I am not making any money with this. I do not own Lara Croft, Tomb Raider
etc.
Only to be archived at Fanfiction.net and 'Lara Croft's Tales of Beauty and Power'. All other sites email me first to gain permission.
========================================================= The Last Revelation Part III: Garden of The Five Towers by Heidi Ahlmen (siirma6@surfeu.fi) =========================================================
Chapter 3
US Air Force Air Hangar 3
Bangkok, Thailand
11:24 a.m.
"Let me see. Miss Lara Croft and Mr Jean-Yves Ducarmine?"
"Yes. Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Calder."
Lara's reply raised a delighted smile on the young lieutenant's face. "Welcome to Bangkok. Unless you have other plans, we have a plane waiting as agreed."
"No further plans," Jean assured him, and offered his hand to take Lara's suitcase from her but she refused. The lieutenant nodded at them and made a gesture suggesting that they follow him. Lara took the lead before the officer, Jean following them.
"So, Miss Croft, what is this urgent business about?"
Lara smiled coolly. "That is classified information."
"Says who?" the lieutenant teased, making Lara grow uneasy.
"Says I," Lara said, bumping her suitcase on the lieutenant's stomach, forcing him to carry it, as Lara quickened her pace on the bushy sand trail towards a small, private airfield. Jean, smiling secretly to Lara, shrugged to the lieutenant who had turned to him with a questioning face, and continued behind Lara, who was walking further ahead.
Another self-acclaimed womaniser, Lara predicted, secretly feeling glad that Jean wasn't one. Glad that he had joined her on the trip. Lara pushed aside some bushes as she continued towards the airfield. Pausing to look back to see if Jean and Lieutenant Calder were still following her, she felt a sharp sting in her side. Slapping the point where she'd felt the sting, she looked at her hand. A dead mosquito. Wiping off the crushed insect to her shorts, she continued her walk.
The old army plane shook violently in every little gust of wind over the Cambodean border. Jean paced between the cockpit and the passenger space, made restless by their long flight from London to Thailand.
Lara sat silently in the seat she had chosen, carefully belted. The bright sunlight reddened her hair as she wiped off some dust from the window next to her. She could have dug out one of her many books from her bag, but it didn't feel right. She had too many thoughts to occupy her. Before every of her adventures - there had not yet been very many - she had felt slightly nervous, but just for herself. Jean was. wonderful, she admitted, but hardly an adventurer. He didn't seem to mind dirt or creeping insects, but he still seemed more of a librarian. Lara hoped for a sign for her subconsciousness, a sign that Jean would be worthy as a partner. She'd hate to have someone to drag along. She smiled to herself, somehow knowing it wouldn't happen. After all, Jean was a man, and men seemed to protect their honour before their own comfort. Lara wouldn't be patronized. 'On the other hand, an occasional reassuring tap on the shoulder doesn't do bad to anyone,' she thought. Lara felt terribly young as she looked at Jean, stretching in the walkway. He must have had plenty of ladyfriends. Plenty and plenty. Lara felt like she was always behaving so badly - doing what she wanted, even sometimes completely ignoring the high standards people expected from her due to her high social rank. Jean didn't seem to mind, though, but the fact that her behaviour seemed to amuse him annoyed Lara slightly.
"Lara?"
"Mmm-hmm?" Lara didn't turn her head from the window.
"Come and take a look at this!"
Lara slowly unbuckled her seatbelt and walked to the other side of the small plane, where Jean stood staring out of the window. Outside, they could see a wide, muddy river twisting and turning its way across the moist forest.
"Mekong River." Lara nodded. " 'As the waters of Mekong floweth to the shore, the kingdom of the Funan prospected and grew strong and wide.' " she quoted.
"King Ishanavarman's tomb engraving, 7th century." Jean replied, impressing Lara. She made a mental note to stop testing Jean's knowledge in every twist and turn.
The plane took a long curve - they were landing. The magnificent view of the Mekong delta slowly changed to the city of Phnom Penh, growing bigger in the windows as their flight approached its end. The pilot soon informed Lara and Jean of the landing.
Jean started a conversation after they had sat down. "This went suprisingly easily, if you think about the civil war."
"Well, these are poor people we're talking about. They can't afford fighters or rocket launchers to protect themselves. Planes are relatively safe, if not talking about tourist jets. And they're not even flying here at the moment. It's a sad thing that some of the soldiers here are even women or children."
