The Crystal World

1 The dark river

Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary. After many delays, the small passenger steamer was at last approaching the line of jetties, but although it was ten o'clock the surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks.

At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilions of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle.

This pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light, Dr. Sanders had noticed during his long wait at the rail of the passenger deck. For two hours the steamer had sat out in the center of the estuary, now and then blowing its whistle at the shore in a half-hearted way. But for the vague sense of uncertainty induced by the darkness over the river, the few passengers would have been driven mad with annoyance. Apart from a French military landing craft, there seemed to be no other vessels of any size berthed along the jetties. As he watched the shore, Dr. Sanders was almost certain that the steamer was being deliberately held off, though the reason was hard to see. The steamer was the regular packet boat from Libreville, with its weekly cargo of mail, brandy and automobile spare parts, not to be postponed for more than a moment by anything less than an outbreak of the plague.

Politically, this isolated corner of the Cameroon Republic was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal, fifty miles up the Matarre River. Despite the presence of the landing craft-a French military mission supervised the training of the local troops-life in the nondescript port at the river mouth seemed entirely normal. Watched by a group of children, a jeep was at that moment being unloaded. People wandered along the wharves and through the arcades in the main street, and a few outriggers loaded with jars of crude palm oil drifted past on the dark water toward the native market to the west of the port.

Nevertheless, the sense of unease persisted. Puzzled by the dim light, Dr. Sanders turned his attention to the inshore areas, following the river as it made a slow clockwise turn to the southeast. Here and there a break in the forest canopy marked the progress of a road, but otherwise the jungle stretched in a flat olive-green mantle toward the inland hills. Usually the forest roof would have been bleached to a pale yellow by the sun, but even five miles inland Dr. Sanders could see the dark green arbors towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, somber and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.

Someone drummed impatiently at the rail, sending a stir down its length, and the half-dozen passengers on either side of Dr. Sanders shuffled and muttered to one another, glancing up at the wheelhouse, where the captain gazed absently at the jetty, apparently unperturbed by the delay.

Dr. Sanders turned to Father Balthus, who was standing a few feet away on his left. "The light-have you noticed it? Is there an eclipse expected? The sun seems unable to make up its mind."

The priest was smoking steadily, his long fingers drawing the cigarette half an inch from his mouth after each inhalation. Like Sanders, he was gazing, not at the harbor, but at the forest slopes far inland. In the dull light his thin scholar's face seemed tired and fleshless. During the three-day journey from Libreville he had kept to himself, evidently distracted by some private matter, and only began to talk to his table companion when he learned of Dr. Sanders's post at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital. Sanders gathered that he was returning to his parish at Mont Royal after a sabbatical month, but there seemed something a little too plausible about this explanation, which he repeated several times in the same automatic phrasing, unlike his usual hesitant stutter. However, Sanders was well aware of the dangers of imputing his own ambiguous motives for coming to Port Matarre to those around him.

Even so, at first Dr. Sanders had suspected that Father Balthus might not be a priest at all. The self-immersed eyes and pale neurasthenic hands bore all the signatures of the impostor, perhaps an expelled novice still hoping to find some kind of salvation within a borrowed soutane. However, Father Balthus was entirely genuine, whatever that term meant and whatever its limits. The first officer, the steward and several of the passengers recognized him, complimented him on his return and generally seemed to accept his isolated manner.

"An eclipse?" Father Balthus flicked his cigarette stub into the dark water below. The steamer was now overrunning its own wake, and the veins of foam sank down through the deeps like threads of luminous spittle. "I think not, Doctor. Surely the maximum duration would be eight minutes?"

In the sudden flares of light over the water, reflected off the sharp points of his cheeks and jaw, a harder profile for a moment showed itself. Conscious of Sanders's critical eye, Father Balthus added as an afterthought, to reassure the doctor: "The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral- do you know Böcklin's painting, ' Island of the Dead,' where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea? It's in the Kunstmuseum in my native Basel- " He broke off as the steamer's engines drummed into life. "We're moving. At last."

"Thank God for that. You should have warned me, Balthus."

Dr. Sanders took his cigarette case from his pocket, but the priest had already palmed a fresh cigarette into his cupped hand with the deftness of a conjurer. Balthus pointed with it to the jetty, where a substantial reception committee of gendarmerie and customs officials was waiting for the steamer. "Now, what nonsense is this?"

Dr. Sanders watched the shore. Whatever Balthus's private difficulties, the priest's lack of charity irritated him. Half to himself, Sanders said dryly: "Perhaps there's a question of credentials."

"Not mine, Doctor." Father Balthus turned a sharp downward glance upon Sanders. "And I'm certain your own are in order."

The other passengers were leaving the rail and going below to collect their baggage. With a smile at Balthus, Dr. Sanders excused himself and began to make his way down to his cabin. Dismissing the priest from his mind- within half an hour they would have disappeared their separate ways into the forest and whatever awaited them there-Sanders felt in his pocket for his passport, reminding himself not to leave it in his cabin. The desire to travel incognito, with all its advantages, might well reveal itself in some unexpected way.

As Dr. Sanders reached the companionway behind the funnelhouse, he could see down into the afterdeck, where the steerage passengers were pulling together their bundles and cheap suitcases. In the center of the deck, partly swathed in a canvas awning, was a large red-and-yellow-hulled speedboat, part of the cargo consignment for Port Matarre.

Taking his ease on the wide bench seat behind the steering helm, one arm resting on the raked glass and chromium windshield, was a small, slimly built man of about forty, wearing a white tropical suit that emphasized the rim of dark beard which framed his face. His black hair was brushed down over his bony forehead, and with his small eyes gave him a taut and watchful appearance. This man, Ventress-his name was about all Dr. Sanders had managed to learn about him-was the doctor's cabinmate. During the journey from Libreville he had roamed about the steamer like an impatient tiger, arguing with the steerage passengers and crew, his moods switching from a kind of ironic humor to sullen disinterest, when he would sit alone in the cabin, gazing out through the porthole at the small disc of empty sky.

Dr. Sanders had made one or two attempts to talk to him, but most of the time Ventress ignored him, keeping to himself whatever reasons he had for coming to Port Matarre. However, the doctor was well inured by now to being avoided by those around him. Shortly before they embarked, a slight contretemps, more embarrassing to his fellow passengers than to himself, had arisen over the choice of a cabinmate for Dr. Sanders. His fame having preceded him (what was fame to the world at large still remained notoriety on the personal level, Sanders reflected, and no doubt the reverse was true), no one could be found to share a cabin with the assistant director of the Fort Isabelle leper hospital.

At this point Ventress had stepped forward. Knocking on Dr. Sanders's door, suitcase in hand, he had nodded at the doctor and asked simply:

"Is it contagious?"

After a pause to examine this white-suited figure with his bearded skull-like face-something about him reminded Sanders that the world was not without those who, for their own reasons, wished to _catch_ the disease-Dr. Sanders said: "The disease is contagious, as you ask, yes, but years of exposure and contact are necessary for its transmission. The period of incubation may be twenty or thirty years."

"Like death. Good." With a gleam of a smile, Ventress stepped into the cabin. He extended a bony hand, and clasped Sanders's firmly, his strong fingers feeling for the doctor's grip. "What our timorous fellow passengers fail to realize, Doctor, is that outside your colony there is merely another larger one."

Later, as he looked down at Ventress lounging in the speedboat on the afterdeck, Dr. Sanders pondered on this cryptic introduction. The faltering light still hung over the estuary, but Ventress's white suit seemed to focus all its intense hidden brilliancy, just as Father Balthus's clerical garb had reflected the darker tones. The steerage passengers milled around the speedboat, but Ventress appeared to be uninterested in them, or in the approaching jetty with its waiting throng of customs and police. Instead, he was looking out across the deserted starboard rail into the mouth of the river, and at the distant forest stretching away into the haze. His small eyes were half-closed, as if he were deliberately merging the view in front of him with some inner landscape within his mind.

Sanders had seen little of Ventress during the voyage up-coast, but one evening in the cabin, searching through the wrong suitcase in the dark, he had felt the butt of a heavy-caliber automatic pistol wrapped in the harness of a shoulder holster. The presence of this weapon had immediately resolved some of the enigmas that surrounded Ventress's small brittle figure.

"Doctor…" Ventress called up to him, waving one hand lightly, as if reminding Sanders that he was daydreaming. "A drink, Sanders, before the bar closes?" Dr. Sanders began to refuse but Ventress had halfturned his shoulder, veering off on another tack. "Look for the sun, Doctor, it's there. You can't walk through these forests with your head between your heels."

"I shan't try to. Are you going ashore?"

"Of course. There's no hurry here, Doctor. This is a landscape without time."

Leaving him, Dr. Sanders made his way to the cabin. The three suitcases, Ventress's expensive one in polished crocodile skin, and his own scuffed workaday bags, were already packed and waiting beside the door. Sanders took off his jacket, and then bathed his hands in the washbasin, drying them lightly in the hope that the soap's pungent scent might make him seem less of a pariah to the examining officials.

However, Sanders realized only too well that by now, after fifteen years in Africa, ten of them at the Fort Isabelle hospital, any chance he may once have had of altering the outward aspect of himself, his image to the world at large, had long since gone. The work-stained cotton suit, slightly too small for his broad shoulders, the striped blue shirt and black tie, the strong head with its gray uncut hair and trace of beard-all these were the involuntary signatures of the physician to the lepers, as unmistakable as Sanders's own scarred but firm mouth and critical eye.

Opening the passport, Sanders compared the photograph taken eight years earlier with the reflection in the mirror. At a glance, the two men seemed barely recognizable-the first, with his straight, earnest face, his patent moral commitment to the lepers, all too obviously on top of his work at the hospital, looked more like the dedicated younger brother of the other, some remote and rather idiosyncratic country doctor.

Sanders looked down at his faded jacket and calloused hands, knowing how misleading this impression was, and how much better he understood, if not his present motives, at least those of his younger self, and the real reasons that had sent him to Fort Isabelle. Reminded by the birth date in the passport that he had now reached the age of forty, Sanders tried to visualize himself ten years ahead, but already the latent elements that had emerged in his face during the previous years seemed to have lost momentum. Ventress had referred to the Matarre forests as a landscape without time, and perhaps part of its appeal for Sanders was that here at last he might be free from the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past.

The steamer was now barely twenty feet from the jetty, and through the porthole Dr. Sanders could see the khaki-clad legs of the reception party. From his pocket he took out a well-thumbed envelope and drew from it a letter written in pale-blue ink that had almost penetrated the soft tissue. Both envelope and letter were franked with a censor's stamp, and panels which Sanders assumed contained the address had been Cut out.

As the steamer bumped against the jetty, Dr. Sanders read through the letter for the last time on board.

Thursday, January 5th

My dear Edward,

At last we are here. The forest is the most beautiful in Africa, a house of jewels. I can barely find words to describe our wonder each morning as we look out across the slopes, still half-hidden by the mist but glistening like St. Sophia, each bough a jeweled semi-dome. Indeed, Max says I am becoming excessively Byzantine-I wear my hair to my waist even at the clinic, and affect a melancholy expression, although in fact for the first time in many years my heart sings! Both of us wish you were here. The clinic is small, with about twenty patients. Fortunately the people of these forest slopes move through life with a kind of dreamlike patience, and regard our work for them as more social than therapeutic. They walk through the dark forest with crowns of light on their heads.

Max sends his best wishes to you, as I do. We remember you often.

The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.

My love,

Suzanne

As the metal heels of the boarding party rang out across the deck over his head, Dr. Sanders read again the last line of the letter. But for the unofficial but firm assurances he had been given by the prefecture in Libreville, he would not have believed that Suzanne Clair and her husband had come to Port Matarre, so unlike the somber light of the river and jungle were her descriptions of the forest near the clinic. Their exact whereabouts no one had been able to tell him, or for that matter why a sudden censorship should have been imposed on mail leaving the province. When Sanders became too persistent, he was reminded that the correspondence of people under a criminal charge was liable to censorship, but as far as Suzanne and Max Clair were concerned, the suggestion was grotesque.

Thinking of the small, intelligent microbiologist and his wife, tall and dark-haired, with her high forehead and calm eyes, Dr. Sanders remembered their sudden departure from Fort Isabelle three months earlier. Sanders's affair with Suzanne had lasted for two years, kept going only by his inability to resolve it in any way. His failure to commit himself fully to her made it plain that she had become the focus of all his uncertainties at Fort Isabelle. For some time he had suspected that his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented, than he imagined. Suzanne's somber beauty had become identified in his mind with this dark side of the psyche, and their affair was an attempt to come to terms with himself and his own ambiguous motives.

