The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

scrambled up from the hammock, leaving Holly looking up at her, slack-jawed.

‘What, now? Right now?’

‘Well, if it’s going to take four days, we need to get going as soon as possible. It’s Dad’s big day on Friday. I can hardly miss it.’

‘But . . . we haven’t even had breakfast yet.’

‘Really? I’m going full Indiana Jones and you’re thinking about your stomach?’

Holly laughed in disbelief. ‘I just can’t believe you’re actually serious.’

‘Unless you’ve got a better idea,’ Tara shrugged, beginning to walk towards the beach bar.

Holly got to her feet and began running after her. ‘Well, all I can say is you’re going to need a hell of a packed lunch.’

Chapter Seventeen

The sky cracked in half, splitting like an egg, and the rain came down like glass bullets as they hiked through the trees. Tara spluttered as it streamed down her face, plastering her hair to her head in moments. There was nothing English about this rain. It wasn’t a soft smudge of grey, a lingering drizzle. This was tropical – warm and heavy, persistent, everywhere.

‘Here.’

Jed, just two steps ahead of her, reached down and pulled the knife from the holster – holster! – strapped to his knee. He bent down and with two clean hacks, detached a hand of banana leaves from low down the stalk. He held it above her head, providing an immediate umbrella. It wasn’t foolproof – rivulets still caught her in the gaps, but it blocked most of the strikes. It even sounded like an umbrella, the raindrops heavy upon the leaves as they landed and bringing to mind – curiously – a forgotten moment of running down Kensington Gate a long time ago, when a copy of the Evening Standard had had to suffice. She could still remember the weight of a hand upon her waist as they’d run, their laughter . . .

‘Thanks.’

They had been walking for a couple of hours now. It had taken her twenty minutes to convince Jed she was serious about the plan, another hour and twenty minutes to get back to the village and explain to his wife.

The Awa had been called.

Strangely, he hadn’t seemed surprised when Jed had conveyed it to him, and he hadn’t seemed perturbed either by the prospect of Paco being transported to San José if – or rather, to her mind, when – his treatment failed. Instead, he had begun to draw, on a piece of cloth, two things: an illustration of the black star plants they were looking for, and a map. Neither one of them looked distinctive or detailed enough to even navigate off her roof terrace, much less a two-day hike through the tropical rainforest. Nevertheless, it had seemed to resonate with Jed and he had listened intently as the Awa had spoken.

Their departure from the village after that had been swift. As Holly had predicted, there were no shortcuts to Alto Uren. This wasn’t a money issue, but a tree cover one and the only way in was through, on foot. Everything about this trek, Tara had quickly realized, was going to have to be done the hard way – back in London, in anticipation of the luxury of a barefoot holiday, she hadn’t packed walking boots, only the pair of Tod’s trainers she had travelled in and that now seemed woefully inadequate, not to mention impractical; if the Italians could take on Costa Rican coffee, they certainly couldn’t stand up to Costa Rican mud. It had been decided that rather than lose time going back into town to buy new ones, she and Jed would head for the rangers’ base station several hours up into the mountains; Jed’s father worked there and Jed knew there would be kit they could use.

The Awa had given her a long, narrow parcel wrapped in cloth and secured with vines, which was only to be opened when the black star leaves were being picked, and other than some wry advice not to pull on the vines and never to look up with her mouth open, they were set on their way.

She carefully walked in Jed’s footsteps, carrying her banana leaf umbrella and backpack now stuffed with food. (Holly hadn’t been joking about the packed lunch.) And as the footsteps spooled up into the thousands, and the jungle grew thicker and louder, she began to realize that the trek to Jed’s village was nothing compared to the gradients ahead of them. The Talamanca mountains towered like purple shadows; sleepy rivers began to tumble and drop. Her breath came fast, her hurried mileage up and down the hospital corridors seemingly not counting for much out here in the wild.

The tension between them had eased with this proposal and Jed explained to her as they walked that their village was in fact but a ‘modern satellite’ in the foothills, the tribe’s original village being another thousand metres higher up. Sarita had been born there and spent the first twenty-three years of her life living on the high plateaus, walking down weekly with the other women to barter goods and services with women of the other tribes. But it wasn’t enough. Her brothers were lured by the inducements of modern life; they wanted to work in the towns, drive bikes, watch TVs, meet more people. In the old village, there were only twenty-four males and twenty-nine females – and over half of those were children. Moving to the foothills had been the tribe’s own compromise solution, a way to preserve their culture, language and ways whilst being more accessible to the outside world.

‘How did you meet her?’ she panted, vaguely aware of the ground to their right beginning to pleat and drop away into a majestic gorge.

Jed gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I got lost. She rescued me.’

Tara laughed too. ‘You’re joking?’

‘I wish I was. I was sent by my father to place some new wildlife cameras where some jaguar tracks had been sighted, took a wrong turn and within twenty steps was more lost than I have ever been.’

‘And you’re telling