Jean wasn't in the mood for serious politics. "Think about that. Women with poles and rocket launchers chasing away the Vietnamese."
"The female liberation front still has a lot to do around here." Lara sighed.
"I think otherwise. Isn't it the best kind of equality if both men and women go to war?"
"What about the children? Who will look after them?" Lara waved her arms in a move of desperate uncertainty to make a stronger point.
Jean didn't have an answer to that. She was suprised for Lara's compassion for the Cambodian people. In Peru she had not seemed such a humanist - more of an underaged gun-toting Indiana Jones. But she had proved to be thoughtful - and very determined in her ways of doing things.
"Guess that's a family decision then," Jean said quietly.
Lara nodded silently.
"But think about it - you with a rocket launcher. I'd say you'd rock a couple guys' libidos pretty hard."
Lara looked at Jean with a half-amused, half-annoyed look on her face. "If the further exploration of this subject encloses posing for magazines and taking artist names such as "Gina the Swedish Goddess" then forgive me Jean, I'll pass," she replied, with no hint of a smile whatsoever.
Jean didn't say a word; he was perfectly happy with marveling at Lara's annoying ability of completely cutting off a conversation she didn't like.
Flood season in Phnom Penh. The crummy houses along the 258th street outside just downtown had a good five inches of water on its surface, but the Cambodeans did not seem to mind. Their little motorcycles were everywhere to carry passengers, tourists, chickens, fruits, of laughing children around. Their humming was an ever-present sound. The air was refreshingly misty but grey, as Lara and Jean-Yves checked in to Hotel Sofitel Cambodiana, one of the only big hotels still fully functional after a long time under war.
After their arrival in Phnom Penh, one of the safer cities in Cambodia, they had rented a rickshaw. Jean had insisted on calling it a 'cyclo' as they did in France - Lara had gently mocked him on his French accent, grinning in the warm Asian rain. She had looked so cheerful and cute in the warm rain that it had inspired Jean to kiss her on the cheek. But for the first time after Peru, she had turned her cheek away and kissed him 'the only acceptable way', as she had once told Jean in Peru; a deep, lasting kiss on the mouth. A woman full of surprises, Jean had thought. They had spent the rest of the rickshaw drive looking at the sights and grinning slightly.
'I seriously need my excercise' Lara thought afterwards. 'I'm getting in a seriously uncharacteristic mood'. She was a bit embarrassed, and cursed her own tendecy of blushing slightly. She stood up to have a better view of the city, but they soon arrived at the hotel. "Let's go," she said after the rikshaw had stopped and they had paid the driver. "There must be a swimming pool and there's no doubt I'll take advantage of it," she commented, making a huge leap over the rickshaw's door.
After settling into their suite with a living room and two bedrooms in the top floor of Hotel Sofitel Cambodiana, they headed for the French embassy to meet their contacts - a group of French and American soldiers who were supposed to drive them through the thick jungle to Siem Reap, a small town near the Tonle Sap Lake and most of all, just a stone's throw away from the temple of Angkor Wat. Jean had done most of the talking - he obviously spoke very good French. Lara had followed the conversation with nods and tired smiles. Her earlier enthusiasm had turned to downright yawns and two- syllable replies to questions by the time they got back to their hotel. Jean-Yves had borrowed a book from her and Lara had informed Jean that she was going to go to the hotel gym for a quick break on the treadmill and to do some twenty laps in the pool. Jean sent her on her way with a relaxed smile - they were both relieved that everything had gone well so far. The war was obviously fought most in the thick jungles. Phnom Penh was silently floating in the flood season's atmosphere - yells from the fruit market, sounds of the small motorcycles, honking of the rickshaw horns.
The old city was slowly disappearing into the shadows as Lara, dressed in leggings and a swimsuit, sneaked to the silent corridor and rode the elevator to the floor where the gym and the swimming pool were located.