On second thought, Sanders recognized that a far more sinister explanation for their departure from the hospital was at hand. When Suzanne's letter arrived with its strange and ecstatic vision of the forest-in maculoanesthetic leprosy there was an involvement of nervous tissue-he had decided to follow them. Forgoing his inquiries about the censored letter, in order not to warn Suzanne of his arrival, he took a month's leave from the hospital and set off for Port Matarre.

From Suzanne's description of the forest slopes he guessed the clinic to be somewhere near Mont Royal, possibly attached to one of the French-owned mining settlements, with their overzealous security men. However, the activity on the jetty outside-there were half a dozen soldiers moving about near a parked staff car- indicated that something more was afoot.

As he began to fold Suzanne's letter, smoothing the petal-like tissue, the cabin door opened sharply, jarring his elbow. With an apology Ventress stepped in, nodding to Sanders.

"I beg your pardon, Doctor. My bag." He added: "The customs people are here."

Annoyed to be caught reading the letter again by Ventress, Dr. Sanders stuffed envelope and letter into his pocket. For once Ventress appeared not to notice this. His hand rested on the handle of his suitcase, one ear cocked to listen to the sounds from the deck above. No doubt he was wondering what to do with the pistol. A thorough baggage search was the last thing any of them had expected.

Deciding to leave Ventress alone so that he could slip the weapon through the porthole, Dr. Sanders picked up his two suitcases.

"Well, goodbye, Doctor." Ventress was smiling, his face even more skull-like behind the beard. He held the door open. "It's been very interesting, a great pleasure to share a cabin with you."

Dr. Sanders nodded. "And perhaps something of a challenge too, M. Ventress? I hope all your victories come as easily."

"Touché, Doctor!" Ventress saluted him, then waved as Sanders made his way down the corridor. "But I gladly leave you with the last laugh-the old man with the scythe, eh?"

Without looking back, Dr. Sanders climbed the companionway to the saloon, aware of Ventress watching him from the door of the cabin. The other passengers were sitting in the chairs by the bar, Father Balthus among them, as a prolonged harangue took place between the first officer, two customs officials and a police sergeant. They were consulting the passenger list, scrutinizing everyone in turn as if searching for some missing passenger.

As Dr. Sanders lowered his two bags to the floor he caught the phrase: "No journalists allowed…" and then one of the customs men beckoned him over.

"Dr. Sanders?" he asked, putting a particular emphasis into the name as if he half hoped it might be an alias. "From Libreville University…?" He lowered his voice. "The Physics Department…? May I see your papers?"

Dr. Sanders pulled out his passport. A few feet to his left, Father Balthus was watching him with a sharp eye. "My name is Sanders, of the Fort Isabelle _léproserie_."

After apologizing for their mistake, the customs men glanced at each other and then cleared Dr. Sanders, chalking up his suitcases without bothering to open them. A few moments later he walked down the gangway. On the jetty the native soldiers lounged around the staff car. The rear seat remained vacant, presumably for the missing physicist from Libreville University.

As he handed his suitcases to a porter with _Hotel d'Europe_ stenciled across his peaked cap, Dr. Sanders noticed that a far more thorough inspection was being made of the baggage of those leaving Port Matarre. A group of thirty to forty steerage passengers was herded together at the far end of the jetty, and the police and customs men were searching them one by one. Most of the natives carried bedrolls with them, and the police were unwinding these and squeezing the padding.

By contrast with this activity, the town was nearly deserted. The arcades on either side of the main street were empty, and the windows of the Hotel d'Europe hung listlessly in the dark air, the narrow shutters like coffin lids. Here, in the center of the town, the faded white façades made the somber light of the jungle seem even more pervasive. Looking back at the river as it turned like an immense snake into the forest, Dr. Sanders felt that it had sucked away all but a bare residue of life.

As he followed the porter up the steps into the hotel, he saw the black-robed figure of Father Balthus farther down the arcade. The priest was walking swiftly, his small traveling bag held in one hand. He turned between two columns, then crossed the road and disappeared among the shadows in the arcade facing the hotel. At intervals Sanders saw him again, his dark figure lit by the sunlight, the white columns of the arcade framing him like the shutter of a defective stroboscopic device. Then, for no apparent reason, he crossed the Street again, the skirt of his black robe whipping the dust around his heels. His high face passed Sanders without turning, like the pale, half-remembered profile of someone glimpsed in a nightmare.

Sanders pointed after him. "Where's he off to?" he asked the porter: "The priest-he was on the steamer with me."

"To the seminary. The Jesuits are still there."

"Still? -what do you mean?"

Sanders moved toward the swinging doors, but at that moment a dark-haired young Frenchwoman stepped out. As her face was reflected in the moving panes, Sanders had a sudden glimpse of Suzanne Clair. Although the young woman was in her early twenties, at least ten years younger than Suzanne, she had the same wide hips and sauntering stride, the same observant gray eyes. As she passed Sanders, she murmured, "Pardon…" Then, returning his stare with a faint smile, she set off in the direction of an army lorry that was reversing down a side road. Sanders watched her go. Her trim white suit and metropolitan chic seemed out of place in the dingy light of Port Matarre.

"What's going on here?" Sanders said. "Have they found a new diamond field?"

The explanation seemed to make sense of the censorship and the customs search, but something about the porter's studied shrug made him doubt it. Besides, the references in Suzanne's letter to diamonds and sapphires would have been construed by the censor as an open invitation to join in the harvest.

The clerk at the reception desk was equally evasive. To Sanders's annoyance, the clerk insisted on showing him the weekly tariff, despite his assurances that he would be setting off for Mont Royal the following day.

"Doctor, you understand there is no boat, the service has been suspended. It will be cheaper for you if I charge you by the weekly tariff. But as you wish."

"All right." Dr. Sanders signed the register. As a precaution he gave as his address the university at Libreville. He had lectured several times at the medical school, and mail would be forwarded from there to Fort Isabelle. The deception might be useful at a later date.

"What about the railway?" he asked the clerk. "Or the bus service? There must be some transport to Mont Royal."

"There's no railway." The clerk snapped his fingers. "Diamonds, you know, Doctor, not difficult to transport. Perhaps you can make inquiries about the bus."

Dr. Sanders studied the man's thin, olive-skinned face. His liquid eyes roved around the doctor's suitcases and then out through the arcade to the forest canopy overtopping the roofs across the street. He seemed to be waiting for something to appear.

Dr. Sanders put away his pen. "Tell me, why is it so dark in Port Matarre? It's not overcast, and yet one can hardly see the sun."

The clerk shook his head. When he spoke, he seemed to be talking more to himself than to Sanders. "It's not dark, Doctor, it's the leaves. They're taking minerals from the ground, it makes everything look dark all the time."

This notion seemed to contain an element of truth. From the windows of his room overlooking the arcades, Dr. Sanders gazed out at the forest. The huge trees surrounded the port as if trying to crowd it back into the river. In the street the shadows were of the usual density, following at the heels of the few people who ventured out through the arcades, but the forest was without contrast of any kind. The leaves exposed to the sunlight were as dark as those below, almost as if the entire forest were draining all light from the sun in the same way that the river had emptied the town of its life and movement. The blackness of the canopy, the olive hues of the flat leaves, gave the forest a somber heaviness emphasized by the motes of light that flickered within its aerial galleries.

Preoccupied, Dr. Sanders almost failed to hear the knock on his door. He opened it to find Ventress standing in the corridor. His white-suited figure and sharp skull seemed to personify the bonelike colors of the deserted town.

"What is it?"

Ventress stepped forward. He held an envelope in his hand. "I found this in the cabin after you had gone, Doctor. I thought I should return it to you."

Dr. Sanders took the envelope, feeling in his pocket for Suzanne's letter. In his hurry he had evidently let it slip to the floor. He pushed the letter into the envelope, beckoning Ventress into the room. "Thank you, I didn't realize…"

Ventress glanced around the room. Since disembarking from the steamer he had changed noticeably. The laconic and offhand manner had given way to a marked restlessness. His compact figure, held together as if all the muscles were opposing each other, contained an intense nervous energy that Sanders found almost uncomfortable. His eyes roved about, searching the shabby alcoves for some hidden perspective.

"May I take something in return, Doctor?" Before Sanders could answer, Ventress had stepped over to the larger of the two suitcases on the slatted stand beside the wardrobe. With a brief nod, he released the catches and raised the lid. From beneath the folded dressing gown, he withdrew his automatic pistol wrapped in its shoulder holster harness. Before Dr. Sanders could protest, he had slipped it away inside his jacket.

"What the devil-?" Dr. Sanders crossed the room. He pulled the lid of the suitcase into place. "You've got a bloody nerve…!"

Ventress gave him a weak smile, then started to walk past Sanders to the door. Annoyed, Sanders caught his arm and pulled the man almost off his feet. Ventress's face shut like a trap. With an agile swerve he feinted sideways on his small feet and wrenched himself away from Sanders.

As Sanders came forward again, Ventress seemed to debate whether to use his pistol and then raised a hand to pacify the doctor. "Sanders, I apologize, of course. But there was no other way. Try to understand me, it was those idiots on board I was taking advantage of-"

"Rubbish! You were taking advantage of _me!_"

Ventress shook his head vigorously. "You're wrong, Sanders. I assure you, I have no prejudice against your particular calling… far from it. Believe me, Doctor, I understand you, your whole-"

"All right!" Sanders pulled back the door. "Now get out!"

Ventress, however, stood his ground. He seemed to be trying to bring himself to say something, as if aware that he had exposed some private weakness of Sanders's and was doing his best to repair it. Then he gave a small shrug and left the room, bored by the doctor's irritation.

After he had gone Dr. Sanders sat down in the armchair with his back to the window. Ventress's ruse had annoyed him, not merely because of the assumption that the customs men would avoid contaminating themselves by touching his baggage. The smuggling of the pistol unknown to himself seemed to symbolize, in sexual terms as well, all his hidden motives for coming to Port Matarre in quest of Suzanne Clair. That Ventress, with his skeletal face and white suit, should have exposed his awareness of these still concealed motives was all the more irritating.

He ate an early lunch in the hotel restaurant. The tables were almost deserted, and the only other guest was the dark-haired young Frenchwoman who sat by herself, writing into a dictation pad beside her salad. Now and then she glanced at Sanders, who was struck once again by her marked resemblance to Suzanne Clair. Perhaps because of her raven hair, or the unusual light in Port Matarre, her smooth face seemed paler in tone than Sanders remembered Suzanne's, as if the two women were cousins separated by some darker blood on Suzanne's side. As he looked at the girl he could almost see Suzanne beside her, reflected within some half-screened mirror in his mind.

When she left the table she nodded to Sanders, picked up her pad and went out into the street, pausing in the lobby on the way.

After lunch, Sanders began his search for some form of transport to take him to Mont Royal. As the desk clerk has stated, there was no railway to the mining town. A bus service ran twice daily, but for some reason had been discontinued. At the depot, near the barracks on the eastern outskirts of the town, Dr. Sanders found the booking office closed. The timetables peeled off the notice boards in the sunlight, and a few natives slept on the benches in the shade. After ten minutes a ticket collector wandered in with a broom, sucking on a piece of sugar cane. He shrugged when Dr. Sanders asked him when the service would be resumed.

"Perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, sir. Who can tell? The bridge is down."

"Where's this?"

"Where? Myanga, ten kilometers from Mont Royal. Steep ravine, the bridge just slid away. Risky there, sir."

Dr. Sanders pointed to the compound of the military barracks, where half a dozen trucks were being loaded with supplies. Bales of barbed wire were stacked on the ground to one side, next to some sections of metal fencing. "They seem busy enough. How are they going to get through?"

"They, sir, are repairing the bridge."

"With barbed wire?" Dr. Sanders shook his head, tired of this evasiveness. "What exactly is going on up there? At Mont Royal?"

The ticket collecter sucked his sugar cane. "Going on?" he repeated dreamily. "Nothing's going on, sir."

Dr. Sanders strolled away, pausing by the barrack gates until the sentry gestured him on. Across the road the dark tiers of the forest canopy rose high into the air like an immense wave ready to fall across the empty town. Well over a hundred feet above his head, the great boughs hung like half-furled wings, the trunks leaning toward him. Dr. Sanders was tempted to cross the road and approach the forest, but there was something minatory and oppressive about its silence. He turned and made his way back to the hotel.

An hour later, after several fruitless inquiries, he called at the police prefecture near the harbor. The activity by the steamer had subsided, and most of the passengers were aboard. The speedboat was being swung out on a davit over the jetty.

Coming straight to the point, Dr. Sanders showed Suzanne's letter to the African charge captain. "Perhaps you could explain, Captain, why it was necessary to delete their address? These are close friends of mine and I wish to spend a fortnight's holiday with them. Now I find that there's no means of getting to Mont Royal, and an atmosphere of mystery surrounds the whole place."

The captain nodded, pondering over the letter on his desk. Occasionally he prodded the tissue with a steel ruler, as if he were examining the pressed petals of some rare and perhaps poisonous blossom. "I understand, Doctor. It's difficult for you."

"But why is the censorship in force at all?" Dr. Sanders pressed. "Is there some sort of political disturbance? Has a rebel group captured the mines? I'm naturally concerned for the well-being of Dr. and Madame Clair."

The captain shook his head. "I assure you, Doctor, there is no political trouble at Mont Royal -in fact, there is hardly anyone there at all. Most of the workers have left."

"Why? I've noticed that here. The town's empty."

The captain stood up and went over to the window. He pointed to the dark fringe of the jungle crowding over the rooftops of the native quarter beyond the warehouses. "The forest, Doctor, do you see? It frightens them, it's so black and heavy all the time." He went back to his desk and fiddled with the ruler. Sanders waited for him to make up his mind what to say. "In confidence, I can explain that there is a new kind of plant disease beginning in the forest near Mont Royal- "

"What do you mean?" Sanders cut in. "A virus disease, like tobacco mosaic?"

"Yes, that's it-" The captain nodded encouragingly, although he seemed to have little idea of what he was talking about. However, he kept a quiet eye on the rim of jungle in the window. "Anyway, it's not poisonous, but we have to take precautions. Some experts will look at the forest, send samples to Libreville -you understand, it takes time-" He handed back Suzanne's letter. "I will find out your friends' address. You come back in another day. All right?"

"Will I be able to go to Mont Royal?" Dr. Sanders asked. "The army hasn't closed off the area?"

"No-" the captain insisted. "You are quite free." He gestured with his hands, enclosing little parcels of air. "Just small areas, you see. It's not _dangerous_, your friends are all right. We don't want people rushing there, trying to make trouble."

At the door, Dr. Sanders asked: "How long has this been going on?" He pointed to the window. "The forest is very dark here."

The captain scratched his forehead. For a moment he looked tired and withdrawn. "About one year. Longer, perhaps. At first no one bothered…"

2 The jeweled orchid

On the steps outside, Dr. Sanders saw the young Frenchwoman who had taken lunch at the hotel. She carried a businesslike handbag and wore a pair of dark glasses that failed to disguise the inquisitive look in her intelligent face. She watched Dr. Sanders as he walked past her.

"Any news?"

Sanders stopped. "What about?"

"The emergency."

"Is that what they call it? You're luckier than I. I haven't heard that term."

The young woman brushed this aside. She eyed Sanders up and down, as if unsure who he might be. "You can call it what you like," she said matter-offactly. "If it isn't an emergency now, it soon will be." She came over to Sanders, lowering her voice. "Do you want to go to Mont Royal, Doctor?"

Sanders began to walk off, the young woman following him. "Are you a police spy?" he asked. "Or running an underground bus service? Or both, perhaps?"

"Neither. Listen." She stopped him when they had crossed the road to the first of the curio shops that ran down to the jetties between the warehouses. She took off her sunglasses and gave him a frank smile. "I'm sorry to pry-the clerk at the hotel told me who you were-but I'm stuck here myself and I thought you might know something. I've been in Port Matarre since the last boat."

"I can believe it." Dr. Sanders strolled on, eyeing the stands with their cheap ivory ornaments, small statuettes in an imitation Oceanic style the native carvers had somehow picked up at many removes from European magazines. "Port Matarre has more than a passing resemblance to purgatory."

"Tell me, are you on official business?" The young woman touched his arm. She had replaced her sunglasses, as if this gave her some sort of advantage in her interrogation. "You gave your address as the university at Libreville. In the hotel register."

"The medical school," Dr. Sanders said. "To put your curiosity at rest, if that's possible, I'm simply here on holiday. What about you?"

In a quieter voice, after a confirmatory glance at Sanders, she said: "I'm a journalist. I work free-lance for a bureau that sells material to the French illustrated weeklies."

"A journalist?" Dr. Sanders looked at her with more interest. During their brief conversation he had avoided looking at her, put off partly by her sunglasses, which seemed to emphasize the strange contrasts of light and dark in Port Matarre, and partly by her echoes of Suzanne Clair. "I didn't realize… I'm sorry I was offhand, but I've been getting nowhere today. Can you tell me about this emergency-I'll accept your term for it."

The young woman pointed to a bar at the next corner. "We'll go there, it's quieter-I've been making a nuisance of myself all week with the police."

As they settled themselves in a booth by the window, she introduced herself as Louise Peret. Although prepared to accept Dr. Sanders as a fellow conspirator, she still wore her sunglasses, screening off some inner sanctum of herself. Her masked face and cool manner seemed to Sanders as typical in their way of Port Matarre as Ventress's strange garb, but already he sensed from the slight movement of her hands across the table toward him that she was searching for some point of contact.

"They're expecting a physicist from the university," she said. "A Dr. Tatlin, I think, though it's difficult to check from here. To begin with, I thought you might be Tatlin."

"A physicist-? That doesn't make sense. According to the police captain, these affected areas of the forest are suffering from a new virus disease. Have you been trying to get to Mont Royal all week?"

"Not exactly. I came here with another man from the bureau, an American called Anderson. When we left the boat he went off to Mont Royal in a hired car to take photographs. I was to wait here so I could get a story out quickly."

"Did he see anything?"

"Well, four days ago I spoke to him on the telephone, but the line was bad, I could hardly hear a thing. All he said was something about the forest being full of jewels, but it was meant as a joke, you know-" She gestured in the air.

"A figure of speech?"

"Exactly. If he had seen a new diamond field, he would have said so definitely. Anyway, the next day the telephone line was broken, and they're still trying to repair it-even the police can't get through."

Dr. Sanders ordered two brandies. Accepting a cigarette from Louise, he looked out through the window at the jetties along the river. The last of the cargo was being loaded aboard the steamer, and the passengers stood at the rail or sat passively on their luggage, looking down at the deck.

"It's difficult to know how seriously to take this," Sanders said. "Obviously something is going on, but it could be anything under the sun."

"Then what about the police and the army convoys? And the customs men out there this morning?"

Dr. Sanders shrugged. "Officialdom-if the telephone lines are down they probably know as little as we do. What I can't understand is why you and this American came here in the first place. By all accounts Mont Royal is even more dead than Port Matarre."

" Anderson had a tip that there was some kind of trouble near the mines-he wouldn't tell me what, it was really his story, you see-but we knew the army had sent in reserves. Tell me, Doctor, are you still going to Mont Royal? To your friends?"

"If I can. There must be some way. After all, it's only fifty miles, at a pinch one could walk it."

Louise laughed. "Not me." Just then a black-garbed figure strode past the window, heading off toward the market. "Father Balthus," Louise said. "His mission is near Mont Royal -I checked up on him too. There's a traveling companion for you."

"I doubt it." Dr. Sanders watched the priest walk briskly away from them, his thin face lifted as he crossed the road. His head and shoulders were held stiffly, but behind him his hands moved and twisted with a life of their own. "Father Balthus is not one to make a penitential progress-I think he has other problems on his mind." Dr. Sanders stood up, finishing his brandy. "However, it's a point. I think I'll have a word with the good Father. I'll see you back at the hotel-perhaps we can have dinner together?"

"Of course." She waved to him as he went out and then sat back against the window, her face motionless and without expression.

A hundred yards away, Dr. Sanders caught sight of the priest. Balthus had reached the outskirts of the native market and was moving among the first of the stalls, turning from left to right as if looking for someone. Dr. Sanders followed at a distance. The market was almost empty and he decided to keep the priest under observation for a few minutes before approaching him. Now and then, when Father Balthus glanced about, Sanders saw his lean face, the thin nose raised critically as he peered above the heads of the native women.

Dr. Sanders glanced down at the stalls, pausing to examine the carved statuettes and curios. The small local industry had made full use of the waste products of the mines at Mont Royal, and many of the teak and ivory carvings were decorated with fragments of calcite and fluorspar picked from the refuse heaps, ingeniously worked into the statuettes to form miniature crowns and necklaces. Many of the carvings were made from lumps of impure jade and amber, and the sculptors had abandoned all pretense to Christian imagery and produced squatting idols with pendulous abdomens and grimacing faces.

Still keeping Father Balthus under scrutiny, Dr. Sanders examined a large statuette of a native deity in which two crystals of calcium fluoride formed the eyes, the mineral phosphorescing in the sunlight. Nodding to the stall holder, he complimented her on the piece. Making the most of her opportunity, she gave him a wide smile and then drew back a strip of faded calico that covered the rear of the stall.

"My, that is a beauty!" Dr. Sanders reached forward to take the ornament she had exposed, but the woman held back his hands. Glittering below her in the sunlight was what appeared to be an immense crystalline orchid carved from some quartzlike mineral. The entire structure of the flower had been reproduced and then embedded within the crystal base, almost as if a living specimen had been conjured into the center of a huge cut-glass pendant. The internal faces of the quartz had been cut with remarkable skill, so that a dozen images of the orchid were refracted, one upon the other, as if seen through a maze of prisms. As Dr. Sanders moved his head, a continuous font of light poured from the jewel.

Dr. Sanders reached into his pocket for his wallet, and the woman smiled again and drew the cover back to expose several more of the ornaments. Next to the orchid was a spray of leaves attached to a twig, carved from a translucent jadeike stone. Each of the leaves had been reproduced with exquisite craftsmanship, the veins forming a pale lattice beneath the crystal. The spray of seven leaves, faithfully rendered down to the axillary buds and the faint warping of the twig, seemed characteristic more of some medieval Japanese jeweler's art than of the crude massive sculpture of Africa.

Next to the spray was an even more bizarre piece, a carved tree fungus that resembled a huge jeweled sponge. Both this and the spray of leaves shone with a dozen images of themselves refracted through the faces of the surrounding mount. Bending forward, Dr. Sanders placed himself between the ornaments and the sun, but the light within them sparkled as if coming from some interior source.

Before he could open his wallet there was a shout in the distance. A disturbance had broken Out near one of the stalls. The stall holders ran about in all directions, and a woman's voice cried out. In the center of this scene stood Father Balthus, arms raised above his head as he held something in his hands, black robes lifted like the wings of a revenging bird.

"Wait for me!" Sanders called over his shoulder to the stall owner, but she had covered up her display, sliding the tray out of sight among the stacks of palm leaves and baskets of cocoa meal at the back of the stall.

Leaving her, Dr. Sanders ran through the crowd toward Father Balthus. The priest now stood alone, surrounded by a circle of onlookers, holding in his upraised hands a large native carving of a crucifix. Brandishing it like a sword over his head, he waved it from left to right as if semaphoring to some distant peak. Every few seconds he stopped and lowered the carving to inspect it, his thin face tense and perspiring.

The statuette, a cruder cousin of the jeweled orchid Dr. Sanders had seen, was carved from a pale-yellow gem-stone similar to chrysolite, the outstretched figure of the Christ embedded in a sheath of prismlike quartz. As the priest waved the statuette in the air, shaking it in a paroxysm of anger, the crystals seemed to deliquesce, the light pouring from them as from a burning taper.

"Balthus-!"

Dr. Sanders pushed through the crowd watching the priest. The faces were half averted, keeping an eye open for the police, as if the people were aware of their own complicity in whatever act of _lèse-majesté_ Father Balthus was now punishing. The priest ignored them and continued to shake the carving, then lowered it from the air and felt the crystalline surface.

"Balthus, what on earth-?" Sanders began, but the priest shouldered him aside. Whirling the crucifix like a propeller, he watched its light flashing away, intent only on exorcising whatever powers it held for him.

There was a shout from one of the stall holders, and Dr. Sanders saw a native police sergeant approaching cautiously in the distance. Immediately the crowd began to scatter. Panting from his efforts, Father Balthus let one end of the crucifix fall to the ground. Still holding it like a blunted sword, he looked down at its dull surface. The crystalline sheath had vanished into the air.

"Obscene, obscene-!" he muttered to Dr. Sanders, as the latter took his arm and propelled him through the stalls. Sanders paused to toss the carving onto the blue sheet covering the owner's stall. The shaft, fashioned from some kind of polished wood, felt like a stick of ice. He pulled a five-franc note from his wallet and stuffed it into the stall owner's hands, then pushed Father Balthus in front of him. The priest was staring up at the sky and at the distant forest beyond the market. Deep within the great boughs the leaves flickered with the same hard light that had flared from the cross.

"Balthus, can't you see-?" Sanders took the priest's hand in a firm grip when they reached the wharf. The pale hand was as cold as the crucifix. "It was meant as a compliment. There was nothing obscene there-you've seen a thousand jeweled crosses."

The priest at last seemed to recognize him. His narrow face stared sharply at the doctor. He pulled his hand away. "You obviously don't understand, Doctor! That cross was not _jeweled!_"

Dr. Sanders watched him stride off, head and shoulders held stiffly with a fierce self-sufficient pride, the slim hands behind his back twisting and fretting like nervous serpents.

Later that day, as he and Louise Peret had dinner together in the deserted hotel, Dr. Sanders said: "I don't know what the good Father's motives are, but I'm certain his bishop wouldn't approve of them."

"You think he may have-changed sides?" Louise asked.

Laughing at this, Sanders replied: "That may be putting it too strongly, but I suspect that, professionally speaking, he was trying to confirm his doubts rather than allay them. That cross in the market drove him into a frenzy-he was literally trying to shake it to death."

"But why? I've seen those native carvings, they're beautiful but just ordinary pieces of jewelry."

"No, Louise. That's the point. As Balthus knew, they're not ordinary by any means. There's something about the light they give out-I didn't get a chance to examine one closely-but it seems to come from inside them, not from the sun. A hard, intense light, you can see it all over Port Matarre."

"I know." Louise's hand strayed to the sunglasses that lay beside her plate, safely within reach like some potent talisman. At intervals she automatically opened and closed them. "When you first arrive here everything seems dark, but then you look at the forest and see the stars burning in the leaves." She tapped the glasses. "That's why I wear these, Doctor."

"Is it?" Sanders picked up the glasses and held them in the air. One of the largest pairs he had seen, their frames were almost three inches deep. "Where did you get them? They're huge, Louise, they divide your face into two halves."

Louise shrugged. She lit a cigarette with a nervous flourish. "It's March 21, Doctor, the day of the equinox."

"The equinox? Yes, of course-when the sun crosses the equator, and day and night are the same length-" Sanders pondered this. These divisions into dark and light seemed everywhere around them in Port Matarre, in the contrasts between Ventress's white suit and Balthus's dark soutane, in the white arcades with their shadowed in-fills, and even in his thoughts of Suzanne Clair, the somber twin of the young woman watching him across the table with her frank eyes.

"At least you can choose, Doctor, that's one thing. Nothing is blurred or gray now." She leaned forward. "Why did you come to Port Matarre? These friends, are you really looking for them?"

Sanders turned away from her level gaze. "It's too difficult to explain, I-" He debated whether to confide in her, and then with an effort pulled himself together. Sitting up, he touched her hand. "Look, tomorrow we must try to hire a car or a boat. If we share expenses it will give us longer in Mont Royal."

"I'll gladly come with you. But do you think it's safe?"

"For the time being. Whatever the police think, I'm sure it's not a virus growth." He felt the emerald in the gilt ring on Louise's finger, and added: "In a small way I'm something of an expert in these matters."

Without moving her hand from his touch, Louise said quietly: "I'm sure you are, Doctor. I spoke briefly this afternoon to the steward on the steamer." She added: "My aunt's cook is now a patient at your _léproserie_."

Sanders hesitated. "Louise, it's not my _léproserie_. Don't think I'm committed to it. As you say, perhaps we have a firm choice now."

They had finished their coffee. Sanders stood up and took Louise's arm. Perhaps because of her resemblance to Suzanne, he seemed to understand her movements as her hips and shoulders touching his own, as if familiar intimacies were already beginning to repeat themselves. Louise avoided his eyes, but her body remained close to him as they moved between the tables.

They walked out into the empty lobby. The desk clerk sat asleep with his head leaning against the small switchboard. To their left the brass rails of the staircase shone in the damp light, the limp fronds of the potted palms trailing onto the worn marble steps. Still holding Louise's arm, and feeling her fingers take his hand, Sanders glanced out through the entrance. In the shadows of the arcade he caught a glimpse of the shoes and trousers of a man leaning against a column.

"It's too late to go out," Louise said.

Sanders looked down at her, aware that for once all the inertia of sexual conventions, and his own reluctance to involve himself intimately with others, had slipped away. In addition he felt that the past day at Port Matarre, the ambivalent atmosphere of the deserted town, in some way placed them at a pivotal point below the dark and white shadows of the equinox. At these moments of balance any act was possible.

As they reached his door Louise drew her hand away and stepped forward into the darkened room. Sanders followed her and closed the door. Louise turned toward him, the pale light from the neon sign below illuminating one side of her face and mouth. Knocking her glasses to the floor as their hands brushed, Sanders held her in his arms, freeing himself for the moment from Suzanne Clair and the dark image of her face that floated like a dim lantern before his eyes.

Shortly after midnight, as Sanders lay asleep across the pillow on his bed, he woke to feel Louise touch his shoulder.

"Louise-?" He reached up and put his arm around her waist, but she disengaged his hand. "What is it-?"

"The window. Go to the window and look up to the southeast."

"What-?" Sanders gazed at her serious face, beckoning him across the room in the moonlight. "Of course, Louise-"

She waited by the bed as he crossed the faded carpet and unlatched the mosquito doors. Peering upward, he stared into the star-filled sky. In front of him, at an elevation of forty-five degrees, he picked out the constellations Taurus and Orion. Passing them was a star of immense magnitude, a huge corona of light borne in front of it and eclipsing the smaller stars in its path. At first Sanders failed to recognize this as the Echo satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least tenfold, transforming the thin pinpoint of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jeweled flowers that afternoon.

Thinking lamely that perhaps the balloon might be breaking up, forming a cloud of aluminum like a gigantic mirror, Dr. Sanders watched the satellite setting in the southeast. As it faded, the dark canopy of the jungle flickered with a million points of light. Beside him Louise's white body glittered in a sheath of diamonds, the black surface of the river below spangled like the back of a sleeping snake.

3 Mulatto on the catwalks

In the darkness the worn columns of the arcade receded toward the eastern fringes of the town like pale ghosts, overtopped by the silent canopy of the forest. Sanders stopped outside the entrance of the hotel, and let the night air play on his creased suit. The faint odor of Louise's scent still clung to his face and hands. He stepped out into the road and looked up at his window. Unsettled by the image of the satellite, which had crossed the night sky like a warning beacon, Sanders had left the narrow, high-ceilinged hotel room and decided to go out for a walk. As he set off along the arcade toward the river, now and then passing the huddled form of a native asleep inside a roll of corrugated paper, he thought of Louise, with her quick smile and nervous hands, and her obsessional sunglasses. For the first time he felt convinced of the complete reality of Port Matarre. Already his memories of the _léproserie_ and Suzanne Clair had faded. In some ways his journey to Mont Royal had lost its point. If anything, it would have made more sense to take Louise back to Fort Isabelle and try to work out his life afresh there in terms of her rather than Suzanne.

Yet the need to find Suzanne Clair, whose distant presence, like a baleful planet, hung over the jungle toward Mont Royal, still remained. For Louise, too, he sensed that there were other preoccupations. She had told him something of her unsettled background, a childhood in one of the French communities in the Congo, and later of some kind of humiliation during the revolt against the central government after independence, when she and several other journalists had been caught in the rebel province of Katanga by mutinous _gendarmerie_. For Louise, as well as for himself, Port Matarre with its empty light was a neutral point, a dead zone on the African equator to which they had both been drawn. However, nothing achieved there, between themselves or anyone else, would necessarily have any lasting value.

At the end of the street, opposite the lights of the halfempty police prefecture, Sanders turned right along the river and walked toward the native market. The steamer had sailed for Libreville, and the main wharves were deserted, the gray hulls of four landing craft tied together in pairs. Below the market was the native harbor, a maze of small piers and catwalks. This water-borne shanty town of some two hundred boats and rafts was occupied at night by the stall holders in the market. A few fires burned from the tin stoves in the steering wells, lighting up the sleeping cubicles beneath the curved rattan roofs. One or two men sat on the catwalks above the boats, and a small group were playing dice at the end of the first pier, but otherwise the floating cantonment was silent, its cargo of jewelry eclipsed by the night.

The bar which Louise and he had visited the previous afternoon was still open. In the alleyway opposite the entrance two African youths in blue denims were lounging around an abandoned motorcar, one of them sitting on the hood against the windscreen. As Sanders entered the bar they watched him with studied casualness.

The bar was almost empty. At the far end a European plantation manager and his African foreman were talking to two of the local half-caste traders. Sanders carried his whisky to a booth by the window, and looked out across the river, calculating when the satellite would make a second traverse.

He was thinking again of the jeweled leaves he had seen in the market that afternoon, when someone touched his shoulder and murmured: "Dr. Sanders? You're up late, Doctor?"

Sanders turned to find the small, white-suited figure of Ventress gazing down at him with his familiar ironic smile. Remembering their brush the previous day, Sanders said: "No, Ventress, _early_. I'm a day ahead of you."

Ventress nodded eagerly, as if glad to see Sanders gaining an advantage over him, even if only a verbal one. Although he was standing, he seemed to Sanders to have shrunk in size, his jacket tightly buttoned across his narrow chest.

"That's good, Sanders, very good." Ventress glanced around the deserted booths. "Can I join you for a moment?"

"Well-" Sanders made no effort to be agreeable. The incident with the automatic pistol reminded him of the element of calculation in everything Ventress did. After the past few hours with Louise the last person he wanted near him was Ventress with his manic rhythms. "Could you-?"

"My dear Sanders, don't let me embarrass you! I'll stand." Oblivious of Sanders's half-turned shoulder, Ventress carried on. "How sensible of you, Doctor. The nights in Port Matarre are far more interesting than the days. Don't you agree?"

Sanders looked around at this, uncertain of Ventress's point. The man watching from the opposite arcade as he and Louise made their way up the staircase might well have been Ventress. "In a sense-"

"Astronomy isn't one of your hobbies, by any chance?" Ventress asked. He leaned over the table with his mock smile.

"I saw the satellite, if that's what you're driving at," Sanders said. "Tell me, how do you account for it-the sudden increase in magnitude?"

Ventress nodded sagely. "A large question, Doctor. To answer it I would need-literally, I fear-all the time in the world-"

Before Sanders could question him the door opened and one of the African youths he had seen by the car outside entered. A quick glance passed between himself and Ventress, and the youth slipped out again.

With a short bow at Sanders, Ventress turned and pulled his crocodile-skin suitcase from the booth behind Sanders. He paused on his way out and whispered at Sanders: "All the time in the world… remember that, Doctor!"

Wondering what it was that Ventress felt the need to hide behind these riddles, Dr. Sanders finished his whisky. Ventress's white figure, suitcase in hand, disappeared into the darkness near the piers, the two Africans moving quickly ahead of him.

Sanders gave him five minutes to make his departure, assuming that Ventress was about to leave by boat, whether hired or stolen, for Mont Royal. Although he would soon be following Ventress there, Sanders was glad to be left alone in Port Matarre. Ventress's presence in some way added an unnecessary random element to the already confused patterns of arcade and shadow, like a chess-game in which both players suspected that there was a concealed piece on the board.

As he walked past the abandoned motor-car, Sanders noticed that some sort of commotion was going on in the center of the native harbor. Many of the fires had been doused. Others were being fanned to life, and the flames danced in the disturbed water as the boats shifted and moved about. The overhead catwalks that crisscrossed the piers swayed under the weight of running men, swinging themselves along the handrails as they swerved after each other like shuttles.

Sanders moved closer to the edge of the water. Then he saw Ventress's small white figure darting about in the center of the chase, like a spider trapped in a collapsing web. Ventress shouted to the youth carrying his suitcase along the catwalk ten yards in front of him. A tall crop-haired mulatto in a khaki bush-shirt was swarming towards them, a length of weighted hose-pipe in his scarred hand. Behind Ventress the second youth had been beaten to the floor of the catwalk by two men in dark sweatshirts. Knives flashed in their hands, and the youth kicked at them and leapt sideways through the catwalk like a wriggling fish about to be gutted. He landed on a boat below, a long gash torn down the side of his denims. Holding the blood against his leg with one hand, he scrambled across the next boat to the pier, then ran off among the bales of cocoa meal.

On the catwalk above, Ventress shouted again, and the youth carrying the suitcase lifted the bag and feinted with it as the mulatto swung the hose-pipe at his head. Tossing the suitcase through the air in front of him, the youth slid below the rail and vaulted down on to the second rank of boats moored against the pier, crushing the rattan roof as he landed. The hovel collapsed in a mêlée of blankets and upturned petrol cans. There was a vivid glimmer as a cache of crystalline jewelry was exposed to the fires in the other boats.

Watching the brilliant jewels reflected in the broken water of the harbor as the lines of boats slipped from their moorings, Sanders heard the hard detonation of a gunshot sound out above the noise. The automatic pistol in his hand, Ventress crouched down on the catwalk. He fired again at the mulatto with the truncheon. As the mulatto backed away up a gangway to the wharf Ventress glanced over his shoulder at the two men behind him, both now motionless against the handrail, their dark bodies almost invisible. Holstering the pistol, Ventress lowered himself off the edge of the catwalk and leapt down on to the deck of the boat below.

Ignoring the boat's owner, a small gray-haired African trying to gather together the harvest of jeweled leaves scattered around him in the well of the boat, Ventress upended the trestle roof covered by a blanket. His two assistants had vanished among the boats between the next two piers, but Ventress seemed intent only on finding the suitcase. One by one he moved along the boats, kicking back the calico awnings, his pistol holding off the owners. As he stepped from one boat to the next a jeweled wake lay behind him. The three men on the catwalk above were reflected in the flaring light.

Giving up the hunt for his suitcase, Ventress pushed through the stall holders. He climbed up on to the pier. At its far end a small motor-boat lay moored by a single line to a sawn-off pile. Ventress reached the end of the pier, cast off the line and climbed into the boat. For a moment he worked at the controls, and the starting motor whined above the noise. A second later there was a jolting explosion from the bow locker of the boat, and a vivid geyser of flame lifted into the dark air. Knocked back against the tiller, Ventress looked up at the flames burning across the deck panels in front of the shattered windscreen. As the boat drifted back across the pier he managed to pull himself together and jumped up on to the floating box frame that served as a gangway.

Pushing past the few Africans watching from the shore, Sanders climbed on to the pier and ran towards Ventress. Hurt by the explosion, the white-suited man had not seen the pale outline of a large motor-cruiser that had been waiting out on the river some twenty yards from the end of the pier. Standing at the helm on the bridge, from where he had watched the pursuit across the catwalks, was a tall broad-shouldered man in a dark suit, his long face partly hidden behind the white shaft of the radio mast. On the deck below him was what appeared to be a yacht-club starting cannon, its squat polished barrel gleaming in the light. As the burning motor-boat drifted past the end of the pier the flames subsided, and the cruiser and its watching owner sank once again into the darkness.

Halfway along the pier Sanders saw the crop-headed mulatto swing down from the catwalk in front of him. He had thrown away the truncheon, and a thin silver blade flickered in his huge hand. He crept up behind Ventress, who sat numbly on the edge of the pier, watching the burning motor-boat move into the shallows.

"Ventress!" Running hard, Sanders caught up with the mulatto, and in his rush knocked the man off balance. Recovering with the speed of a snake, the mulatto lunged round and drove his shaved head at Sanders, hitting him in the chest. He bent down to retrieve his knife, his white eyes swinging from Ventress to the doctor and back again.

A hundred yards along the shore a signal flare rose into the air over the harbor. Its muffled light burned with a dull glow. A siren began to wail, its noise mounting over the warehouses. A police truck stopped at the foot of the next pier, and its headlights illuminated the last of the crystalline jewels now being hidden away beneath the awnings. The burning motor-boat had drifted against one of the catwalk supports, and the tarstreaked wood had caught fire, the flames flaring along the dry timbers.

Sanders lunged with one foot at the mulatto, then wrenched at a half-loose timber sticking from the pier. The mulatto peered at the police truck. He seized the knife, then ran straight past Sanders along the pier and dived down among the boats on the far side.

"Ventress-?" Sanders knelt beside him, and brushed at the cinders that had burned themselves into the fabric of the man's suit. "Can you walk? The police are here."

Ventress stood up, his eyes clearing. Behind the beard, his small face seemed completely closed. He appeared to have no idea what had happened, and held on to Sanders's arm like an old man.

Behind them, out on the river, there was a muted roar, and white water broke behind the stern of the waiting cruiser. As it moved away Ventress came to life. Still holding Sanders's arm, but this time guiding him, he began to run along the pier.

"Head down, Doctor! We can't wait here!"

His head swivelled from left to right as he watched the burning catwalk, now dividing itself as it collapsed into the water. When they reached the bank and moved behind the small crowd standing on the slope he turned to Sanders: "My thanks, Doctor. I was almost out of time myself there."

Before Sanders could reply, Ventress darted off among the stacks of gasoline drums in the entrance to one of the warehouses. Sanders followed him, and saw Ventress disappear behind the abandoned motor-car.

In the harbor the fires had burned themselves out. The charred sections of the catwalk steamed and spat in the dark air. The police moved along the other catwalks with their machetes, cutting them one by one into the water, the stall holders below shouting as they paddled their boats out of the way.

Sanders walked back to his hotel, avoiding the arcades. Disturbed from their sleep, the mendicants sat up in their cardboard wrappings and wheedled at him as he went past, their eyes shining from the dark columns.

Louise had returned to her room. Switching off the light, Sanders sat down in the chair by the window. The last traces of Louise's scent dissolved in the air as he watched the dawn lift over the distant hills of Mont Royal, illuminating the serpentine course of the river as if revealing a secret pathway.

4 A drowned man

The next morning the body of a drowned man was taken from the river at Port Matarre. Shortly after ten o'clock Dr. Sanders and Louise Peret walked down to the harbor by the native market in the hope of hiring one of the boatmen to take them up-river to Mont Royal. The harbor was almost empty, and most of the boats had moved across the river to the settlements on the far bank. The wrecked catwalks lay in the water like the skeletons of half-drowned lizards, one or two of the fishermen poking around among them.

The market was quiet, either as a result of the incident the previous night or because Father Balthus's scene with the jeweled cross had dissuaded the owners of the curio stalls from putting in an appearance.

Despite the compacted glitter of the forest during the night, by day the jungle had become dark and somber again, as if the foliage were recharging itself from the sun. This pervading sense of unease convinced Sanders of the need to leave for Mont Royal with Louise as soon as possible. As they walked along he watched for any signs of the mulatto and his two assistants. However, from the scale of the attack upon Ventress-without doubt the armed motor-cruiser and its watching helmsman had played some part in the attempted murder- Sanders assumed that the would-be assassins were by now a safe distance from the police.

During the short walk from the hotel Sanders had halfexpected to hear Ventress whisper to him from the shadows within the arcade, but there had been no signs of him in the town. However improbable, the unrelieved heaviness of the light over Port Matarre convinced Sanders that the white-suited figure had already left.

To Louise he pointed out the jumble of wrecked catwalks and the charred hulk of the motor-boat lying in the shallows, and described the attack by the mulatto and his men.

"Perhaps he was trying to steal some jewelry from the boats," Louise suggested. "They may just have been defending themselves."

"No, it was more than that-this mulatto was really after Ventress. If the police hadn't arrived we'd both have ended up face down in the river."

"How horrible for you!" Louise took his arm, as if barely convinced of Sanders's physical identity in the nexus of uncertainty at Port Matarre. "But why should anyone attack him?"

"I've no idea-you didn't find anything out about Ventress?"

"No, I was following you most of the time. I haven't even seen this small man with a beard. You make him sound very sinister."

Sanders laughed at this. Holding her shoulders for a few steps, he said: "My dear Louise, you have a Bluebeard complex-like all women. As a matter of fact, Ventress isn't in the least sinister. On the contrary, he's rather naive and vulnerable-"

"Like Bluebeard, I suppose?"

"Well, not quite. But the way he talks in riddles all the time-it's as if he's frightened of revealing himself. I'd say he knew something about this crystallizing process."

"But why shouldn't he tell you directly? How could it have any bearing on his own situation?"

Sanders paused, glancing down at the sunglasses which Louise still carried in her hand. "Doesn't it with all of us, Louise? There are white shadows as well as black behind us in Port Matarre-why, God alone knows. Still, of one thing I'm sure, there's no actual physical danger from this process, or Ventress would have warned me. If anything, he was encouraging me to go to Mont Royal."

Louise shrugged. "Perhaps it would suit him to have you there."

"Perhaps-" They had passed the main piers of the native harbor, and Sanders stopped and spoke to the half-castes who owned the small group of fishing boats moored along the bank. They shook their heads when he mentioned Mont Royal, or seemed too unreliable to trust.

He rejoined Louise. "No good. They're the wrong kind of boats anyway."

"Is that the ferry over there?" Louise pointed a hundred yards along the bank, where half a dozen people stood at the water's edge near a landing stage. Two men armed with poles were steering in a large skiff.

When Louise and Dr. Sanders approached they saw that the boatmen were bringing in the floating body of a dead man.

The group of onlookers moved back as the body, prodded by the two poles, was beached in the shallows. After a pause, someone stepped forward and pulled it on to the damp mud. For a few moments everyone looked down at it, as the muddy water ran off the drenched clothing and drained from the blanched cheeks and eyes.

"Oooohh-!" With a shudder, Louise turned and backed away, stumbling a few feet up the bank to the landing stage. Leaving her, Dr. Sanders bent down to inspect the body. That of a muscular fair-skinned European of about thirty, it appeared to have suffered no external physical injuries. From the extent to which the dye had run from the leather belt and boots it was plain that the man had been immersed in water for four or five days, and Sanders was surprised to find that rigor mortis had still not occurred. The joints and tissues were malleable, the skin firm and almost warm.

What most attracted his attention, however, like that of the rest of the watching group, was the man's right arm. From the elbow to the finger tips it was enclosed by-or more precisely had effloresced into-a mass of translucent crystals, through which the prismatic outlines of the hand and fingers could be seen in a dozen multi-colored reflections. This huge jeweled gauntlet, like the coronation armor of a Spanish conquistador, was drying in the sun, its crystals beginning to emit a hard vivid light.

Dr. Sanders looked over his shoulder. Someone else had joined the watching group. Looking down at them from the top of the bank, his dark robe held below his hunched shoulders like the wings of a huge carrion bird, was the tall figure of Father Balthus. His eyes were fixed on the dead man's jeweled arm. A small tic in one corner of his mouth was fluttering, as if some blasphemous requiem for the dead man was discharging itself below the surface of the priest's consciousness. Then, with an effort, he turned on one heel and walked off along the river toward the town.

Dr. Sanders stood up as one of the watermen came forward. He stepped through the circle of onlookers and made his way to Louise Peret.

"Is that Anderson? The American? You recognized him."

Louise shook her head. "The cameraman, Matthieu. They went off in the car together." She looked up at Sanders, her face contorted. "His _arm?_ What happened to it?"

Dr. Sanders moved her away from the group of people looking down at the body as the jeweled light discharged itself from the crystalline tissues. Fifty yards away, Father Balthus was striding past the native harbor, the fishermen stepping out of his path. Sanders gazed around, trying to take his bearings. "It's rime to find out. Somewhere we've got to get hold of a boat."

Louise straightened her handbag, searching for her pencil and shorthand pad. "Edward, I think-I must get this story out. I'd like to go to Mont Royal with you, but with a dead man, it's not just guesswork any more."

"Louise!" Dr. Sanders held her arm. Already he sensed that the physical bond between them was slipping-Louise's eyes were turned away from him toward the body on the shore, as if she understood that there was little point in her going with Sanders to Mont Royal, and that his real motives for wanting to sail up-river, his quest for an end to all Suzanne Clair stood for in his mind, concerned him alone. Yet Sanders felt reluctant to let her go. However fragmentary their relationship, it offered at least an alternative to Suzanne.

"Louise, if we don't leave this morning we'll never get away from here. Once the police find that body they'll put a cordon around the whole of Mont Royal, if not Port Matarre as well." He hesitated, and then added: "That man had been in the water for at least four days, probably carried downstream all the way from Mont Royal, yet he died only half an hour ago."

"What do you mean?"

"Precisely that. He was still _warm_. Do you understand when I say we must leave for Mont Royal now? The story you want will be there, and you'll be the first-"

Sanders broke off, aware that their conversation was being overheard. They were walking along the quay, and to their right, twenty feet away, a motor-boat moved slowly through the water, keeping pace with them. Sanders recognized the red-and-yellow craft brought to Port Matarre on the steamer. Standing at the controls, one hand lightly on the steering helm, was a raffish-looking man with a droll handsome face. He eyed Dr. Sanders with a kind of amiable curiosity, as if balancing the advantages and drawbacks of becoming involved with him.

Dr. Sanders motioned to Louise to stop. The helmsman cut his engine, and the motor-boat drifted in an arc toward the bank. Dr. Sanders walked down to it, leaving Louise on the quay.

"A fine boat you have there," Sanders said to the helmsman.

The tall man made a deprecating gesture, then gave Sanders an easy smile. "I'm glad you appreciate it, Doctor." He pointed to Louise Peret. "I can see you have a good eye."

"Mlle. Peret is a colleague of mine. I'm more interested in boats just now. This one traveled with me on the steamer from Libreville."

"Then you know, Doctor, it's a fine craft, as you say. It could take you to Mont Royal in four or five hours."

"Excellent, indeed." Dr. Sanders glanced at his watch. "What would you charge for such a trip, Captain-?"

" Aragon." The tall man took a partly smoked cheroot from behind his ear and gestured with it at Louise. "For one? Or both of you?"

"Doctor-" Louise called down, still uncertain. "I'm not sure-"

"For the two of us," Dr. Sanders said, turning his back on the young woman. "We'll want to go today, within half an hour if possible. Now how much?"

