The notches were three meters from the ground, and some small branches had been cleared away from the main trunk below that level. They untied Remy’s wrists, and then lashed them to a pole, so that his arms were at half-stretch. Then, using poles with Y-shaped ends to lift him, they slotted the shaft to which he was secured into the notches, leaving him dangling above the ground, his arms twisted painfully, facing outward over the rim of the cliff. The precipice curved away to a region of jagged rocks and thorn bushes some thirty meters below. That area sloped away at a gradually increasing angle until it was cut abruptly into a much steeper face of bare, weathered rock. That would be the lake’s high-water mark, though at present the actual water level was twelve meters down. Across the far side of the muddy lake as it now lay, those twelve meters of almost vertical fall were matched by a great expanse of gray-brown mud, baked as hard as concrete by the sun, its surface cracked and channeled by desiccation.
