Cryptonomicon

Where the jungle's dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under-growth is only knee-high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy's tentpoles are huge trees--"Octomelis sumatrana," says Enoch Root--with narrow buttress roots splayed out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal philodendrons winding up their trunks.

They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it be comes possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of, and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be above them--forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as though he's at the bottom of the food chain.

They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees, clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating for about ten seconds and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have assaulted in order to get here. The river's bed is shallow and rocky here, with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. "What is the point of all this?" asks Enoch Root suddenly. "I don't mean to sound discouraged by these physical barriers, because I'm not. But I'm wondering whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind."

"This is fact-finding. Nothing more," Randy says.

"But there's no point in just aimlessly finding facts unless you're a pure scientist, or a historian. You are representing a business concern here. Correct?"

"Yes."

"And so if I were a shareholder in your company I could demand an explanation of why you are sitting here on the edge of this river right now instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does."

"Assuming you were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that's what you'd be doing."

"And what would your explanation be, Randy?"

"Well--"

"I know where we are going, Randy." And Enoch quotes a string of digits.

"How did you know that?" Randy asks kind of hotly.

"I've known it for fifty years," Enoch says. "Goto Dengo told me."

All Randy can do for a while is fume. Doug Shaftoe's laughing. Amy just looks distracted. Enoch broods for a few moments, and finally says: "Originally the plan was to buy this land with a smaller cache of gold that was dug up and loaded aboard a certain submarine. We would then wait for the right moment and then dig up the rest. But the submarine sank, and the gold sank with it. I sat on the knowledge for many years. But then people started buying up land around here--people who were obviously hoping to find the Primary. If I'd had the money, I would have bought this land myself. But I didn't. So I saw to it that the Church bought it."

Doug Shaftoe says, "You haven't answered Enoch's question yet, Randy: what good are you doing your shareholders here?"

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass.