The Drought

Chapter 11 – The Illuminated River

Like a bleached white bone, the flat deck of the river stretched away to the north. At its margins, where the remains of the stone embankment formed a ragged windbreak, the dunes had gathered together in high drifts, and these defined the slow-winding course of the drained bed. Beyond the dunes was the desert floor, littered with rocks and stones, and with fragments of dried mud like burnt shards of pottery. Now and then the stump of a tree marked the distance of a concealed ridge from the river, or a metal windmill, its rusty vanes held like a cipher above the empty wastes, stood guard over a dried-up creek. In the coastal hills, the upper slopes of the valley had flowered with a few clumps of hardy gorse sustained by the drifts of spray, but ten miles from the sea the desert was completely arid, the surface crumbling beneath the foot into a fine white powder. The metal refuse scattered about the dunes provided the only floral decoration-twisted bedsteads rose like clumps of desert thorns, water pumps and farm machinery formed angular sculptures, the dust spuming from their vanes in the light breeze.

Revived by the spring sunlight, the small party moved at a steady pace along the drained bed. In the three days since setting out they had covered twenty miles, walking unhurriedly over the lanes of firmer sand that wound along the bed. In part their rate of progress was dictated by Mrs. Quilter, who insisted on walking for a few miles each morning. During the afternoon she agrsed to sit on the cart, half asleep under the awning, while Ransom and Catherine Austen took turns with Philip Jordan to push it. With its large wooden wheels and light frame the cart was easy to move. Inside its locker were the few essentials of their expedition-a tent and blankets, a case of smoked herring and edible kelp, and half a dozen large cans of water, enough, Ransom estimated, for three weeks. Unless they found water during the journey to Mount Royal, they would have to give up and turn back before reaching the city, but they all tacitly accepted that they would not be returning to the coast.

The appearance of the lion convinced Ransom that there was water within twenty or thirty miles of the coast, probably released from a spring or underground river. Without this, the lion would not have survived, and its hasty retreat up the river indicated that the drained bed had been its route to the coast. They came across no spoors of the crealure, but each morning their own footprints around the camp Were soon smoothed over by the wind. Nonetheless Ransom and Jordan kept a sharp watch for the animal, their hands never far from the spears fastened to the sides of the cart.

From Mrs. Quilter, Ransom gathered that the three of them had been preparing for the journey for the past two years. At no time had there been any formal plan or route, but merely a shared sense of the need to retrace their steps toward the city and the small town by the drained lake. Mrs. Quilter was obviously looking for her son, convinced that he was still alive somewhere in the ruins of the city.

Philip Jordan's motives, like Catherine's, were more concealed. Whether, in fact, he was searching for Jonas or for tile painted houseboat he had shared with the old Negro, Ransom could not discover. He guessed that Mrs. Quilter had sensed these undercurrents during Philip's visits to her booth, and then carefully played on them, knowing that she and Catherine could never make the journey on their own. When Philip revealed the whereabouts of the car to her, Mrs. Quilter had needed no further persuasion.

Ironically, the collapse of the plan to drive in style to Mount Royal in the magnificently appointed hearse had returned Ransom to her favor.

"It was a grand car, doctor," she told him sadly for the tenth time, as they finished an early lunch under the shade of the cart. "That would have shown my old Quilty, wouldn't it?" She gazed into the distant haze, this vision of the prodigal mother's return hovering over the dunes. "Now I'll be sitting up in this old cart like a sack of potatoes."

"He'll be just as glad to see you, Mrs. Quilter." Ransom buried the remains of their meal in the sand. "Anyway, the car would have broken down within ten miles."

"Not if you'd been driving, doctor. I remember how you brought us here." Mrs. Quilter leaned back against the wheel. "You just started those cars with a press of your little finger."

Philip Jordan paced across to her, resenting this swing in her loyalties. "Mrs. Quilter, the battery was flat. It had been there for ten years."

Mrs. Quilter brushed this aside scornfully. "Batteries…! Help me up, would you, doctor? We'd best be pushing this cart on a bit more. Perhaps Philip will find us an old donkey somewhere."

They lifted her up under the awning. Ransom leaned against the shaft next to Catherine, while Philip Jordan patrolled the bank fifty yards ahead, spear in hand. Mrs. Quilter's upgrad ing of Ransom's status had not yet extended to Catherine Austen. She pushed away steadily at the handle, her leather. jacket fastened by its sleeves around her strong shoulders. When the wheel on Ransom's side lodged itself in the cracked surface, she chided him: "Come on, doctor, or do you want to sit up there with Mrs. Quilter?"

Ransom bided his time, thinking of when he had first seen, Catherine in the zoo at Mount Royal, exciting the lions in the cages. Since leaving them she had been subdued and guarded, but he could feel her reviving again, drawn to the empty savannahs and the quickening pulse of the desert cats.

Slowly they moved along the river, as Mrs. Quilter drowsed under the awning, her violet silks ruffled like half-furled sails in the warm air. Ahead of them the river continued its serpentine course between the dunes. Its broad surface, nearly three hundred yards wide, reflected the sunlight like a chalk deck. The draining water had grooved the surface, and it resembled the weathered dusty hide of an albino elephant The wheels broke the crust, and their footsteps churned the dust into soft plumes that drifted away on the air behind them. Everywhere the sand was mingled with the fine bones of small fish, the white flakes of mollusk shells.

Once or twice Ransom glanced over his shoulder toward the coast, glad to see that the dust obscured his view of the hills above the beach. Already he had forgotten the long ten years on the saltflats, the cold winter nights crouched among the draining brine pools, and the running battles with the men of the settlement.

The river turned to the northeast. They passed the remains of a line of wharfs. Stranded lighters, almost buried under the sand, lay beside them, their gray hulks blanched and empty. A group of ruined warehouses stood on the bank, jingle walls rising into the air with their upper windows intact. A series of concrete telegraph poles marked the progress of a road running toward the hills across the alluvial plain.

At this point the river had been dredged and widened. They passed more launches and rivercraft, half-submerged under the drifting sandhills. Ransom stopped and let the others move on ahead. He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The bnvarying light and absence of all movement made Ransom feel that he was advancing across an inner landscape where the elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without association.

They stopped by the hulk of a river steamer, a large graceful craft with a tall white funnel, which had run aground in the center of the channel. The deck was level with the surrounding sand. Ransom walked to the rail and stepped over it, then strolled across the deck to the open doors of the saloon below the bridge. Inside, the dust lay over the floor and tables, its slopes cloaking the seats and corner upholstery.

Catherine and Philip Jordan climbed onto the bridge and looked out over the plain for any signs of movement Two miles away the aluminum towers of a grain silo shone against the hills.

"Can you see anything?" Ransom called up. "If there are hot springs they should send up steam clouds."

They shook their heads. "Nothing, doctor."

Ransom walked forward to the bow, and sat down on the capstan. Lowering his head, he saw that its shadow lay across his hands. Cupping them together, he altered the outline of his skull, varying its shape and length. He noticed Mrs. Quilter eying him curiously from her seat atop the cart.

"Doctor, that's a trick my Quilty had. You looked like him then. Poor lad, he was trying to straighten his head like everyone else's."

Ransom crossed the rail and went over to her. On an impulse he reached up and held her hand. Small and round, its pulse fluttered faintly, like a trembling sparrow. Mrs. Quilter gazed down at him with her vague eyes, her mind far away. Suddenly Ransom found himself hoping against all logic that they would discover Quilter somewhere.

"We'll find him, Mrs. Quilter. He'll still be there."

"It's a dream, doctor, just a dream, a woman's fancy. But I couldn't rest until I've tried."

Ahead of them was a sharp bend in the river. A herd of cattle had been driven down the bank toward the last trickle of fluid, and their collapsed skeletons lay in the sand. The huge dented skulls lolled on their sides, each one like Quilter's, the grains of quartz glittering in the empty orbits.

Two miles further on a railway bridge crossed the river. A stationary train stood among the cantilevers, the doors of the carriages open onto the line. Ransom assumed that the route ahead had been blocked, and that the crew and passengers had decided to complete the journey to the coast by steamer.

They stopped in the shade below the bridge, and looked out at the endless expanse of the dry bed framed within its pillars. In the afternoon light the thousands of shadows cast by the metal refuse covered the surface with calligraphic patterns.

"We'll camp here tonight," Philip Jordan said. "We'll make an early start; by this time tomorrow we'll be well on the way."

Each evening it took them at least two hours to prepare their camp. They pushed., the cart into the shelter of one of the pillars, then drove the spears into the sand and draped the tent from the frame. Catherine and Ransom dug a deep trench around the tent, piling the warm sand into a windbreak. Philip walked up to the bank and searched the dunes for metal stakes. At night a cold wind blew across the desert, and the few blankets tkey had brought with them were barely adequate to keep them warm.

By dusk they had built a semicircular embankment three feet high around the tent and cart, held together by the pieces of metal. Inside this small burrow they sat together, cooking their meal at a fire of tinder and driftwood. The smoke wreathed upwards through the girders, drifting away into the cold night air.

While the two women prepared their meal, Ransom and Philip Jordan climbed up onto the bridge. The dried and splitting hulks of the passenger coaches sat between the cantilevers, the stars shining through the rents in their roofs. Philip began to tear armfuls of the dry wood from the sides of the coaches. Rotted suitcases and haversacks lay in the dust by the tracks. Ransom walked forward along the line to the locomotive. He climbed into the cabin and searched for a water tap among the rusted controls. He leaned his elbows on the sill of the driver's window and for half an hour looked out along the track as it crossed the bridge and wound away over the desert.

At night, as he slept, he was awakened by Philip Jordan. "Doctor! Listen!"

He felt the young man's hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see the glowing embers of the fire reflected in his eyes as he stared across the river. "What is it?"

Far away to the northwest, where the dried trees and husks of the desert merged into the foothills of the night, an animal howled wearily. Its lost cries echoed faintly among the steel pillars of the bridge, reverberating across the white river that lay beside them, as if trying to resurrect this longdormant skeleton of the dead land.

At dawn the next morning they dismantled the camp and loaded their equipment into the cart. The disturbed night, and the earlier appearance of the sun each morning, delayed their departure. Philip Jordan paced around the cart as he waited for Mrs. Quilter, tapping his spear restlessly against the spokes of the wheel. In the sunlight his dark beaked face gave him the appearance of a nervous desert nomad, scion of some dwindling aristocratic tribe.

"Did you hear the sounds?" he asked Catherine when she appeared. "What was it-a lion or a panther?"

Catherine shook her head. She had loosened her hair, and the long tresses lifted about her head in the cool air. Unlike Philip, the sounds of the night seemed to have calmed her. "Neither. A dog of some sort. Perhaps a wolf. It was far away."

"Not more than five miles." Philip climbed up on to the remains of the camp and peered across the riverbed. "We'll be on it by noon. Keep your eyes open." He glanced sharply at Catherine, and then looked down at Ransom, who was squatting by the fire, warming his hands over the embers. "Doctor?"

"Of course, Philip. But I shouldn't worry. After ten years they'll be more frightened of us than we are of them."

"That's wishful thinking, doctor." To Catherine, he added tersely as he strode down the embankment: "On the cliff we saw a _lion_."

When Mrs. Quilter was ready, he tried to persuade her to take her seat on the cart Although she had slept badly and was already becoming overtired by the journey, Mrs. Quilter insisted on walking for the first hour. She moved along at a snail's pace, her tiny booted feet advancing over the cracked sand like timorous mice.

Philip strode beside her, barely controlling his impatience, steering the cart with one hand. Now and then Catherine would take Mrs. Quilter's arm, but she insisted on making her own way, pausing to mumble to herself and shake her head.

Ransom took advantage of her slow pace to stroll away across the surface of the river, picking among the windblown debris that had spilled down onto the bank-windmill blades and the detached doors of cars. The cold morning air refreshed him, and he was glad that Mrs. Quilter was slowing the party's progress. The few minutes alone allowed him to collect the stray thoughts that had preoccupied him more and more during their advance up the river. As he pondered on the real reasons for their journey, he had begun to sense its true inner compass. At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs. Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life; but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all into the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking, but nonetheless they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the drained bed.

"Philip! Dr. Ransom!" Catherine Austen had stopped some twenty yards behind the others and was pointing down the river behind them.

