‘By all my bare-tailed cousins, what was that?’ cried Lola indignantly as she throttled back the engine, much to Twigleg’s relief, and the plane finally climbed higher.
‘A member of the Sciuridae genus,’ replied Twigleg, pressing one hand to his queasy stomach. ‘Not unusual in this climatic zone. Indonesia has thirty-seven known species of flying furry animals. Of course they don’t really fly. The membrane under their arms—’
He stopped abruptly as Lola steered the plane into a tangle of wild orchids, just before it collided with a gibbon swinging from tree to tree by its long arms.
‘This is impossible! How’s a girl pilot supposed to manoeuvre in territory where squirrels and monkeys think they can fly?’ said Lola angrily as she looked for a way out of the orchid roots. ‘Spoilsports! I love to fly a slalom around trees… you know, like in that film with the spaceships and the talking bears on the strange planet.’
Twigleg hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. He and Lola had very different tastes in films.
‘Whatever,’ the rat murmured, putting the plane into such a steep climb that Twigleg thought his stomach had moved to just behind his forehead.
They were shooting up to the leaf canopy as if Lola was trying to fly to the moon. But suddenly Twigleg let out a loud shriek.
‘Lola! Lola, there they are!’ he cried – and bumped his head on the roof of the plane as Lola abruptly cut out the engine. A tree ahead of them spread mighty branches on which feathery, evergreen leaves grew. But it wasn’t the leaves that had attracted Twigleg’s attention, it was the fruits that the tree bore, round as melons but considerably larger.
Twigleg’s heart was in his mouth as Lola made for the tree, but this time it wasn’t just fear that made it beat so fast. He had found several descriptions of griffins’ nests in the library at MÍMAMEIÐR. They all agreed that griffins had the caverns where they nested built for them by flocks of smaller birds, relations of Furnarius rufus, also known as the hornero or oven-bird.
As its name suggests, it builds oven-shaped nests out of mud. The oldest description – Twigleg had found it in a fifteenth-century Persian manus
cript – claimed that griffins’ nests were like the palaces of the Mesopotamian kings whose treasures the griffins had once guarded. When Lola approached the top nest, which clung to the trunk of the tree under a huge branch, Twigleg could see with his own eyes that the manuscript had been correct. The entry hole, as wide as a barn door, was framed by an artistic carving like the reliefs on the ruins of Persepolis. It was an incredible sight in the Indonesian rain forest. However, the relief looked unfinished, as if work on it had been abruptly interrupted.
‘Wait! What… what are you doing?’ cried the horrified Twigleg as Lola made for the entrance. ‘Barnabas only asked us to find the nests! He didn’t say anything about flying into them!’
‘Take it easy, humpelcluss!’ cried Lola, her voice competing with the noise of the engine as she pointed to the side of the nest. ‘I don’t think we’re going to meet the masters of the house.’
She was right. Only now did Twigleg see that the nest had been wrecked. In many places, the mud walls looked as if gigantic claws had torn them apart. It didn’t make sense. Why would the griffins destroy their own nests? The smaller nests, clinging to the branches and trunk of the tree lower down, had also been destroyed. Creatures in the service of the griffins had lived in those; in Mesopotamia, they had often been snakes, cats, or other birds of prey.
‘All the same, I really don’t think flying into one of these nests is a good idea!’ shouted Twigleg.
But Lola’s plane was already whirring through the gateway like a fly into the invitingly open mouth of a toad.
Brown twilight surrounded them.
The mud floor of the nest was so badly raked up by claws that Lola had to fly around it a couple of times before she found a place to land.
‘Oh, mouse-droppings, they’ve gone!’ she cursed as she jumped out of the cockpit. Lola’s curses were not quite so imaginative as Sorrel’s, but she enjoyed them just as much.
Hesitantly, Twigleg climbed out after her. The mud platform that occupied the middle of the nest was as badly damaged as the outer wall. A griffin’s sleeping place. Twigleg shuddered as he saw the furrows raked by its claws at close quarters. Obviously the medieval accounts of the size of the griffins had not been over-estimating. Where was the treasure chamber? Twigleg went over to one of the holes in the floor, and retreated in a hurry when, looking through the broken mud, he saw the tree trunk descending to dizzying depths.
‘It’s not there,’ he said. ‘That’s odd.’
‘What?’ Lola stepped over a dull brown feather lying on the floor. It was a wing feather, over thirty rats’ tails long, and unfortunately not the kind of feather they were looking for. The griffins’ sun-feathers were considerably shorter, for if the stories were accurate, they grew in the down around the creatures’ necks.
‘There’s no treasure chamber!’ Twigleg looked around in search for one. ‘All the texts I found say that griffins have a hatch right beside the place where they sleep, and the treasure chamber is under it.’
Lola wrinkled her nose scornfully. She took as little interest in treasure as the Greenblooms – and all other rational beings, she would have added.
‘Now what?’ asked Twigleg. ‘What are we going to tell the others?’
He had to admit that he was slightly relieved. Who wanted to meet giant birds with the paws of lions? Lola did, of course.
‘Not so fast, humpelklumpus!’ she said. ‘We know there are griffins on this island, and that’s a start.’
She went to the gateway at the entrance and took the binoculars from her belt. Then she got so close to the brink of the abyss that Twigleg could have almost thrown up again on her behalf. But Lola just calmly whistled through her teeth.
‘Homklopus!’ She beckoned Twigleg closer and handed him the binoculars. ‘Do you see that, down there on the broad branch?’ She nudged him in the ribs so that he nearly fell head first into the depths. ‘Right between the treetops.’
Horrified, Twigleg lowered the binoculars. ‘A skeleton!’