For a few minutes they argued over the price, then agreed. Aragon started his motor, and shouted: "I'll see you at the next pier, Doctor, in an hour. The tide will have turned, it will carry us half the way."

At noon, their suitcases stowed away in the locker behind the engine, they set off up-river in the speedboat. Dr. Sanders sat beside Aragon in the front seat, while Louise Peret, her dark hair flowing behind her in the slipstream, sat in one of the bucket seats behind. As they swept up the brown tidal river, the arcs of spray rainbowing behind them, Sanders felt the oppressive silence that had pervaded Port Matarre lift for the first time since his arrival. The deserted arcades, of which they had a last glimpse as they headed out into the main channel, and the somber forest seemed to recede into the background, separated from him by the roar and speed of the motor-boat. They passed the police wharf. A corporal lounging there with his squad watched them sweep by on a wake of foam. The powerful motor lifted the craft high out of the water, and Aragon leaned forward, watching the surface for any floating logs.

There were few other craft about. One or two native outriggers moved along by the edge of the banks, half hidden by the overhanging foliage. A mile from Port Matarre they passed the private jetties owned by the cocoa plantations. The empty lighters lay unattended under the idle cranes. Weeds sprang between the tracks of the small-gauge railways and climbed up the gantries of the storage silos. Everywhere the forest hung motionless in the warm air, and the speed and spray of the motor-boat seemed to Dr. Sanders like an illusionist trick, the flickering shutter of a defective cine-camera.

Half an hour later, when they reached the tidal limits of the river, some ten miles inland, Aragon slowed down so that they could watch the water more closely. Dead trees and large pieces of bark drifted past. Now and then they came across sections of abandoned wharves that had been pulled off their moorings by the current. The river seemed untended and refuse-strewn, carrying the litter of deserted towns and villages.

"This is quite a boat, Captain," Dr. Sanders complimented Aragon, as the latter changed fuel tanks to preserve the balance of the craft.

Aragon nodded, steering the boat past the remains of a floating hut. "Faster than the police launches, Doctor."

"I'm sure it is. What do you use it for? Diamond smuggling?"

Aragon turned his head, casting a sharp eye at Sanders. Despite the latter's reserved manner, Aragon seemed already to have made his own judgment of the doctor's character. He shrugged sadly. "So I hoped, Doctor, but too late now."

"Why do you say that?"

Aragon looked up at the dark forest draining all light from the air. "You'll see, Doctor. We'll soon be there."

"When were you last at Mont Royal, Captain?" Sanders asked. He glanced back at Louise. She leaned forward to catch Aragon 's replies, holding her hair against her cheek.

"Not for five weeks. The police took my old boat."

"Do you know what's going on up there? Have they found a new mine?"

Aragon gave a laugh at this, and then steered the boat at a large white bird sitting on a log in their path. With a cry it took off straight over their heads, its huge wings working like ungainly oars. "You could say that, Doctor. But not in the way you mean." He added before Sanders could question him further: "I really saw nothing. I was on the river, it was during the night."

"You saw the dead man in the harbor this morning?"

Aragon paused for half a minute before replying. At last he said: " El Dorado, the man of gold and jewels, in an armor of diamonds. There's an end many would wish for, Doctor."

"Perhaps. He was a friend of Mlle. Peret."

"Of Mlle.-?" With a grimace, Aragon sat forward over the helm.

Shortly after one thirty, when they were almost halfway to Mont Royal, they stopped by a derelict jetty that jutted out into the river from an abandoned plantation. Sitting on the soft beams over the water, they ate their lunch of ham and rolls followed by café royal. Nothing moved across the river or along the banks, and to Sanders it seemed that the entire area had been deserted.

Perhaps because of this, any conversation between them had lapsed. Aragon sat by himself, staring out at the water that swept past. The marked slope of his forehead, and his lean face with its pointed cheekbones, had given him a sharp piratical look along the waterfront at Port Matarre, but here, surrounded on all sides by the oppressive jungle, he seemed less sure of himself, more like some trigger-nerved forest guide. Why he had chosen to take Sanders and Louise to Mont Royal remained obscure, but Sanders guessed that he was drawn back to this focal area by motives as uncertain as his own.

Louise had also withdrawn into herself. As she smoked her cigarette after the meal she avoided Sanders's eyes. Deciding to leave her alone for the time being, Sanders walked away along the pier, picking his way across the broken boards until he reached the bank. The forest had re-entered the plantation, and the giant trees hung silently in lines, one dark cliff behind another.

In the distance he could see the ruined plantation house, creepers entwined through the rafters of the outbuildings. Ferns overgrew the garden of the house, running up to the doors and sprouting through the planks of the porch. Avoiding this mournful wreck, Sanders strolled around the perimeter of the garden, following the faded stones of a pathway. He passed the wire screen of a tennis court, the mesh covered by creepers and moss, and then reached the drained basin of an ornamental fountain.

Sanders sat down on the balustrade, and took out his cigarettes. He was looking across at the plantation house a few minutes later when he sat forward with a start. Watching him from an upstairs window of the house was a tall pale-skinned woman with a white mantilla covering her head and shoulders, the dark creepers clustering at the window around her.

Sanders threw away his cigarette and ran forward through the ferns. He reached the porch and kicked back the dusty frame of the door, then made his way toward the wide staircase. Here and there his shoes sank through the balsa-like boards, but the marble steps were still firm. The house had been stripped of its furniture and he crossed the landing upstairs to the bedroom in which he had seen the woman.

"Louise-!"

With a laugh she turned to face him, the puffy remains of an old lace curtain falling from one hand to the floor. Shaking her hair lightly, she smiled at Sanders.

"Did I frighten you? -I'm sorry."

"Louise-that was a damn silly thing to do-" With an effort Sanders controlled himself, his moment of recognition fading. "How the devil did you get up here?"

Louise sauntered around the room, looking at the patches left behind the pictures that had been removed, as if visiting some spectral gallery. "I walked, of course." She turned to face him, her eyes sharpening. "What's the matter-did I remind you of someone?"

Sanders went over to her. "Perhaps you did. Louise, it's difficult enough, without any practical jokes."

"It wasn't meant as a joke." She took his arm, her ironic smile gone. "Edward, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have-"

"Never mind." Sanders held her face to his shoulder, recovering himself in the physical contact with Louise. "For God's sake, Louise. All this will be over once we reach Mont Royal -before I had no choice."

"Of course-" She drew him away from the window. " Aragon -he can see us here."

The lace curtain lay on the floor at their feet, the mantilla Sanders had seen from the drained fountain in the garden. As Louise began to kneel down on it, holding his hands, he shook his head, then kicked it away into the corner.

Later, when they returned to the motor-boat, Aragon met them halfway down the pier. "We should leave, Doctor," he said, "the boat is exposed here-sometimes they patrol the river."

"Of course. How many soldiers are there in the Mont Royal area?" Sanders asked.

"Four or five hundred. Perhaps more."

"A battalion? That's a lot of men, Captain." He offered Aragon a cigarette from his case as Louise walked on ahead. "That incident in the native harbor last night-did you see it?"

"No, I heard this morning-those market boats are always catching fire."

"Perhaps. There was an attack on a man I know-a European called Ventress." He looked up at Aragon. "There was a large motor-cruiser with a cannon on the deck-you may have seen it on the river?"

Aragon 's face gave nothing away. He shrugged vaguely. "It could belong to one of the mining companies. I haven't met this Ventress." Before Sanders could move on he added: "Remember, Doctor, there are many interests in Mont Royal that wish to stop people from going into the forest-or leaving it."

"I can see that. By the way, that drowned man in the harbor this morning-when you saw him, was he lying on a raft, by any chance?"

Aragon inhaled slowly on the cigarette, watching Sanders with some respect. "That's a good guess, Doctor."

"And as for this armor of light, was he covered with the crystals from head to foot?"

Aragon gave him a grimace of a smile, revealing a gold eye-tooth. He tapped it with his forefinger. "'Covered'-is that the right word? My tooth is the whole gold, Doctor."

"I take the point." Sanders gazed down at the brown water sweeping past the polished timbers of the jetty. Louise waved to him from her place in the boat, but he was too preoccupied to reply. "You see, Captain, I'm wondering whether this man, Matthieu he was called, was dead in the absolute sense when you saw him. If, say, in the choppy open water of the harbor he had been knocked from the raft, but still held on in some way with one hand-that would explain a lot. It might have very important consequences. You see what I mean?"

Aragon smoked his cigarette, watching the crocodiles that lay in the shallows below the opposite bank. Then he threw the half-smoked cigarette into the water. "I think we should set off for Mont Royal now. The army here is not very intelligent."

"They have other things to think about, but you may well be right. Mile. Peret thinks there is a physicist on the way. If so, he should be able to prevent any more tragic accidents."

Just before they started off Aragon turned to Dr. Sanders and said: "I was wondering, Doctor, why you were so eager to go to Mont Royal."

The remark seemed by way of apology for earlier suspicions, but Sanders found himself laughing defensively. With a shrug he said: "Two of my closest friends are in the affected zone, as well as Louise's American colleague. Naturally we're worried about them. The automatic temptation of the army will be to seal off the entire area and see what happens. They were loading barbed wire and fencing in the barracks at Port Matarre yesterday. For anyone trapped within the cordon it could be like being frozen solid inside a glacier."

5 The crystallized forest

Five miles from Mont Royal the river narrowed to little more than a hundred yards in width. Aragon reduced the speed of their craft to a few knots, steering between the islands of rubbish that drifted by, and avoiding the creepers that hung far out over the water from the high jungle walls on either side. Sitting forward, Dr. Sanders searched the forest, but the great trees were still dark and motionless.

They emerged into a more open stretch, where part of the undergrowth along the right-hand bank had been cut back to provide a small clearing. As Dr. Sanders pointed to a collection of derelict outbuildings, there was a tremendous blare of noise from the forest canopy above them, as if a huge engine had been mounted in the top-most branches, and a moment later a helicopter soared past above the trees.

It disappeared from view, its noise reverberating off the foliage. The few birds around them flickered away into the darkness of the forest, and the idling crocodiles submerged into the bark-stained water. As the helicopter hovered into view again a quarter of a mile ahead of them, Aragon cut the throttle and began to turn the craft toward the bank, but Sanders shook his head.

"We might as well carry on, Captain. We can't make it on foot through the forest. The farther we can go upriver the better."

As they continued down the center of the channel the helicopter continued to circle overhead, sometimes swinging up to a height of eight or nine hundred feet, as if to take a better look at the winding river, at other times soaring low over the water fifty yards in front of them, the wheels almost touching the surface. Then, abruptly, it zoomed away and carried out a wide circuit of the forest.

Rounding the next bend, where the river widened into a small harbor, they found that a pontoon barrage stretched across the channel from one bank to the next. On the right, along the wharves, were the warehouses bearing the names of the mining companies. Two landing craft and several military launches were tied up, and native soldiers moved about unloading equipment and drums of fuel. In the clearing beyond, a substantial military camp had been set up. The lines of tents ran off between the trees, partly hidden by the gray festoons of moss. Large piles of metal fencing lay about, and a squad of men were painting a number of black signs with luminous paint.

Halfway across the pontoon barrage a French sergeant with an electric megaphone called to them, pointing to the wharves. "A droite! A droite!" A group of soldiers waited by the jetty, leaning on their rifles.

Aragon hesitated, turning the boat in a slow spiral. "What now, Doctor?"

Sanders shrugged. "We'll have to go in. There's no point in trying to cut and run for it. If I'm going to find the Clairs, and Louise is to get her story, we'll have to do it on the army's terms."

They coasted in toward the wharf between the two landing craft, and Aragon threw the lines up to the waiting soldiers. As they climbed up on to the wooden deck the sergeant with the megaphone walked down the barrage.

"You made good time, Doctor. The helicopter only just caught up with you." He pointed between the warehouses to a small landing field by the camp. With a roar of noise, throwing up a tremendous fountain of dust, the helicopter was coming in to land.

"You knew we were coming? I thought the telephone line was down."

"Correct. But we have a radio, you know, Doctor." The sergeant smiled amiably. His relaxed good humor, uncharacteristic of the military in its dealings with civilinns, suggested to Sanders that perhaps the events in the forest near by for once had made these soldiers only too glad to see their fellow men, whether in uniform or out.

The sergeant greeted Louise and Aragon, consulting a slip of paper. "Mile. Peret? Monsieur Aragon? Would you come this way? Captain Radek would like a word with you, Doctor."

"Certainly. Tell me, Sergeant, if you have a radio how is it that the police at Port Matarre have no idea what's going on?"

"What _is_ going on, Doctor? That's a question many people are trying to solve at this moment. As for the police at Port Matarre, we tell them as little as we think good for them. We're not eager to spread rumors, you know."