Hotel Sofitel Cambodiana was almost modern, clean, and civilized. Probably in favor of foreign politicians, the banished King Sihanouk's visitors and diplomats who dared to visit the country. Lara felt serene, her head was clear, but she was extremely tired. She opened the ladies' locker room and went in. All the locker doors were open - she would probably have the gym all to herself. As she left her towel and soap in the locker, Lara wondered silently why she had not invited Jean to join her. She wasn't used to company when doing her exercises, nor was she used to travelling company. As friendly and charming Jean was, despite that fact that they were becoming almost an obvious pair, Lara didn't know him well enough to feel completely at ease when talking to him. 'Goddammit, I'm terrible in my social affairs,' Lara cursed bitterly, and went for a run on the treadmill.
After a good six minutes of running, Lara started to feel unusually tired. Her every muscle was silently burning, but not because of the run - six minutes was only about twenty percent of her usual running time. Shrugging to herself in the dimly lit gym, Lara suffocated a huge yawn and wandered to the pool room. She had a mild headache - probably because of the lack of fresh air in the Thailand plane, Lara reasoned.
The pool room was quiet and inviting. A clear, deep swimming pool the shape of a circle. It was framed by replicas of ancient statues. Lara recognized one statue - a very unrealistic lion statue - a singha, a guardian lion. There were no lions in Asia, so the ancient Khmers had never seen one. They had to guess what a creature they had heard stories of, looked like.
Another statue portrayed two bare-breasted dancing women - Apsaras, celestial nymphs dancing. Lara walked closer and run her finger along the fine crevices of the statue. It was an excellent replica - almost too good. Lara looked at her finger, expecting to see gray paint - but saw nothing.
The statues were real. And heavenly expensive. 'Another example of the rape of a culture by its habitants - ancient treasures are only useful as hotel pool decorations.'
Touching her temple, Lara threw away the towel she had wrapped around her and shivered in her swimsuit. The evening was chilly and the pool room was not heated. Expecting the cool water to cool down her pounding head, Lara walked the underwater stairs to the pool. The touch of the chilly water made her muscles ache even worse. She stood shivering in the pool, eyeing the statues. She started swimming and after a couple of strokes she suddenly felt so awful she had to stop. Reasoning that she must have caught another pharoh's revenge from an unpeeled apple or such thing, Lara waded out of the pool and changed to a bathrobe.
Yearning for a clean bed and an aspirin Lara rode the elevator up.
Their suite was silent and dark. Jean was sleeping in his own room - the moon declared its nightly presence outside the window. Lara grabbed a hairbrush and cleared her hair in front of the living room mirror before moving to her own room.
On her table, was a plate covered with a food warmer. Underneath was a steamy portion of chicken casserole, and underneath the chilly water bottle placed on her bedside table, she found a note.
"Good swim? We have an early start tomorrow - enjoy your nightly lunch, cherie Lara. Sleep well.
Jean"
Fingering her wet hair, Lara stood in front of her window, wondering how much good luck one could possibly have with a travelling companion.
The muddy road twisted its way through the Asian jungle - rain forest, vines, khmers and vietnamese soldiers, leopards, thousands of chattering monkeys and occasional sounds of gunshots.
The civil war was still visible and vivid.
Every once in awhile the driver slowed down, ordering Jean and Lara to duck down - they were approaching a restless area. They had been stopped my red khmers with assault rifles just once - and they had let the jeep pass their roadblock - Jean was probably as nervous as Lara was during that incident - they both knew Lara had hidden her guns in her toiletry bag.
Due to the flood season also visible in the capital Phnom Penh the roads had turned into a very hard drive. It was bumpy, and a steady rain kept falling from the grey skies of Cambodia as their jeep made its way towards Siem Reap along the River Tonle Sap.
Wonderously, Lara had slept through most of the drive - something Jean considered impossible. She had been complaining of a headache that morning but it had presumably already passed. Jean had estimated that they would be in Siem Reap before sundown, but the wet road slowed them down noticeably.
"How much more left?" Jean yelled to the driver, a young French soldier.
"Excusez-moi?" he yelled back, leaning back to hear better through the huge noise the mud and the jeep were making.
"How much more to go?"
"An hour, Monsieur DuCarmine!" the driver yelled, and Jean nodded. Their backseat man in the pickup-model Jeep had finally unloaded his assault rifle, and started dozing.
Lara opened her eyes, stretched, and sat up, holding on the the edges of the pickup.