A mile away, where the bridge crossed the river, the empty train was burning briskly in the sunlight, billows of smoke pouring upwards into the air. The flames moved from one coach to the next, the bright embers falling between the tracks onto the site of the camp below. Within a few minutes the entire train had been engulfed. The sky to the south was stained by the dark smoke.

Ransom walked over to the others. "There's a signal, at least," he said quietly. "If there's anyone here they'll know we've arrived."

Philip Jordan's hands fretted on the shaft of his spear. "It must have been the fire. Didn't you put it out, doctor?"

"Of course. An ember must have blown up onto the track during the night."

They watched the fire burn itself out among the last coaches on the approach lines to the bridge. Collecting himself, Philip turned to Mrs. Quilter and motioned her toward the cart.

Ransom took his place at the shaft They moved off at a brisk pace, all three pushing the cart along. Over his shoulder, when they reached a bend in the river, Ransom looked back at the burning bridge. The smoke still drifted up from the train, its curtain sealing off the south behind them.

By noon they had covered ten miles more. They stopped to prepare their midday meal. Pleased with their progress, Philip Jordan helped Mrs. Quilter down from the cart and set up the awning for her, trailing it from the hull of an old lighter.

After the meal Ransom strolled away along the bank. Cloaked by the sand, the remains of wharfs and jetties straggled past the hulks of barges. The river widened into a small harbor. Ransom climbed a wooden quay and walked past the leaning cranes through the outer streets of a small town. The facades of half-ruined buildings and warehouses marked out the buried streets. He passed a hardware store and then a small bank, its doors shattered by ax blows. The burntout remains of a bus depot lay in a heap of smashed glass plate and dulled chromium.

A large bus stood in the court, its roof and sides smothered under the sand, in which the eyes of the windows were set like mirrors of an interior world. Ransom ploughed his way down the center of the road, passing the submerged forms of abandoned cars. The succession of humps, the barest residue of identity, interrupted the smooth flow of the dunes down the street. He remembered the cars excavated from the quarry on the beach. There they had emerged intact from their ten-year burial, the scratched fenders and bright chrome mined straight from the past. By contrast, the half-covered cars in the street were like idealized images of themselves, the essences of their own geometry, the smooth curvatures like the eddies flowing out of some platonic future.

Submerged by the sand, everything had been transvalued in the same way. Ransom stopped by one of the stores in the main street. The sand blowing across it had reduced the square glass plate to an elliptical window three feet wide. Peering through it, he saw a dozen faces gazing out at him from the dim light with the waxy expressions of plastic mannequins. Their arms were raised in placid postures, the glacé smiles as drained as the world around them.

Abruptly, Ransom caught his breath. Among the blank faces, partly obscured by the reflections of the buildings behind him, was a grinning head. It swam into focus, like a congealing memory, and Ransom started as a shadow moved in the street behind him.

"Quilt-!" He watched the empty streets and sidewalks, trying to remember if all the footprints in the sand were his own. The wind passed flatly down the street, and a wooden sign swung from the roof of the store opposite.

Ransom walked toward it, and then turned and hurried away through the drifting sand.

They continued their progress up the river. Pausing less frequently to rest, they pushed the cart along the baked white deck. Far behind them the embers of the burnt-out train sent their long plumes into the sky.

Then, during the midafternoon, when the town was five miles behind them, they looked back and saw dark billows of smoke rising from its streets. The flames raced across the rooftops, and within ten minutes an immense pall of smoke cut off the southern horizon.

"Dr. Ransom!" Philip Jordan strode over to him as he leaned against the shaft of the cart. "Did you light a fire while you were there? You went for a walk."

Ransom shook his head. "I don't think so, Philip. I had some matches with me-I suppose I might have done."

"But did you? Can't you remember?" Philip watched him closely.

"No. I'm sure I didn't. Why should I?"

"All right, then. But I'll take those matches, doctor."

From then on, despite Philip's suspicions that he had started the fires-suspicions that for some obscure reason he found himself sharing-Ransom was certain they were being followed. The landscape had changed perceptibly. The placid open reaches of the coastal plain, its perspectives marked by an isolated tree or silo, had vanished. Here the remains of small towns gave the alluvial bench an uneven appearance, the wrecks of cars were parked among the dunes by the river and along the roads approaching it Everywhere the shells of metal towers and chimneys rose into the air. Even the channel of the river was more crowded, and they wound their way past scores of derelict craft.

They passed below the spans of the demolished road bridge that had interrupted their drive to the coast ten years earlier. As they stepped through the collapsed arches, and the familiar perspectives reappeared in front of them, Ransom remembered the solitary figure they had seen walking slowly away up the drained bed. He left the cart and went on ahead, searching for the footsteps of this enigmatic figure. In front of him the light was hazy and obscured, and for a moment, as he tried to clear his eyes, he saw a sudden glimpse of someone three hundred yards away, his back touched by the sunlight as he moved off among the empty basins.

Chapter 12 – The Smoke Fires

This image remained with him as they completed the final stages of the journey to Mount Royal. Ten days later, when they reached the western outskirts of the city, it had become for Ransom inextricably confused with all the other specters of the landscape they had crossed. The aridity of the central plain, with its desolation and endless deserts stretching across the continent, numbed him by its extent. The unvarying desert light, the absence of all color, and the brilliant whiteness of the stony landscape made him feel that he was advancing across an immense graveyard. Above all, the lack of movement gave to even the slightest disturbance an almost hallucinatory intensity. By night, as they rested in a hollow cut into the dunes along the bank, they would hear the same unseen animal somewhere to the northwest, howling to itself at their approach. Always it was several miles away from them, its cries echoing across the desert, reflected off the isolated walls that loomed like megaliths in the gray light.

By day, when they set out again, they would see the fires burning behind them. The dark plumes rose from the desert floor, marking the progress of the river bed front the south. Sometimes six or seven fires wtuld burn simultaneously in a long line, their billows leaning against the sky.

Their supplies of water were now almost exhausted, and the failure to find any trace of springs or underground channels had put an end to the original purpose of the expedition. However, none of them mentioned the need to turn back for the coast, or made a serious attempt to dig for water in the sand. Backs bent against the cart, they plodded on toward the rising skyline of the city.

The reduction in their daily water ration made them uneager to talk to each other. Most of the time Mrs. Quilter sat tied to the back-rest atop the cart, swaying and muttering to herself. Philip Jordan, his dust-streaked face more and more lizardlike in the heat, carefully scanned the verges of the river, taking his spear and running on ahead whenever the others rested. Pushing away at the cart, Catherine Austen kept to herself. Only the cries of the animal at night drew any response from her.