They set off toward a large metal hut that formed the battalion's headquarters. Dr. Sanders looked back at the river. Along the barrage across the channel two young soldiers walked to and fro with large butterfly nets in their hands, fishing methodically at the water that ran through the wire mesh hanging from the pontoons. More amphibious craft were moored against the wharf on the upstream side of the barrage, their crews sitting at the ready. The two landing craft sat low in the water, loaded almost to capacity with huge crates and bales, a random selection of household effects-refrigerators, airconditioners and the like-and units of machinery and office cabinets.

As they reached the edge of the landing strip Dr. Sanders saw that the main runway consisted of a section of the Port Matarre- Mont Royal highway. Half a mile away the road had been sealed off by lines of fiftygallon drums painted with black-and-white stripes. Beyond this point the forest sloped slowly upwards, giving way to the blue hills of the mining area. Lower down, by the river, the white roof-tops of the town shone in the sunlight above the jungle.

Two other aircraft, high-wing military monoplanes, were parked off the runway. The rotors of the helicopter had stopped and drooped downwards over the heads of a group of four or five civilians stepping unsteadily out of the cabin. As he reached the door of the hut Dr. Sanders recognized the black-garbed figure walking across the dusty ground.

"Edward!" Louise held his arm. "Who's that over there?"

"The priest. Balthus." Sanders turned to the sergeant as the latter opened the door. "What's he doing here?"

The sergeant paused for a moment, watching Sanders. "His parish is here, Doctor. Near the town. Surely we have to let him in?"

"Of course." Sanders collected himself. His sharp reaction to the arrival of the priest made him realize how far he already identified himself with the forest. He pointed to the civilians still finding their land-legs. "And the others?"

"Agriculture experts. They arrived at Port Matarre by flying boat this morning."

"Sounds like a big operation. Have you seen the forest, Sergeant?"

The sergeant held up his hand. "Captain Radek will explain, Doctor." He ushered Dr. Sanders across the corridor, then opened a door into a small waiting room and beckoned to Louise and Aragon. "Mlle.-please make yourself comfortable. I will have some coffee brought to you."

"But Sergeant, I have to-" Louise began to remonstrate with the sergeant, but Sanders put his hand on her shoulder.

"Louise, it's best if you wait here. I'll find Out all I can."

Aragon waved to Sanders. "We'll see you later, Doctor. I'll keep an eye on your suitcases."

Captain Radek was waiting for Dr. Sanders in his office. A doctor in the army medical corps, he was plainly glad to find another physician in the neighborhood.

"Sit down, Doctor, it's a pleasure to see you. First of all, to put your mind at rest, may I say that an inspection party will be leaving for the area in half an hour, and I have arranged for us to go with them."

"Thank you, Captain. What of Mlle. Peret? She-"

"I'm sorry, Doctor, but that won't be possible." Radek placed his hands palm-downwards on the metal desk, as if trying to draw some kind of resolution from its hard surface. A tall slimly built man with somewhat weak eyes, he seemed anxious to come to a personal understanding with Sanders, the pressure of events making it necessary to dispense with the usual preliminaries of friendship. "I'm afraid we are keeping all journalists out of the area for the time being. It's not my decision but I'm sure you understand. Perhaps I should add that there are a number of matters I cannot confide to you- our operations in this area, evacuation plans and so forth-but I will be as frank as possible. Professor Tatlin flew here direct from Libreville this morning-he is at the inspection site now-and I'm sure he will be glad of your opinion."

"I'll be glad to give it," Dr. Sanders said. "It's not exactly my field of specialty."

Radek made a limp gesture with one hand, then let it fall back onto the desk. In a quiet voice, out of deference to any feelings Sanders might have, he said: "Who knows, Doctor? It seems to me that the business here and your own specialty are very similar. In a way, one is the dark side of the other. I'm thinking of the silver scales of leprosy that give the disease its name." He straightened up. "Now, tell me, have you seen any of the crystallized objects?"

"Some flowers and leaves." Sanders decided not to mention the dead man that morning. However frank and likeable the young army doctor might seem, Sanders's first priority was to reach the jungle. If they suspected him even of some remote complicity in Matthieu's death he might well find himself sidetracked into an endless military investigation. "The native market is full of them. They're selling them as curios."

Radek nodded. "This has been going on for some time-nearly a year, in fact. First it was costume jewelry, then small carvings and holy objects. Recently there's been quite a trade here-the natives were taking cheap carvings into the active zone, leaving them there overnight and going back the next day for them. Unfortunately some of the stuff, the jewelry in particular, had a tendency to dissolve."

"The rapid movement?" Dr. Sanders queried. "I noticed that. A curious effect, the discharge of light. Disconcerting to some of the wearers."

Radek smiled. "It didn't matter with the costume jewelry, but some of the native miners started using the same technique on the small diamonds they smuggled out. As you know, the diamond mines here don't produce gem-stones, and everyone was naturally surprised when these huge rocks began to reach the market. The share prices on the Paris Bourse climbed to fantastic heights. That's how it all started. A man was sent to investigate and ended up in the river."

"There were vested interests?"

"There still are. We aren't the only people trying to keep this quiet. The mines here have never been particularly profitable-" Radek seemed about to reveal something, and then changed his mind, perhaps aware of Sanders's withdrawn manner. "Well, I think I can tell you, in confidence of course, that this is not the only affected area in the world. At this moment at least two other sites exist-one in the Florida Everglades, and the other in the Pripet Marshes of the Soviet Union. Naturally, both are under intensive investigation."

"Then the effect is understood?" Dr. Sanders asked.

Radek shook his head. "Not at all. The Soviet team is under the leadership of Lysenko. As you can imagine, he is wasting the Russians' time. He believes that non-inherited mutations are responsible, and that because there is an apparent increase in tissue weight, crop yields can also be increased." Radek laughed wearily. "I'd like to see some of those tough Russians trying to chew a piece of this crystallized glass."

"What is Tatlin's theory?"

"In general he agrees with the American experts. I spoke to him at the site this morning." Radek opened a drawer and tossed something from it across the desk to Sanders. It lay there like crystallized leather, giving off a soft light. "That's a piece of bark I show to visitors."

Dr. Sanders pushed it back across the desk. "Thank you, but I saw the satellite last night."

Radek nodded to himself. He scooped the bark back into the drawer with his ruler and closed it, obviously glad to have this exhibit out of sight. He brushed his fingers together. "The satellite? Yes, an impressive sight. Venus now has two lamps. Not only two either. Apparently at the Mount Hubble Observatory in the States they have seen distant galaxies efflorescing!"

Radek paused, collecting his energies with an effort. "Tatlin believes that this Hubble Effect, as they call it, is closer to a cancer than anything else-and about as curable-an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter. It's as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light."

There was a knock on the door. The sergeant put his head through. "The inspection party is ready to leave, sir."

"Good." Radek stood up and took his cap from the peg. "We'll have a look, Doctor. I think you'll be impressed."

Five minutes later the party of visitors, some dozen in number, set off in one of the amphibian craft. Father Balthus was not among them, and Sanders assumed that he had left for his mission by road. However, when he asked Radek why they were not approaching Mont Royal by the highway the captain told him that the road was closed. In response to Sanders's request, the captain arranged to make contact by field telephone with the clinic where Suzanne and Max Clair were working. The owner of the mine near by, a Swedish-American by the name of Thorensen, would tell them of Sanders's arrival, and with luck Max would be at the wharf to meet him when they landed.

Radek had heard nothing of Anderson 's whereabouts. "However," he explained to Louise before they embarked, "we ourselves have had great difficulty in taking photographs-the crystals look like wet snow, in Paris they're still sceptical-so he may be hanging about somewhere, waiting for a convincing picture."

As he took his seat near the driver in the bow of the amphibian, Dr. Sanders waved to Louise Peret, who was watching from the wharf on the other side of the pontoon-barrage. He had promised to return with Max for her after they had visited the affected area, but even so Louise had made a half-hearted attempt to stop him going at all.

"Edward, wait till I can come with you-it's too dangerous for you-"

"My dear, I'm in good hands-the Captain will see everything is all right."

"There's no danger, Mlle. Peret," Radek assured her. "I will bring him back."

"I didn't mean-" She embraced Sanders hurriedly and walked back to where Aragon sat in the speedboat, talking to two of the soldiers. The presence of the barrage seemed to mark off one section of the forest from the other, a point beyond which they entered a world where the normal laws of the physical universe were suspended. The mood of the party was subdued, and the officials and French experts sat in a group at the stern, as if to place the maximum possible distance between themselves and whatever was to face them ahead.

For ten minutes they moved forward, the green walls of the forest slipping past on either side. They met a convoy of motor launches harnessed together behind a landing craft. All of them were crammed with cargo, their decks and cabin roofs loaded with household possessions of every kind, perambulators and mattresses, washing machines and bundles of linen, so that there were only a few inches of freeboard amidships. The solemn-faced French and Belgian children sat with suitcases on their knees above the freight. Their parents gazed expressionlessly at Sanders and his companions as they passed.

The last of the craft moved by, dragged through the disturbed water. Sanders turned and watched it go.

"You're evacuating the town?" he asked Radek.

"It was half-empty when we came. The affected zone moves about from one place to another, it's too dangerous for them to stay."

They were rounding a bend, as the river widened in its approach to Mont Royal, and the water ahead was touched by a roseate sheen, as if reflecting a distant sunset or the flames of a silent conflagration. The sky, however, remained a bland limpid blue, devoid of all clouds. They passed below a small bridge, where the river opened into a wide basin a quarter of a mile in diameter.

With a gasp of surprise they all craned forward, staring at the line of jungle facing the white-framed buildings of the town. The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process. The entire length of the opposite shore glittered with this blurred kaleidoscope, the overlapping bands of color increasing the density of the vegetation, so that it was impossible to see more than a few feet between the front line of trunks.

The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight shining uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene erupted into cascades of color that rippled away into the air around them. Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armor of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.

Moved to astonishment, like everyone else in the craft, Dr. Sanders stared at this spectacle, his hands clasping the rail in front of him. The crystal light dappled his face and suit, transforming the pale fabric into a brilliant palimpsest of colors.

The craft moved in a wide arc toward the quay, where a group of launches were being loaded with equipment, and they came within some twenty yards of the trees, the hatchwork of colored light across their clothes transforming them for a moment into a boat-load of harlequins. There was a round of laughter at this, more in relief than amusement. Then several arms pointed to the water-line, and they could see that the process had not affected the vegetation alone.

Extending outwards for two or three yards from the bank were the long splinters of what appeared to be crystallizing water, the angular facets emitting a blue and prismatic light washed by the wake from their craft. The splinters were growing in the water like crystals in a chemical solution, accreting more and more material to themselves, so that along the bank there was a congested mass of rhomboidal spears like the barbs of a reef, sharp enough to slit the hull of their craft.

A hubbub of speculation broke out in the launch, during which only Dr. Sanders and Radek remained silent. The captain was gazing up at the overhanging trees, encrusted by the translucent lattice, through which the sunlight was reflected in rainbows of primary colors. Unmistakably each tree was still alive, its leaves and boughs filled with sap. Dr. Sanders was thinking of Suzanne Clair's letter. She had written, "The forest is a house of jewels." For some reason he felt less concerned to find a so-called scientific explanation for the phenomenon he had just seen. The beauty of the spectacle had turned the keys of memory, and a thousand images of childhood, forgotten for nearly forty years, filled his mind, recalling the paradisal world when everything seemed illuminated by that prismatic light described so exactly by Wordsworth in his recollections of childhood. The magical shore in front of him seemed to glow like that brief spring.

"Dr. Sanders." Radek touched his arm. "We must go now."

"Of course." Sanders pulled himself together. The first passengers were disembarking from the gangway at the stern.

As he walked back between the seats Dr. Sanders started with surprise, pointing to a bearded man in a white suit who was crossing the gangway.

"There-! Ventress!"

"Doctor?" Radek caught up with him, peering solicitously into Sanders's eyes as if aware of the forest's impact. "Are you unwell?"

"Not at all. I… thought I recognized someone." He watched Ventress sidestep past the officials and make off down the quay, his bony skull held stiffly above his shoulders. A faint multi-colored dappling still touched his suit, as if the light from the forest had contaminated the fabric and set off the process anew. Without a backward glance, he stepped between two warehouses and disappeared among the sacks of cocoa meal.

Sanders stared after him, unsure whether he had in fact seen Ventress-had the white-suited figure been some kind of hallucination set off by the prismatic forest? It seemed impossible for Ventress to have smuggled himself aboard the craft, even by masquerading as one of the agriculture experts, though Sanders had been so distracted by the prospect of seeing the affected zone for the first time that he had not bothered to look closely at his fellow passengers.