"We have an hour left!" Jean yelled so that she would hear. Lara glanced at her watch, ran a hand through her fringe, and greeted the reddish, setting sun. Crossing her hiking boot-clad legs, she turned her head to the wind as the jeep rushed its way on the banks of Lake Tonle Sap, its still waters gleaming in the afternoon sun. Fishermen in their narrow, tall boats waved their hands prudently as they passed.
The sun was as hot as ever as the jeep rushed its way back to the jungle. The area consisted of huge, green hills, separated by wide, misty rivers. Every once in awhile they passed a smaller village with dusty, sandy ground, chickens and low bushes.
Lara was stunned by the utter beauty of the poor country. As she was worried for her own safety - despite the fact that there had not been any big battles near Tonle Sap very recently - she felt as if the jungle was waiting for the rages of war to begin again. Vietnamese soldiers were everywhere - guarding the villages, protecting the occasional roadblocks.
The khmer rouges went silently in the bushes. They were the rebels - desperately wanting to get rid of the Vietnamese that had almost literally taken over the country after the French left. 'All these people want is independence' Lara thought sadly, suddenly remembering his father's attitude towards such things. As a British aristocrat he had been a conservative, an imperialist who thought Britain had the right to take whatever it needed from insignificant countries such as India. Lara wondered silently if Jean agreed with him - he was a Frenchman and from an upperclass family. She made a mental note to discuss that with Jean. She hoped that there would be enough humanist in him to think imperialism should be extinct.
They passed a sign declaring "Siem Reap 5 miles" in Cambodian and another sign warning of mines. In a nearby field Jean and Lara saw about a dozen young boys crawling in the muddy ground.
"What are they doing?!" Lara yelled to the soldier who was sitting in the back with them.
"Clearing the area of mines. Many Cambodians are optimistic about the upcoming peace negotiations so they are starting the peacework already."
Lara nodded silently, aware of the fact that Cambodia had more amputees per 10,000 people than any other country in the world. The mines were everywhere.
She looked at Jean. He sat in the back end of the pickup, his legs hanging down from the ledge. His sunglasses caught the sun gleaming through the narrow holes in the ceiling the trees formed. Lara moved to the back and sat next to him, smiling as she had to blink hard because of the sun.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
As always, comments and reviews would be much appreciated - they're the fuel that feeds this creative furnace.
siirma6@surfeu.fi
Only to be archived at Fanfiction.net and 'Lara Croft's Tales of Beauty and Power'. All other sites email me first to gain permission.
========================================================= The Last Revelation Part III: Garden of The Five Towers by Heidi Ahlmen (siirma6@surfeu.fi) =========================================================
Chapter 3
US Air Force Air Hangar 3
Bangkok, Thailand
11:24 a.m.
"Let me see. Miss Lara Croft and Mr Jean-Yves Ducarmine?"
"Yes. Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Calder."
Lara's reply raised a delighted smile on the young lieutenant's face. "Welcome to Bangkok. Unless you have other plans, we have a plane waiting as agreed."
"No further plans," Jean assured him, and offered his hand to take Lara's suitcase from her but she refused. The lieutenant nodded at them and made a gesture suggesting that they follow him. Lara took the lead before the officer, Jean following them.
"So, Miss Croft, what is this urgent business about?"
Lara smiled coolly. "That is classified information."
"Says who?" the lieutenant teased, making Lara grow uneasy.
"Says I," Lara said, bumping her suitcase on the lieutenant's stomach, forcing him to carry it, as Lara quickened her pace on the bushy sand trail towards a small, private airfield. Jean, smiling secretly to Lara, shrugged to the lieutenant who had turned to him with a questioning face, and continued behind Lara, who was walking further ahead.
Another self-acclaimed womaniser, Lara predicted, secretly feeling glad that Jean wasn't one. Glad that he had joined her on the trip. Lara pushed aside some bushes as she continued towards the airfield. Pausing to look back to see if Jean and Lieutenant Calder were still following her, she felt a sharp sting in her side. Slapping the point where she'd felt the sting, she looked at her hand. A dead mosquito. Wiping off the crushed insect to her shorts, she continued her walk.
The old army plane shook violently in every little gust of wind over the Cambodean border. Jean paced between the cockpit and the passenger space, made restless by their long flight from London to Thailand.
