Chapter 10 — Inside

The interior of the wall.Lata's account was the most complete, because she had the training of a person who documented for a living. She wrote for thirty-eight minutes in the medical facility the day after the events, before she was able to think clearly about what to include and what to protect from the record, and the thirty-eight-minute account is, consequently, the most raw.What was inside the walls:A space that was both smaller and larger than the exterior dimensions implied. Smaller in that it was clearly bounded — the walls were walls, visible on all four sides. Larger in that the distances within the bounded space were inconsistent with the exterior measurements. Priti, whose attention to the physical details was trained by years of fieldwork, noted that the interior length, pacing it, was approximately sixty meters. The exterior, which she had also paced, was forty.No roof. The canopy overhead was the same canopy that existed outside — there was no structural covering. But the sky visible through the canopy was different. Not dramatically — you would not have noticed it in a photograph. But the quality of the light was the quality of a different time of day than four in the afternoon, and when she checked the GPS watch on her wrist the satellite signal was gone.The floor: not mud. Something that looked like mud and was not. Dense and dark, but with a surface texture that was wrong for mud, more fibrous, more uniform. It gave slightly underfoot in the way that living tissue gave rather than the way saturated earth gave.And across the floor, walls, the exposed root systems that crossed the interior at various heights: the teeth.