On the night before they reached the city, Ransom woke to the distant howling and saw her a hundred yards from the camp. She was walking on the dunes beyond the river's edge, the dark night wind whipping her long hair off her shoulders.

The next morning, as they knelt by the fire, sipping at one of the two remaining canteens, he asked her: "Catherine, we're almost there. What are you looking for?"

She picked up a handful of the dust and clenched it in her fist, then let the white crystals dissolve between her fingers.

Surrounded on all sides by the encroaching desert, the city seemed to have drawn in upon itself, the ridges of brick and stone running off into the sandhills. As they neared the city, the burnt-out roofs rose above the warehouses by the dockyards. Ransom looked up at the wharfs and riverside streets, waiting for any signs of movement, but the roads were deserted, filled with sand like the floors of canyons. The buildings receded in dusty tiers, transforming the whole place into a prehistoric terrace city, a dead metropolis that turned its forbidding stare on them as they passed.

Beyond the outskirts of the city, the riverside towns had vanished. Huge dunes sloped among the ruined walls, pieces of burnt timber sticking from the smooth flanks. Philip Jordan and Ransom climbed onto the bank and looked out across the causeways of rubble stretching away like the foundation stones of a city still waiting to be laid. Here and there the remains of a shanty leaned against a wall, or a small group of buildings stood alone like a deserted fort. Half a mile away they could see the curve of the motorbridge, and beyond it an indistinct series of earthworks that marked the remains of Larchmont.

Ransom stared out at the lake. Where the open water had once been, a sea of white dunes stretched away toward. the horizon, their rolling crests touched by the sunlight. Ransom waited for them to move, the soft waves sweeping across the shore. The symmetry of the dunes, their drained slopes like polished chalk, illuminated the entire landscape.

Shaking his head at the desolation around him, Philip Jordan muttered: "There's no water here, Ransom. Those fires were an accident. Quilter, everyone, they're all dead."

Ransom looked back at the dark plumes lifting into the sky behind them. The nearest was only half a mile away, burning somewhere by the harbor authority wharf. "Philip, there must be someone. If they're here, there'll be water."

Below them, Catherine Austen leaned against the side of the cart. Under her awning Mrs. Quilter rocked like a child from side to side. Philip began to walk down to them when a harsh barking crossed the air from a two-story building a hundred yards from the bank.

Philip crouched down behind a section of metal fencing, but Ransom beckoned to him. "Philip, come on! Those dogs are given water by someone."

They made their way along the fence, darting from the cover of one ruined house to another. The humps of car roofs and the blackened stumps of old watchtowers broke through the surface. The noise of the dogs rose from the far side of the building. A stairway led to the shopping level on the second floor. Ransom and Philip moved carefully up the steps to the open balcony. Drifts of dust, mingled with old cans and pieces of broken furniture, had been blown against the metal balustrade overlooking the piazza. Holding their spears, they crawled across to the railing. For a moment Philip hesitated, as if frightened by whom he might see below, but Ransom pulled his arm.

In the center of the piazza, some fifty. yards to their left, five or six dogs were attacking a group of plastic mannequins taken from one of the stores and set out on the pavement. The lean white forms leapt and snarled, tearing at the faces of the mannequins and stripping off the rags of clothing draped across their shoulders and waists. One after the other, the mannequins were knocked over, their arms and legs torn off by the snapping mouths.

A whiplike crack came from beyond the far end of the building, and the pack turned and raced off, two of them dragging a headless mannequin across the dust. Rounding the corner of the building, they disappeared among the ruined streets, the sharp cracks of the whip driving them on.

Ransom pointed to a detached head rocking in the gutter, seeing in the savaged faces the waxy images behind the store window in the riverside town. "A warning to travelers, Philip? Or just practice for the dogs?"

They returned to Catherine and Mrs. Quilter, and rested for a few minutes in the shade inside the hull of a wrecked barge. In a breaker's yard across the river was the skeleton of a large fishing trawler, its long hull topped by the high sternbridge that Jonas had paced like some desert Ahab, hunting for his white sea. Ransom glanced at Philip Jordan, and saw that he was staring up at the bridge, his eyes searching the empty portholes.

Mrs. Quilter sat up weakly. "Can you see my old Quilty?" she asked. During the past few days, as they neared Mount Royal, each of them had been generous with their water rations to Mrs. Quilter, as if this in some way would appease the daunting specter of her son. Now, however, with only two canteens left and the city apparently deserted, Ransom noticed that she received barely her own ration.

"He'll be here, doctor," she said, aware of this change of heart. "He'll be somewhere, I can feel it."

Ransom wiped the dust from his beard. The thinning hair was now as white as Miranda Lomax's had ever been. He watched the distant plumes of smoke rising along the course of the river. "Perhaps he is, Mrs. Quilter."

They left the trawler and set off toward the motorbridge, which they reached half an hour later. Outside the entrance to the yacht basin the remains of Mrs. Quilter's barge lay in the sunlight, a few burnt beams dimly out-lining its shape. She pottered over them, stirring the charred timbers with a stick, and then let herself be lifted back into the carts.

As they ploughed through the fine dust below the fishermen's quays, Ransom noticed that from here out to the white dunes of the lake the surface was composed almost entirely of the ground skeletons of thousands of small fish. Spurs of tiny bones and vertebrae shone in the dust at his feet. This coating of bone meal formed the brilliant reflector that illuminated the lake and the surrounding desert.

As they passed below the intact span of the motorbridge, Ransom let go of the shaft. "Philip, the houseboat!" Recognizing the rectangular outline buried in the sand, he ran through the drifts toward it.

He knelt down in the flowing sand, and brushed it away from the windows, then peered through the scored glass as Philip Jordan clambered up beside him.

Some years earlier the cabin had been ransacked. Books were scattered about, the desk drawers pulled out onto the floor; but at a glance Ransom could see that all his mementos, which he had gathered together before leaving Larchmont, were still within the cabin. A window on the port side was broken, and the sand poured across the desk, half-submerging the framed reproduction, Tanguy's image of drained strands. Ransom's paperweight, the fragment of Jurassic limestone, lay just beyond reach of the sand.

