They dragged us all out into the morning to look at it, because it was a vital part of breaking our spirits. Here was our new home, and our mass grave.

The jungle was more of a swamp now, and the water spread on all sides, a glistening wetland choked with reeds and knotted trees. The air was rank with flies. The boat moved slowly through what must have been the only channel deep enough to take its draft, and ahead of us the water broadened out into a lake. It was half mud, and strange plants thrust out from its shallows at intervals like the hands of drowning men. At the heart of this lake was the Island. Everyone’s first glance at the Island was the same: one took it for its namesake. In the middle of this lake, you assumed, there is a hill, and the hill has been covered by the structure. The Island was roughly square, with the top two floors of decreasing size and the lower three all of the same dimensions. It was made of wood and cane, as though the entire building was a barred cell. The higher levels had a few spaces of solid wall, so that the staff could steal a little privacy. The lower levels were all of reinforced slats, cane bars and a vast webwork of rope that held it all together. It was possible to see clean through the Island, if one picked the correct opening. The eye’s path took you through a dozen intervening slatted walls and out to the foul waterscape on the other side, past a hundred sullen inmates. As the boat approached we could see a few of those inmates, shadowed figures behind the bars.

I take you to the point in time when that indefatigable engine proved mortal after all, and was stilled.

The boat was listing as the current took it gently towards the bank behind us, and the river – my first sight of it – was wider than I had expected. It was opaque, brown with silt, loose vegetation and the reflection of the jungle.

Stefan Advani

I’d have you picture a man of aristocratic feature, as of a good family: a long face, dark straight hair and brown-olive skin. A high forehead – a sign of intellect and not just, as Helman always claimed, receding hairline. The nose is finely shaped but, even in the owner’s opinion, a trifle long. Eternally clean-shaven, a gift from my genes, my loose, ill-fitting clothing is dirty grey and does not flatter. This is your narrator contemplating the fate that was so nearly his, something I have made a career of.

Peter Drachmar

…seen there on deck, is quite a different sight. His hair is the colour of wet sand and there are laughter lines on his face even when he is not laughing. He has broader shoulders than I and wears clothes from a far better tailor. Luckily for his future employment, black is his preferred hue for a shirt. His trousers are of mustard colour and he has a short half-cloak of burgundy red that was the height of fashion the year before last. It is edged with gold trim that has faded slightly. If my description of him is more accurate, remember that, from this point on, I seldom crossed paths with a mirror.

Whether the eyeless creature took him, or some other unseen river horror, I never knew…

…but it was just as I imagined. The sudden break in the man’s swimming, the moment of confusion, and then he was gone and there were only the ripples.

So, in the aftermath of that, picture those same two men sitting across a small table, playing chess, I thinking only that if I so much as displeased the man across from me I would be back in the company of my fellow prisoners.

“They call them web-children,” the captain told us shortly.

“Who calls what web-children?” Peter asked.

“Them things that built that,” the captain explained. “They live out here.”

“People live in this jungle?” Peter wondered.

“Ain’t people.”