“This is the Burmese Blight, that’s withered whole great forests down south of the Mekong. A deadly thing, to tropical trees. It was starting to work up into this Laos country, but I showed the tribes how to stop it. The secret hunati sect made me one of them, in reward.”
“But I still can’t understand why an educated man like you would want to join such a crazy mumbo-jumbo,” Farris said.
“Dieu, I’m trying to make you understand why! To show you that it was my curiosity as a botanist that made me join the Rite and take the drug!”
Berreau rushed on. “But you can’t understand, any more than Lys could! You can’t comprehend the wonder and strangeness and beauty of living that other kind of life!”
Something in Berreau’s white, rapt face, in his haunted eyes, made Farris’ skin crawl. His words seemed momentarily to lift a veil, to make the familiar vaguely strange and terrifying.
“Berreau, listen! You’ve got to cut this and leave here at once.”
The Frenchman smiled mirthlessly. “I know. Many times, I have told myself so. But I do not go. How can I leave something that is a botanist’s heaven?”
* * *
Lys had come into the room, was looking wanly at her brother’s tare.
“Andre, won’t you give it up and go home with me?” she appealed.