Because the hoatzins were highly specialized, and therefore not particularly adaptable, they were the first creatures to feel the change when a series of early winter earthquakes and earthquake-generated landslides began to alter the shape and even the course of the Rio Xingu. The quakes were relatively minor, but their impact on the hoatzin colonies was enormous. Trees that had recently overhung the water were now completely submerged, or had been thrust upward with the shoreline and were standing far back from the river’s edge. Hunting parties of flesh-eating monkeys took quick advantage of the birds’ confusion. Fast-moving troops of big-brained primates made deliberately loud approaches from the trees, while others hid in the muddy underbrush, waiting for a rain of disoriented birds, whose familiar escape routes no longer existed. Six weeks after the first earthquake, half a generation of Rio Xingu hoatzins had been eliminated. By the time the Demeter approached Brazil’s Atlantic coast in September 1943, they were extinct along the entire length of the river.
Although few humans had felt these natural rumblings, the landscape was changing with such increasing frequency that previously navigated and mapped river bottoms were being reshaped into the first drafts of the broad, white-water interrupted passages that would become familiar to future cartographers. Even the unusually intense rains of the previous season could not raise the waters high enough to ensure safe passage—and especially not for a craft over one hundred meters long. And so, inevitably, the river bottom reached up, subtly at first, until at last it snared the Demeter, ever so lightly, some 1,200 kilometers inland.
As the hours and then the days passed, every attempt to reverse or to drive forward succeeded only in miring the vessel more deeply, until it became, as S?nger finally summed it up, “Hopeless. We are like a fly, trapped in a spider’s web.”
Eventually there was no choice left but to anchor the sister ship, Nostromo, in deeper water nearby, and to transfer fuel and equipment from the Demeter to the second boat. Voorhees had been caught by surprise when Demeter’s cargo cranes pulled the prefabricated sections of two heavy-lift helicopters out of the hold.
The two men stood silently, which was itself a testament to the spectacle that was unfolding. Once the craft were assembled, they could see that each was powered by a single engine, driving two three-bladed rotors. Nearly twelve meters across, each rotor was mounted on twin tubular steel outriggers on either side of the planelike fuselage—the forward section of which was rounded with a fully glazed cockpit. Voorhees thought this last feature would provide the pilots with a panoramic view of their own deaths. The “chosen” pilots appeared to be a slender, feral-looking man and a pixy-like woman with short blond hair.
“What are those machines?” Voorhees asked.
“The builders, Heinrich Focke and Gerd Achgelis, call them Drache.”
Voorhees gestured toward one of the “Dragon” pilots. “And is that who I think it is?”
“Hanna Reitsch,” S?nger replied with pride. “Do you know her?”
Voorhees winced. “Unfortunately.”
As the young engineer watched the insectlike flying machines rise into the humid air, it was immediately apparent to him that the Dragons were inherently unstable at slow speeds. Annoyingly, the older man seemed to be reading his thoughts.
“If you think the challenges of controlling a rocket-plane are large, just imagine the skill Reitsch and Lothar need to control these. If they lose control for an instant . . .”
Voorhees tuned out the rest of the lecture, instead envisioning Hanna Reitsch’s expression turning from surprise to terror as her mechanical dragonfly began to wobble, then spin out of control, then smash into the river, one of the blades severing—
“Maurice?” S?nger’s voice was a mixture of exasperation and annoyance, especially as he noticed the wry smile his reluctant protégé was now wearing.
Although the current project had proceeded with great haste, there were no crashes. The two helicopters covered the corpse of Demeter in downpours of vines and branches. Yet S?nger was far from satisfied and the theme of his next and most oft-repeated monologue was an expression of fear that all too soon, after the last useful pieces of equipment were gutted from Demeter and airlifted out, the wreck would be discovered—by someone.
“Not much time,” he told Voorhees. “We must hurry.”