Lara sat silently in the seat she had chosen, carefully belted. The bright sunlight reddened her hair as she wiped off some dust from the window next to her. She could have dug out one of her many books from her bag, but it didn't feel right. She had too many thoughts to occupy her. Before every of her adventures - there had not yet been very many - she had felt slightly nervous, but just for herself. Jean was. wonderful, she admitted, but hardly an adventurer. He didn't seem to mind dirt or creeping insects, but he still seemed more of a librarian. Lara hoped for a sign for her subconsciousness, a sign that Jean would be worthy as a partner. She'd hate to have someone to drag along. She smiled to herself, somehow knowing it wouldn't happen. After all, Jean was a man, and men seemed to protect their honour before their own comfort. Lara wouldn't be patronized. 'On the other hand, an occasional reassuring tap on the shoulder doesn't do bad to anyone,' she thought. Lara felt terribly young as she looked at Jean, stretching in the walkway. He must have had plenty of ladyfriends. Plenty and plenty. Lara felt like she was always behaving so badly - doing what she wanted, even sometimes completely ignoring the high standards people expected from her due to her high social rank. Jean didn't seem to mind, though, but the fact that her behaviour seemed to amuse him annoyed Lara slightly.
"Lara?"
"Mmm-hmm?" Lara didn't turn her head from the window.
"Come and take a look at this!"
Lara slowly unbuckled her seatbelt and walked to the other side of the small plane, where Jean stood staring out of the window. Outside, they could see a wide, muddy river twisting and turning its way across the moist forest.
"Mekong River." Lara nodded. " 'As the waters of Mekong floweth to the shore, the kingdom of the Funan prospected and grew strong and wide.' " she quoted.
"King Ishanavarman's tomb engraving, 7th century." Jean replied, impressing Lara. She made a mental note to stop testing Jean's knowledge in every twist and turn.
The plane took a long curve - they were landing. The magnificent view of the Mekong delta slowly changed to the city of Phnom Penh, growing bigger in the windows as their flight approached its end. The pilot soon informed Lara and Jean of the landing.
Jean started a conversation after they had sat down. "This went suprisingly easily, if you think about the civil war."
"Well, these are poor people we're talking about. They can't afford fighters or rocket launchers to protect themselves. Planes are relatively safe, if not talking about tourist jets. And they're not even flying here at the moment. It's a sad thing that some of the soldiers here are even women or children."
Jean wasn't in the mood for serious politics. "Think about that. Women with poles and rocket launchers chasing away the Vietnamese."
"The female liberation front still has a lot to do around here." Lara sighed.
"I think otherwise. Isn't it the best kind of equality if both men and women go to war?"
"What about the children? Who will look after them?" Lara waved her arms in a move of desperate uncertainty to make a stronger point.
Jean didn't have an answer to that. She was suprised for Lara's compassion for the Cambodian people. In Peru she had not seemed such a humanist - more of an underaged gun-toting Indiana Jones. But she had proved to be thoughtful - and very determined in her ways of doing things.
"Guess that's a family decision then," Jean said quietly.
Lara nodded silently.
"But think about it - you with a rocket launcher. I'd say you'd rock a couple guys' libidos pretty hard."
Lara looked at Jean with a half-amused, half-annoyed look on her face. "If the further exploration of this subject encloses posing for magazines and taking artist names such as "Gina the Swedish Goddess" then forgive me Jean, I'll pass," she replied, with no hint of a smile whatsoever.
Jean didn't say a word; he was perfectly happy with marveling at Lara's annoying ability of completely cutting off a conversation she didn't like.
Flood season in Phnom Penh. The crummy houses along the 258th street outside just downtown had a good five inches of water on its surface, but the Cambodeans did not seem to mind. Their little motorcycles were everywhere to carry passengers, tourists, chickens, fruits, of laughing children around. Their humming was an ever-present sound. The air was refreshingly misty but grey, as Lara and Jean-Yves checked in to Hotel Sofitel Cambodiana, one of the only big hotels still fully functional after a long time under war.
After their arrival in Phnom Penh, one of the safer cities in Cambodia, they had rented a rickshaw. Jean had insisted on calling it a 'cyclo' as they did in France - Lara had gently mocked him on his French accent, grinning in the warm Asian rain. She had looked so cheerful and cute in the warm rain that it had inspired Jean to kiss her on the cheek. But for the first time after Peru, she had turned her cheek away and kissed him 'the only acceptable way', as she had once told Jean in Peru; a deep, lasting kiss on the mouth. A woman full of surprises, Jean had thought. They had spent the rest of the rickshaw drive looking at the sights and grinning slightly.