"Doctor, what about the water?" Philip Jordan knelt beside him, clearing the sand away from the window. "You had some water in a secret tank."

"Under the galley. Get in round the other side." As Philip stepped over the roof and began to drive the sand away, Ransom peered down again through the window. The care he had given to furnishing the houseboat, the mementos with which he had stocked it like some psychic ark, made him feel that it had been prepared in the future and stranded here ten years earlier in anticipation of his present needs.

"Over here, doctor!" Philip called. Ransom left the window and crossed the dust-covered roof. Catherine Austen was climbing the bank, gazing up at the ruins of her villa.

"Have you found it, Philip?"

Philip pointed down through the window; the floor of the galley had been ripped back to the walls, revealing the rungs of a stairwell into the pontoon.

"Someone else found it first, doctor." Philip stood up. He rubbed his throat, leaving a white streak across his neck. He turned and looked back down the river to the fishing trawler in the breaker's yard.

Ransom left him and began to climb the slope to the embankment of the bridge. The sand shifted, pouring away around his knees. With his feet he touched a bladed metal object, the outboard motor he had abandoned by the houseboat. For some reason, he now wanted to get away from the others. During the journey from the coast they had relied on one another, but with their arrival at Mount Royal, at the very point from which they,, had set out ten years earlier, he felt that all his obligations to them had been discharged. Ar he climbed the embankment he looked down at them, isolated from each other in the unvarying light, held together only by the sand pouring between their feet.

He climbed over the balustrade and limped slowly along the pavement toward the center of the span. The surface was covered with the strips of metal and old tires that he remembered. He rested on the rail, looking out across the dunecovered ruins around the empty towers of the distant city. To the northeast, the white surface of the drained lake rolled onwards to the horizon.

He sat down by a gap in the balustrade, surrounded by the empty cans and litter, like an exhausted mendicant, Below him Philip Jordan made his way down the riverbed, a spear in one hand and one of the two canteens over his shoulder. Catherine Austen was moving diagonally away from him up the bank, searching for something among the splinters of driftwood. Only Mrs. Quilter still sat on the cart below her tattered awning.

For ten minutes Ransom leaned against the balustrade on the deserted bridge, watching the figures below move away. Like an old crab, Mrs. Quilter crawled slowly up the far bank.

Vaguely hoping for a glimpse of his own house, his eye was distracted by a gleam of light. Cradled among the dunes near the site of Lomax's mansion was a small pond of blue water, its smooth surface ruffled into vivid patterns. Watching it, Ransom decided that the pond was a mirage of remarkable intensity. At least a hundred feet in diameter, the water was ringed by a narrow beach of smooth sand shaped like the banks of a miniature reservoir. The dunes and ruined walls surrounded it on all sides.

As he waited for the mirage to fade, a small white bird crossed the ruins and swooped down over the water. Furling its wings, it landed on the surface, gliding along a wake of breaking light.

Ransom clambered to his feet and hurried forward across the bridge. Giving up any attempt to find the others, he climbed the rail at the lower end and slid down the embankment. Pausing to rest every fifty yards, he ran on along the waterfront streets, stepping on the roofs of the cars buried under the sand.

"Doctor!" As he sidestepped over a low wall, Ransom almost jumped onto the diminutive form of Mrs. Quilter, crouching below him in a crevice. She gazed up at him with timid eyes. Somehow she had managed to dismount from the cart and make her way up the bank. "Doctor," she sighed plaintively, "I can't move myself."

When Ransom began to run on she fished the other canteen from beneath her silks. "I'll share it with you, doctor."

"Come on, then." Ransom took her arm and helped her to her feet. They set off slowly together. Once she tripped over a partly buried cable and sat down panting in the dust Ransom chafed at the delay. Finally he knelt down and hoisted her onto his back, her small, dry hands clasped around his neck.

Surprisingly, she was as light as a child. Along the open stretches, he was able to run for a few paces. Now and then he put her down and climbed one of the walls to take his bearings. Sitting in a sandfilled swimming pool by a lean-to of burnt timber, the embers of an old fire around her, she watched Ransom like an amiable witch.

As they took their final leave of the river, Mrs. Quilter pinched his ear.

"Doctor, look back for a minute!"

Half a mile away, below the motorbridge, clouds of smoke rose from the houseboat, the flames burning brightly in the shadows below the bridge. A few seconds later the cart began to burn, as if touched by some invisible torch.

"Never mind!" Tightening his grip on her legs, Ransom stumbled away across the rubble, like a lunatic Sinbad bearing the old woman of the desert sea. He turned in and out of the sloping streets, the dust rising behind them. Ahead he saw the ring of higher dunes that surrounded the lake of water. With a last effort he ran up the nearest slope.

When he reached the crest he stopped and let Mrs. Quilter slide from his shoulders. He walked slowly down to the silent disc of blue water. Stirred by the wind, a few wavelets lapped at the beach, a strip of dark sand that merged into the rubble. The lake was a small reservoir, the banks of sand built along a convenient perimeter of ruined walls. To Ransom, however, it seemed to have dropped from the sky, a distillation of all the lost rain of a decade.

Ten feet from the water's edge he broke into a run, and stumbled across the loose bricks to the firmer sand. The white bird sat in the center, watching him circumspectly. As the water leapt around his feet, the foam was as brilliant as its plumage. Kneeling in the shallow water, he bathed his head and face, then soaked his shirt, letting the cool crystal-like liquid run down his arms. The powdery blue water stretched to the opposite shore, the dunes hiding all sight of the wilderness.

With a short cry, the bird flew off across the surface. Ransom gazed around the bank. Then, over his shoulder, he became aware of a huge figure standing on the sand behind him.

Well over six feet tall, and with its broad shoulders covered by a loose cloak of cheetah skins, an immense feathered cap on its head, the figure towered above him like a grotesque primitive idol bedecked with the unrelated possessions of an entire tribe. Girdled around its waist by a gold cord was a flowing caftan that had once been a blue paisley dressing gown, cut back to reveal a stout leather belt hitching up a pair of trousers. These had apparently been cut from odd lengths of turkish carpeting, and terminated their uneven progress in a set of hefty sea boots. Clamped to them by metal braces were two stout wooden stilts nailed down to a pair of sandshoes. Together they raised their owner two feet further above the ground.