"Do you wish to rest, Doctor?" Radek asked. "We can pause for a moment."

"If you like-" They stopped by one of the metal bollards. Sander sat down on it, still thinking of the elusive figure of Ventress and its real significance. Again Sanders felt the sense of confusion which the strange light in Port Matarre had generated, a confusion in some way symbolized by Ventress and his skull-like face. Yet however much Ventress had seemed to reflect the flaring half-light in the town, Sanders was sure that here at Mont Royal the white-suited man would really come into his own.

"Captain-" Without thinking, Sanders said: "Radek, I wasn't entirely frank with you-"

"Doctor?" Radek's eyes were watching Sanders's. He nodded slowly, as if he already knew what Sanders would say.

"Don't misunderstand me." Sanders pointed to the forest glowing across the water. "I'm glad you're here, Radek. Before I was thinking only of myself. I had to leave Fort Isabelle-"

"I do understand you, Doctor." Radek touched his arm. "We must follow the party now." As they walked along the wharf, Radek said in his low voice: "Outside this forest everything seems polarized, does it not, divided into black and white? Wait until you reach the trees, Doctor-there, perhaps, these things will be reconciled for you."

6 The crash

Their party was divided into several smaller groups, each accompanied by two N.C.O.s. They moved off past the short queue of cars and trucks which the last of the European townsfolk were using to bring their possessions to the wharf. The families, those of the French and Belgian mine-technicians, waited their turn patiently, flagged on by the military police. The streets of Mont Royal were deserted, and the entire native popula-. tion appeared to have long since vanished into the forest. The houses stood empty in the sunlight, shutters sealed across the windows, and soldiers paced up and down past the closed banks and stores. The side-streets were packed with abandoned cars, indicating that the river was the only route of escape from the town.

As they walked down to the control post, the jungle glowing two hundred yards away to their left, a large Chrysler with a dented fender swerved down the street and came to a halt in front of them. A tall man with blond hair, his double-breasted blue Suit unbuttoned, climbed out. He recognized Radek and waved him over.

"This is Thorensen," Radek explained. "One of the mine-owners. It looks as if he hasn't been able to contact your friends. However, he may have news."

The tall man rested one hand on the roof of the car and scanned the surrounding roof-tops. The collar of his white shirt was open, and he scratched in a bored way at his neck. Although of powerful build, there was something weak and self-centered about his long fleshy face.

"Radek!" he shouted. "I haven't got all day! Is this Sanders?" He jerked his head at the doctor, then nodded to him. "Look, I got hold of them for you-they're at the mission hospital near the old Bourbon Hotel-he and his wife were supposed to come down here. Ten minutes ago he phoned that his wife's gone off somewhere, he has to look for her."

"Gone off somewhere?" Dr. Sanders repeated. "What does that mean?"

"How would I know?" Thorensen climbed into the car, forcing his huge body into the seat as if loading in a sack of meal. "Anyway, he said he'd be down here at six o'clock. O.K., Radek?"

"Thank you, Thorensen. We'll be here then."

With a nod, Thorensen jerked the car into reverse, backing it across the street in a cloud of dust. He set off at speed, almost running down a passing soldier.

"A rough diamond," Sanders commented. "If I can use the term here. Do you think he did get on to the Clairs?"

Radek shrugged. "Probably. Thorensen isn't exactly reliable, but he owed me a small favor for some medicines. A difficult man, always up to some game of his own. But he's been useful to us. The other mine-owners have gone but Thorensen still has his big boat."

Sanders looked around, remembering the attack on Ventress in the harbor at Port Matarre. "A large motorcruiser? With an ornamental cannon?"

"Ornamental? That doesn't sound like Thorensen." Radek laughed. "I can't remember his boat-why do you ask?"

"I thought I'd seen him before. What do we do now?"

"Nothing. The Bourbon Hotel is about three miles from here, it's an old ruin. If we go there we might not get back in time."

"It's strange-Suzanne Clair going off like that."

"Perhaps she had a patient to see. You think it was something to do with your coming here?"

"I hope not…" Sanders buttoned his jacket. "We might as well take a look at the forest until Max gets here."

Following the visiting party, they turned down the next side-street. They approached the forest, which stood back on either side of the road a quarter of a mile away. The vegetation was sparser, the grass growing in clumps along the sandy soil. In the open space a mobile laboratory had been set up in a trailer, and a platoon of soldiers was wandering about, taking cuttings from the trees, which they laid like fragments of stained glass on a line of trestle tables. The main body of the forest circled the eastern perimeter of the town, cutting off the highway to Port Matarre and the south.

Splitting up into twos and threes, they crossed the verge and began to walk among the glacé ferns which rose from the brittle ground. The sandy surface seemed curiously hard and annealed, small spurs of fused sand protruding from the newly formed crust.

A few yards from the trailer two technicians were spinning several of the encrusted branches in a centrifuge. There was a continuous glimmer as splinters of light glanced out of the bowl and vanished into the air. All over the inspection area, as far as the perimeter fence under the trees, the soldiers and visiting officials turned to watch. When the centrifuge stopped, the technicians peered into the bowl, where a handful of limp branches, their blanched leaves clinging damply to the metal bottom, lay stripped of their sheaths. Without comment, one of the technicians showed Dr. Sanders and Radek the empty liquor receptacle underneath.

Twenty yards from the forest, a helicopter prepared for take-off. Its heavy blades rotated like drooping scythes, sending up a blaze of light from the disturbed vegetation. With an abrupt lurch it made a labored takeoff, swinging sideways through the air, and then moved across the forest roof, its churning blades gaining little purchase on the air. The soldiers and the visiting party stopped to watch the vivid discharge of light that radiated from the blades like St. Elmo's fire. Then, with a harsh roar like the bellow of a stricken animal, it slid backwards through the air and plunged tail-first toward the forest canopy a hundred feet below, the two pilots visible at their controls. Sirens sounded from the staff cars parked around the inspection area, and there was a concerted rush toward the forest as the aircraft disappeared from view.

As they raced along the road Dr. Sanders felt its impact with the ground. A glow of light pulsed through the trees. The road led toward the point of the crash, a few houses looming at intervals at the ends of empty drives.

"The blades crystallized while it was near the trees!" Radek shouted as they climbed over the perimeter fence. "You could see the crystals deliquescing. Let's hope the pilots are all right!"

A sergeant blocked their way, beckoning back Sanders and the other civilians who were crowding along the fence. Radek shouted to the sergeant, who let Sanders go past, and then detached half a dozen of his men. The soldiers ran ahead of Radek and Dr. Sanders, stopping every twenty yards to peer through the trees.

They were soon within the body of the forest, and had entered an enchanted world. The crystal trees around them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead.

The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so heavily encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, their white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic minarets and baroque domes. On a lawn of green glass spurs a child's tricycle glittered like a Fabergé gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.

The soldiers were still ahead of Dr. Sanders, but Radek had fallen behind, limping along and pausing to feel the soles of his boots. By now it was obvious to Sanders why the highway to Port Matarre had been closed. The surface of the road was now a carpet of needles, spurs of glass and quartz five or six inches high that reflected the colored light from the leaves above. The spurs tore at Sanders's shoes, forcing him to move hand over hand along the verge.

"Sanders! Come back, Doctor!" The brittle echoes of Radek's voice, like a faint cry in an underground grotto, reached Sanders, but he stumbled on along the road, following the intricate patterns that revolved and expanded over his head like jeweled mandalas.

Behind him an engine roared, and the Chrysler he had seen with Thorensen plunged along the road, the heavy tires cutting through the crystal surface. Twenty yards ahead it rocked to a halt, its engine stalled, and Thorensen jumped out. With a shout he waved Sanders back down the road, now a tunnel of yellow and crimson light formed by the forest canopies overhead.

"Get back! There's another wave coming!" Glancing around wildly, as if searching for someone, he set off at a run after the soldiers.

Dr. Sanders rested by the Chrysler. A marked change had come over the forest, as if dusk had begun to fall. Everywhere the glacé sheaths which enveloped the trees and vegetation had become duller and more opaque. The crystal floor underfoot was occluded and gray, turning the needles into spurs of basalt. The brilliant panoply of colored light had gone, and a dim amber glow moved across the trees, shadowing the sequined floor. At the same time it had become considerably colder. Leaving the car, Dr. Sanders began to make his way back down the road-Radek was still shouting soundlessly to him- but the cold air blocked his path like a refrigerated wall. Turning up the collar of his tropical suit, Sanders retreated to the car, wondering whether to take refuge inside it. The cold deepened, numbing his face, and making his hands feel brittle and fleshless. Somewhere he heard Thorensen's hollow shout, and he caught a glimpse of a soldier running at full speed through the icegray trees.

On the right of the road the darkness enveloped the forest, masking the outlines of the trees, and then extended in a sudden sweep across the roadway. Dr. Sanders's eyes smarted with pain, and he brushed away the crystals of ice that had formed over the eyeballs. As his sight cleared he saw that everywhere around him a heavy frost was forming, accelerating the process of crystallization. The spurs in the roadway were over a foot in height, like the spines of a giant porcupine, and the lattices of moss between the trees were thicker and more translucent, so that the trunks seemed to shrink into a mottled thread. The interlocking leaves formed a continuous mosaic.

The windows of the car were covered by a heavy frost. Dr. Sanders reached for the door handle, but his fingers were stung by the intense cold.

"You there! Come on! This way!"

The voice echoed down a drive behind him. Looking around as the darkness deepened, Dr. Sanders saw the burly figure of Thorensen waving to him from the portico of a mansion near by. The lawn between them seemed to belong to a less somber zone, the grass still retaining its vivid liquid sparkle, as if this enclave were preserved intact like an island in the eye of a hurricane.

Dr. Sanders ran up the drive toward the house. Here the air was at least ten degrees warmer. Reaching the porch, he searched for Thorensen, but the mine-owner had run off again into the forest. Uncertain whether to follow him, Sanders watched the approaching wall of darkness slowly cross the lawn, the glittering foliage overhead sinking into its pall. At the bottom of the drive the Chrysler was now encrusted by a thick layer of frozen glass, its windshield blossoming into a thousand fleur-de-lis crystals.

Quickly making his way around the house, as the zone of safety moved off through the forest, Dr. Sanders crossed the remains of an old vegetable garden, where waist-high plants of green glass rose around him like exquisite sculptures. Waiting as the zone hesitated and veered off, he tried to remain within the center of its focus.

For the next hour he stumbled through the forest, his sense of direction lost, driven from left to right by the occluding walls. He had entered an endless subterranean cavern, where jeweled rocks loomed out of the spectral gloom like huge marine plants, the sprays of grass forming white fountains. Several times he crossed and recrossed the road. The spurs were almost waist-high, and he was forced to clamber over the brittle stems.

Once, as he rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-colored bird erupted from a bough over his head and flew off with a wild screech, aureoles of light cascading from its red and yellow wings.

At last the storm subsided, and a pale light filtered through the stained-glass canopy. Again the forest was a place of rainbows, a deep iridescent light glowing around him. He walked down a narrow roadway which wound toward a large colonial house standing like a baroque pavilion on a rise in the center of the forest. Transformed by the frost, it seemed an intact fragment of Versailles or Fontainebleau, its pilasters and friezes spilling from the wide roof like sculptured fountains.

The road narrowed, avoiding the slope which led up to the house, but its annealed crust, blunted like halffused quartz, offered a more comfortable surface than the crystal teeth of the lawn. Fifty yards ahead Dr. Sanders came across what was unmistakably a jeweled rowing boat set solidly into the roadway, a chain of lapis lazuli mooring it to the verge. He realized that he was walking along a small tributary of the river, and that a thin stream of water still ran below the crust. This vestigial motion in some way prevented it from erupting into the spur-like forms of the rest of the forest floor.

As he paused by the boat, feeling the crystals along its sides, a huge four-legged creature half-embedded in the surface lurched forwards through the crust, the loosened pieces of lattice attached to its snout and shoulders shaking like a transparent cuirass. Its jaws mouthed the air silently as it struggled on its hooked legs, unable to clamber more than a few inches from the hollow trough in its own outline now filling with a thin trickle of water. Invested by the glittering light that poured from its body, the crocodile resembled a fabulous armorial beast. Its blind eyes had been transformed into immense crystalline rubies. It lunged toward him again, and Dr. Sanders kicked its snout, scattering the wet jewels that choked its mouth.

Leaving it to subside once more into a frozen posture, Dr. Sanders climbed the bank and limped across the lawn to the mansion, whose fairy towers loomed above the trees. Although out of breath and very nearly exhausted, he had a curious premonition of hope and longing, as if he were some fugitive Adam chancing upon a forgotten gateway to the forbidden paradise.

High in an upstairs window, the bearded man in the white suit watched him, the shotgun in his hands pointed at Sanders's chest.