'I seriously need my excercise' Lara thought afterwards. 'I'm getting in a seriously uncharacteristic mood'. She was a bit embarrassed, and cursed her own tendecy of blushing slightly. She stood up to have a better view of the city, but they soon arrived at the hotel. "Let's go," she said after the rikshaw had stopped and they had paid the driver. "There must be a swimming pool and there's no doubt I'll take advantage of it," she commented, making a huge leap over the rickshaw's door.
After settling into their suite with a living room and two bedrooms in the top floor of Hotel Sofitel Cambodiana, they headed for the French embassy to meet their contacts - a group of French and American soldiers who were supposed to drive them through the thick jungle to Siem Reap, a small town near the Tonle Sap Lake and most of all, just a stone's throw away from the temple of Angkor Wat. Jean had done most of the talking - he obviously spoke very good French. Lara had followed the conversation with nods and tired smiles. Her earlier enthusiasm had turned to downright yawns and two- syllable replies to questions by the time they got back to their hotel. Jean-Yves had borrowed a book from her and Lara had informed Jean that she was going to go to the hotel gym for a quick break on the treadmill and to do some twenty laps in the pool. Jean sent her on her way with a relaxed smile - they were both relieved that everything had gone well so far. The war was obviously fought most in the thick jungles. Phnom Penh was silently floating in the flood season's atmosphere - yells from the fruit market, sounds of the small motorcycles, honking of the rickshaw horns.
The old city was slowly disappearing into the shadows as Lara, dressed in leggings and a swimsuit, sneaked to the silent corridor and rode the elevator to the floor where the gym and the swimming pool were located.
Hotel Sofitel Cambodiana was almost modern, clean, and civilized. Probably in favor of foreign politicians, the banished King Sihanouk's visitors and diplomats who dared to visit the country. Lara felt serene, her head was clear, but she was extremely tired. She opened the ladies' locker room and went in. All the locker doors were open - she would probably have the gym all to herself. As she left her towel and soap in the locker, Lara wondered silently why she had not invited Jean to join her. She wasn't used to company when doing her exercises, nor was she used to travelling company. As friendly and charming Jean was, despite that fact that they were becoming almost an obvious pair, Lara didn't know him well enough to feel completely at ease when talking to him. 'Goddammit, I'm terrible in my social affairs,' Lara cursed bitterly, and went for a run on the treadmill.
After a good six minutes of running, Lara started to feel unusually tired. Her every muscle was silently burning, but not because of the run - six minutes was only about twenty percent of her usual running time. Shrugging to herself in the dimly lit gym, Lara suffocated a huge yawn and wandered to the pool room. She had a mild headache - probably because of the lack of fresh air in the Thailand plane, Lara reasoned.
The pool room was quiet and inviting. A clear, deep swimming pool the shape of a circle. It was framed by replicas of ancient statues. Lara recognized one statue - a very unrealistic lion statue - a singha, a guardian lion. There were no lions in Asia, so the ancient Khmers had never seen one. They had to guess what a creature they had heard stories of, looked like.
Another statue portrayed two bare-breasted dancing women - Apsaras, celestial nymphs dancing. Lara walked closer and run her finger along the fine crevices of the statue. It was an excellent replica - almost too good. Lara looked at her finger, expecting to see gray paint - but saw nothing.
The statues were real. And heavenly expensive. 'Another example of the rape of a culture by its habitants - ancient treasures are only useful as hotel pool decorations.'
Touching her temple, Lara threw away the towel she had wrapped around her and shivered in her swimsuit. The evening was chilly and the pool room was not heated. Expecting the cool water to cool down her pounding head, Lara walked the underwater stairs to the pool. The touch of the chilly water made her muscles ache even worse. She stood shivering in the pool, eyeing the statues. She started swimming and after a couple of strokes she suddenly felt so awful she had to stop. Reasoning that she must have caught another pharoh's revenge from an unpeeled apple or such thing, Lara waded out of the pool and changed to a bathrobe.
Yearning for a clean bed and an aspirin Lara rode the elevator up.