Ransom knelt in the water, watching the figure's scowling face. The expression was one of almost preposterous ferocity. The long russet hair fell to the shoulders, enclosing the face like a curtained exhibit in a fairground freak show. Above the notched cheekbones, the feathered cap sprouted laterally into two black wings, like a Norseman's helmet, and between them a long wavering appendage pointed down at Ransom.

"Quilter-!" he began, recognizing the stuffed body of the black swan. "Quilter, I'm-"

Before he had climbed to his feet the figure was suddenly galvanized into life, and with a shout launched itself through the air at Ransom. Knocked sideways into the water, Ransom felt the heavy knees in the small of his back, strong hands forcing his shoulders into the water. A fist pounded on the back of his head like a drum. Gasping for air, Ransom had a last glimpse through the flailing furs of Mrs. Quilter hobbling down the bank, her beaked face wearing a stunned smile as she croaked: "It's my Quilty boy… come here, lad, it's your old mother come to save you…"

Half an hour later Ransom had partly recovered, stretched out on the beach by the cool water. As he lay half-stunned in the sunlight he was aware of Mrs. Quilter jabbering away on one of the dunes a few yards from him, the silent figure of her son, like an immense cuckoo, squatting beneath his furs in the sand. The old woman, beside herself with delight at having at last found her son, was now inflicting on him a nonstop resume of everything that had happened to her during the previous decade. To Ransom's good luck, she included a glowing account of the magnificent expedition by automobile to the coast, which Ransom had arranged for her. At the mention of his name, Quilter strode down the dune to inspect Ransom, turning him over with a stilted boot. His broad dented face, with its wandering eyes set above the hollowed cheeks, had changed little during the intervening years, although he seemed twice his former height and gazed about with a more self-composed air. As he listened to his mother he cocked one eye at her thoughtfully, almost as if calculating the culinary possibilities of this small bundle of elderly gristle.

Ransom climbed unsteadily to his feet and walked slowly up the dune to them. Quilter seemed barely to notice him, almost as if Ransom had emerged half-drowned from this pool every morning of the past ten years. His huge eyes were mottled like marbled sandstone. The ambiguous watery smile had vanished, and his wide mouth was firm and thinlipped.

"Doctor-?" Mrs. Quilter broke off her monologue, surprised to see Ransom but delighted that he had been able to join them. "I was just telling him about you, doctor. Quilty, the doctor's a rare one with cars."

Ransom murmured noncommittally, weakly brushing the damp sand from his half-dried clothes.

In a gruff voice, Quilter said: "Don't fish into any cars here, there are people buried in them." With a gleam of his old humor he added: "Hole down to the door, slide them in, up with the window, and that's their lot-eh?"

"Sounds a good idea," Ransom agreed cautiously. He decided not to tell him about Philip Jordan or Catherine. As yet Quilter had given them no indication of where or how he lived.

For five minutes Quilter sat silently on the crest of the dune, occasionally patting his furs as his mother chattered away, touching him tentatively with her little hands. At one point he reached up to the swan's neck, dangling in front of his right eye, and pulled off the headdress. Beneath it his scalp was bald, and the thick red hair that fell to his shoulders sprang from the margins of a huge tonsure.

Then, without a word, he jumped to his feet. With a brief gesture to them he strode off on his stilts across the sand, the cheetah furs and dressing gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.

Chapter 13 – The Oasis

Barely keeping up with Quilter, they followed him as he strode in and out of the dunes, his stilted sandshoes carrying him across the banks of rubble. Now and then, as Ransom helped Mrs. Quilter over a ruined wall, he saw the river bank and the white bonehills of the lake, but the pattern of the eroded streets was only the faintest residue of Larchmont. Nothing moved among the ruins. In the hollows they passed the remains of small fires and the picked skeletons of birds and desert voles left years beforehand.

They reached a set of wrought-iron gates rooted into the sand, and Ransom recognized the half-buried perspectives of the avenue in which he had once lived. On the other side of the road the Reverend Johnstone's house had vanished below the dust carried up from the lake.

Skirting the gate, Quilter led them through an interval in the wall, then set off up the drive. The shell of Lomax's mansion was hidden among the dunes, its upper floors burned out. They passed the entrance. The cracked glass doors stood open, and the marble floor inside the hall was strewn with rubbish and old cans.

They rounded the house and reached the swimming pool. Here at last there were some signs of habitation. A line of screens made of tanned hide had been erected around the pool, and the eaves of a large tented structure rose from the deep end. The faint smoke of a wood fire lifted from the center of the pool. The sandy verges were littered with old cooking implements, bird traps, and pieces of refrigerator cabinets, salvaged from the nearby ruins. A short distance away the wheel-less bodies of two cars sat side by side among the dunes.

A wooden stairway led dowh onto the floor of the swimming pool. Protected by the screens, the floor was smooth and clean, the colored tridents and sea horses visible among the worn tiles. Walking down the slope from the shallow end, they approached the inner wall of blankets. Quilter pushed these aside and beckoned them into the central court.

Lying on a low divan beside the fire was a woman whom Ransom recognized with an effort to be Miranda Lomax. Her long white hair now reached to her feet, enclosing her like a threadbare shroud, and her face had th. same puckish eyes and mouth. But what startled Ransom was her size. She was now as fat as a pig, with gross arms and hips, immense shoulders and waist. Swaddled in fat, her small eyes gazed at Ransom from above her huge cheeks. With a pudgy hand she brushed her hair off her forehead. She was wearing, almost modishly, a black nightdress that seemed designed expressly to show off her vast corpulence.

"Quilty…" she began. "Who's this?" She glanced at Quilter, who kicked off his stilts and gestured his mother to a stool by the fire. Leaving Ransom to sit down on the floor, Quilter reclined into a large fanbacked wicker chair, whose bamboo scrollwork rose above his head in an arch of elaborate trellises. He reached up to the swan's neck and pulled off his hat, dumping it onto the floor.

Miranda stirred, unable to roll her girth more than an inch or two across the divan. "Quilty, isn't this our wandering doctor? What was his name…?" She nodded slowly at Mrs. Quilter, and then turned her attention to Ransom. A smile spread across her face, as if Ransom's arrival had quickened some long dormant and amusing memory. "Doctor, you've come all the way from the coast to see us. Quilty, your mother's arrived."

Mrs. Quilter regarded Miranda blankly with her tired eyes, either unable or unwilling to recognize her.

Quilter sat in his wicker throne. He glanced distantly at his mother, and then said to Miranda, with a quirk of humor: "She likes cars."

"Does she?" Miranda tittered at this. "Well, she looks as if she's just in time for you to fix her up." She turned her pleasant beam on Ransom. "What about you, doctor?"

Ransom brushed his beard. "I've had to make do with other forms of transport. I'm glad to see you're still here, Miranda."

"Yes… I suppose you are. Have you brought any water with you?"

"Water?" Ransom repeated. "I'm afraid we used all ours getting here."

Miranda sighed and looked across at Quilter. "A pity. We're rather short of water, you know."

"But the reservoir-" Ransom gestured in the direction of the pond. "You seem to have the stuff lying around all over the place."

Miranda shook her head. Her rapid attention to the topic made Ransom aware that the water might well turn out to be a mirage after all. Miranda eyed him thoughtfully. "That reservoir, as you call it, is all we've got. Isn't it, Quilter?"

Quilter nodded slowly, taking in Ransom in his gaze. Ransom wondered whether Quilter really remembered him, or even, for that matter, his mother. The old woman sat halfasleep on her stool, exhausted now that the long journey had ended.

Miranda smiled at Ransom. "You see, we were rather hoping you'd brought some water with you. But if you haven't, that's just that Tell me, doctor, why on earth have you come here?"

Ransom paused before answering, aware that Quilter's sharp eyes were on him. Obviously they assumed that the little party was the advance guard of some official expedition from the coast, perhaps the harbinger of the end of the drought.

"Well," he temporized, "I know it sounds quixotic, Miranda, but I wanted to see Lomax and yourself-and Quilter, of course. Perhaps you don't understand?"

Miranda sat up. "But I _do_. I don't know about Richard, he's rather awkward and unpredictable these days, and Quilter does look a bit fed up with you already, but _I_ understand." She patted her huge stomach, looking down with tolerant affection at its giant girth. "If you haven't brought any water, well things won't be quite the same, let's be honest, but you can certainly stay for a few days. Can't he, Quilter?"

Before Quilter could reply Mrs. Quilter began to sway on her stool. Ransom caught her arm. "She needs some rest," he said. "Can she lie down somewhere?"

Quilter carried her away to a small cubicle behind the curtains. In a few minutes he came back and handed Ransom a pail of tepid water. Although his stomach was still full of the water he had swallowed in the lake, Ransom made a pretense of drinking gratefully, assuming that Quilter now accepted him.

To Miranda he said casually: "I take it you had us followed here?"

"We knew someone was struggling along. Not many people come up from the coast-most of them seem to get tired or disappear." She flashed Ransom a sharp smile. "I think they get eaten on the way-by the lions, I mean."

Ransom nodded. "As a matter of interest, what have you been eating? Apart from a few weary travelers like myself."

Miranda hooted. "Don't worry, doctor, you're much too stringy. Anyway, those days are past, aren't they, Quilty? Now we've got organized there's just about enough to eat- you'd be amazed how many cans you can find under these ruins-but to begin with it was difficult. I know you think everyone went off to the coast, but an awful lot stayed behind. After a while they thinned out." She patted her stomach reflectively. "Ten years is a long time."

Above them, from the dunes by the pool, there was a sharp crackling, and the pumping sounds of a bellows being worked. A fire of sticks and oil rags began to burn, sending up a cloud of smoke. Ransom looked up at the huge black pillar, rising almost from the very ground at his feet. It was identical with all the other smoke columns that had followed them across the desert, and Ransom had the sudden feeling that he had at last arrived at his destination, despite the ambiguous nature of his reception-no one had mentioned Catherine or Philip Jordan, but he assumed that people drifted about the desert without formality, taking their chances with Quilter. Some he drowned in the pool out of habit, while others he might take back to his den.

Miranda snuffled some phlegm up one nostril. "Whitman's here," she said to Quilter, who was gazing through a crack in the screen at his mother's sleeping face.

There was a patter of wooden clogs from behind the curtains, and three small children ran out from another cubicle. Surprised by the fire lifting from the edge of the swimming pool, they toddled out, squeaking softly at their mother.

Their swollen heads and puckish faces were perfect replicas of Miranda and Quilter. Each had the same brachycephalie skull, the same downward eyes and hollow cheeks. Their small necks and bodies seemed barely strong enough to carry their huge rolling heads. To Ransom they first resembled the children of the congenitally insane, but then he saw their eyes watching him. Still half asleep, their huge pupils were full of strange dreams.

Quilter ignored them as they scrambled around his feet for a better view of the fire. A man's hunchbacked figure was silhouetted against the screens. There seemed no point in lighting the fire, and Ransom decided that its significance was ritual, part of some established desert practice. Like so many defunct and forgotten rituals, it was now more frightening in its mystery than when it had served some real purpose.

Miranda watched the children scurry among the curtains. "My infants, doctor, or the few that lived. Tell me you think they're beautiful."

"They are," Ransom assured her hastily. He took one of the children by the arm and felt the huge bony skull. Its eyes were illuminated by a ceaseless ripple of thoughts. "He looks like a genius."

Miranda nodded sagely. "That's very right, doctor, they all are. What's still locked up inside poor old Quilter I've brought out in them."

There was a shout from above. A one-eyed man with a stooped crablike walk, his left arm ending in a stump above the wrist, the other blackened by charcoal, peered down at them. His face and ragged clothes were covered with dust, as if he had been living in the wild for several months. Ransom recognized the driver of the water tanker who had taken him to the zoo. A scar on the right cheek had deepened during the previous years, twisting his face into a caricature of an angry grimace, so that the man was less frightening than pathetic, a scarred wreck of himself.

Addressing Quilter, he said: "The Jonas boy and the woman went off along the river. The lions will get them tonight."

Quilter stared at the floor of the pool. At intervals he reached up and scratched his tonsure. His preoccupied manner suggested that he was struggling with some insoluble conundrum.

"Have they got any water?" Miranda asked.

