,” I enunciated.
Inside the Big House, surrounded by skulls, we smoked jum, the odor like mowed grass. The huge pipe did the rounds, everybody laughing. A good sign because the Narang were headhunters. And I had communed with the Blue Virgin, I was welcome, completely safe.
I received his battered leather satchel, the initials HC engraved in faded gold lettering. Inside it, his journal. I leafed through the damp pages, skimming dates, observations, sketches, his unmistakable handwriting deteriorating. The last entry was blurred, the letters spidery.
“What I am seeking may kill me. Yet I would not exist if I had not tried. The tracks I left are gone, there is no path ahead. The clearing in which I lie will disappear.”
I imagined the lean figure hacking his way through the undergrowth, stripped to the waist, dripping sweat, his hard body like a peeled tree. One day, decades later, in the depths of the forest, they would encounter the skeleton clutching a machete. A little medallion around the vertebrae.
That night, I lay in my hammock. Exhausted from the long march, the jum, I opened my Bible. By chance, it seemed, I stumbled on Mathew 7:7, “Seek, and ye shall find.”
Despite the circumstances, sitting in my armchair fifty years later, I found myself chuckling at the recollection.
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