Their suite was silent and dark. Jean was sleeping in his own room - the moon declared its nightly presence outside the window. Lara grabbed a hairbrush and cleared her hair in front of the living room mirror before moving to her own room.
On her table, was a plate covered with a food warmer. Underneath was a steamy portion of chicken casserole, and underneath the chilly water bottle placed on her bedside table, she found a note.
"Good swim? We have an early start tomorrow - enjoy your nightly lunch, cherie Lara. Sleep well.
Jean"
Fingering her wet hair, Lara stood in front of her window, wondering how much good luck one could possibly have with a travelling companion.
The muddy road twisted its way through the Asian jungle - rain forest, vines, khmers and vietnamese soldiers, leopards, thousands of chattering monkeys and occasional sounds of gunshots.
The civil war was still visible and vivid.
Every once in awhile the driver slowed down, ordering Jean and Lara to duck down - they were approaching a restless area. They had been stopped my red khmers with assault rifles just once - and they had let the jeep pass their roadblock - Jean was probably as nervous as Lara was during that incident - they both knew Lara had hidden her guns in her toiletry bag.
Due to the flood season also visible in the capital Phnom Penh the roads had turned into a very hard drive. It was bumpy, and a steady rain kept falling from the grey skies of Cambodia as their jeep made its way towards Siem Reap along the River Tonle Sap.
Wonderously, Lara had slept through most of the drive - something Jean considered impossible. She had been complaining of a headache that morning but it had presumably already passed. Jean had estimated that they would be in Siem Reap before sundown, but the wet road slowed them down noticeably.
"How much more left?" Jean yelled to the driver, a young French soldier.
"Excusez-moi?" he yelled back, leaning back to hear better through the huge noise the mud and the jeep were making.
"How much more to go?"
"An hour, Monsieur DuCarmine!" the driver yelled, and Jean nodded. Their backseat man in the pickup-model Jeep had finally unloaded his assault rifle, and started dozing.
Lara opened her eyes, stretched, and sat up, holding on the the edges of the pickup.
"We have an hour left!" Jean yelled so that she would hear. Lara glanced at her watch, ran a hand through her fringe, and greeted the reddish, setting sun. Crossing her hiking boot-clad legs, she turned her head to the wind as the jeep rushed its way on the banks of Lake Tonle Sap, its still waters gleaming in the afternoon sun. Fishermen in their narrow, tall boats waved their hands prudently as they passed.
The sun was as hot as ever as the jeep rushed its way back to the jungle. The area consisted of huge, green hills, separated by wide, misty rivers. Every once in awhile they passed a smaller village with dusty, sandy ground, chickens and low bushes.
Lara was stunned by the utter beauty of the poor country. As she was worried for her own safety - despite the fact that there had not been any big battles near Tonle Sap very recently - she felt as if the jungle was waiting for the rages of war to begin again. Vietnamese soldiers were everywhere - guarding the villages, protecting the occasional roadblocks.
The khmer rouges went silently in the bushes. They were the rebels - desperately wanting to get rid of the Vietnamese that had almost literally taken over the country after the French left. 'All these people want is independence' Lara thought sadly, suddenly remembering his father's attitude towards such things. As a British aristocrat he had been a conservative, an imperialist who thought Britain had the right to take whatever it needed from insignificant countries such as India. Lara wondered silently if Jean agreed with him - he was a Frenchman and from an upperclass family. She made a mental note to discuss that with Jean. She hoped that there would be enough humanist in him to think imperialism should be extinct.
They passed a sign declaring "Siem Reap 5 miles" in Cambodian and another sign warning of mines. In a nearby field Jean and Lara saw about a dozen young boys crawling in the muddy ground.
"What are they doing?!" Lara yelled to the soldier who was sitting in the back with them.
"Clearing the area of mines. Many Cambodians are optimistic about the upcoming peace negotiations so they are starting the peacework already."
Lara nodded silently, aware of the fact that Cambodia had more amputees per 10,000 people than any other country in the world. The mines were everywhere.
She looked at Jean. He sat in the back end of the pickup, his legs hanging down from the ledge. His sunglasses caught the sun gleaming through the narrow holes in the ceiling the trees formed. Lara moved to the back and sat next to him, smiling as she had to blink hard because of the sun.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~
As always, comments and reviews would be much appreciated - they're the fuel that feeds this creative furnace.
siirma6@surfeu.fi