"Not a drop," Whitman rejoined with a sharp laugh. His twisted face, which Ransom had seen reflected over his shoulder in the store window, gazed down at him with its fierce eye. Whitman wiped his forehead with his stump, and Ransom remembered the mannequins torn to pieces by the dogs. Perhaps this was how the man took his revenge, hating even the residuum of human identity in the blurred features of the mannequins, standing quietly in the piazza like the drained images of the vanished people of the city left behind far into the future. Everything around Ransom now seemed as isolated, the idealized residue of a landscape and human figures whose primitive forbears had long since gone. He wondered what Whitman would do if he knew that Ransom too had once amputated the dead. Neither past nor future could change, only the mirror between them.

Whitman was about to move off when the sounds of a distant voice echoed across the dunes. A confused harangue, addressed to itself as much as to the world at large, it was held together by a mournful dirgelike rhythm.

Whitman scuttled about. "Jonas!" He seemed uncertain whether to advance or flee. "I'll catch him this time!"

Quilter stood up. He placed the swan's cap on his head.

"Quilter," Miranda called after him. "Take the doctor. He can have a word with Lomax, and find out what he's up to."

Quilter remounted his stilts. They climbed out of the pool and set off past the remains of the fire burning itself out, following Whitman across the dunes. Tethered to the stump of a watchtower in one of the hollows were the dogs. The small pack, now on leash, tugged at Whitman's hand. He crept along the low walls, peering over the rough terrain. Twenty yards behind him, towering into the air like an idol in his full regalia, came Quilter, Ransom at his heels. From somewhere ahead of them the low monotonous harangue sounded into the air.

Then, as they mounted one of the dunes, they saw the tall solitary figure of Jonas a hundred yards away, moving slowly among the ruins by the edge of the drained lake. His dark face raised to the sunlight, he walked with the same entranced motion, declaiming at the white bone-like dust that reached across the lake to the horizon. His voice droned on, part prophecy, part lamentation, and twice Ransom caught the word "sea." His arms rose at each crescendo, then fell again as he disappeared from sight.

Obliquely behind him, Whitman scurried along, holding back the straining bodies of the dogs. He hesitated behind the base of a ruined tower, waiting for Jonas to emerge on to the more open stretch of the old lakeside road. He placed the leash in his mouth, and with his one hand began to undo the thong.

"Jonas-"

The call came softly from among the dunes out on the lake. Jonas stopped and looked around, searching for the caller, then saw the grotesque capped figure of Quilter behind him and the dogs jerking away from the hapless Whitman.

As the dogs rushed off in a pack, the tall man came to life. Lowering his head, he raced off, his long legs carrying him away across the rubble. The dogs gained on him, snapping at his heels, and he pulled an old fishing net from around his waist and whipped It across their faces. Suddenly the dogs entangled themselves around the stump of a telegraph pole and came to a halt, barking over each other as they tumbled in the dust.

Ransom watched the thin figure of the preacher disappear along the lakeshore. Whitman cursed his way over to the dogs, kicking at their flanks. Quilter, meanwhile, was gazing unperturbed at the hillocks of rubble.

"Is Jonas still looking for this lost sea?" Ransom asked him.

"He's found it," Quilter said.

"Where?"

Quilter pointed to the lake, at the white chalklike dunes, the myriads of fine bones washed to the surface by the wind speckling in the sunlight.

"This is his sea?" Ransom said as they set off. "Then why doesn't he go out onto it?"

Quilter shrugged. "Lions there," he said, and then strode on ahead.

A hundred yards away, across the stretch of open ground separating the Lomax's swimming pool from the eastern edge of the estate, a small pavilion appeared in a hollow among the dunes, its glass and metal cornices shining brilliantly in the sunlight. It had been constructed from assorted pieces of chromium and enameled metal-the radiator grilles of cars, reflectors of electric heaters, radio cabinets, and so on-fitted together with remarkable ingenuity to form what appeared at a distance to be a bejeweled miniature temple. In the sunlight the gilded edifice gleamed among the dust and sand like a huge Fabergé gem.

Quilter stopped fifty yards from it. "Lomax," he said by way of introduction. "You tell him if he doesn't find water soon he's going to _drown_."

Leaving Ransom with this paradox, he strode away toward the pool.

Ransom set off across the sand. As he approached the pavilion he compared it with the crude hovels he had constructed out of the same materials at the coast, but the even desert light and neutral sand encouraged fancy and imagination while the damp saltdunes had drained it.

He reached the ornamented portico and peered inside. The walls of the small anteroom were decorated with strips of curved chromium. Colored discs of glass taken from car headlamps had been fitted into a grille and formed one continuous wall, through which the sun shone in dozens of images of itself. Another wall was constructed from the grilles of radio sets, the lines of gilded knobs forming astrological patterns.

An inner door opened. A plump, scented figure darted out from the shadows and seized his arm.

"Charles, my dear boy! They said you were coming! How delightful to see you again!"

"Richard…" For a moment Ransom gaped at Lomax. The latter circled around him, goggling over Ransom's ragged clothes with the eyes of a delirious goldfish. Lomax was completely bald, and now resembled a handsome but hairless woman. His skin had become smooth and creamy, untouched by the desert wind and sun. He wore a gray silk suit of extravagant cut, the pleated trousers like a close-fitting skirt or the bifurcated tail of a huge fish, the embroidered jacket fitted with ruffs and rows of pearl buttons. To Ransom he resembled a grotesque pantomime dame, part amiable scoundrel and part transvestite, stranded in the middle of the desert with his pavilion of delights.

"Charles, what is it?" Lomax stood back. His eyes, above the short hooked nose, were as sharp as ever. "Don't you remember me?" He chortled to himself, happy to prepare the way for his own retort. "Or is that the trouble-you _do_ remember me!"

Tittering to himself, he led Ransom through the pavilion into a small court at the rear, where an ornamental garden decorated with glass and chromium blooms had been laid out around the remains of a fountain.

"Well, Charles, what's going on? You've brought water with you?" He pressed Ransom into a chair, his hand holding Ransom's arm like a claw. "God knows I've waited long enough."

Ransom disengaged the arm. "I'm afraid you'll have to go on waiting, Richard. It must sound like a bad joke after all these years, but one of the reasons we came here from the coast was to look for water."

"What?" Lomax swung on his heel. "What on earth are you talking about? You must be out of your mind. There isn't a drop of water for a hundred miles!" With sudden irritation he drove his little fists together. "What have you been doing about it?"

"We haven't been doing anything," