After he finally gets the better of the fight and manages to lop off the snake’s skull, Wood apologizes for failing to clean up the bloody aftermath right away he explains that he had thought it wise to wash off the venom first, since it was starting to seep into an open wound. “As its head lashed back and forth, straining to sink its fangs into Woody’s fist, it expelled poison all over the back of his hand, causing his skin to bubble,” Preston writes.
Wood does so by jabbing at the snake with a forked tree branch, to the snake’s clear displeasure. He calls on Andrew Wood, a former British commando who has been hired to keep the expedition’s death toll to a minimum, to handle the matter. Shortly after he and his group set up camp in La Mosquitia, a jungled expanse that conceals a trove of pre-Columbian ruins, Preston spots a venomous pit viper next to a hammock. The passage is nestled midway through “The Lost City of the Monkey God,” Preston’s account of accompanying an archaeological expedition through the wilds of eastern Honduras. The year may still be young, but I would wager a small fortune that Douglas Preston has already written the best snake-decapitation scene of 2017.
THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD A True Story By Douglas Preston 326 pp.
0 kommentar(er)
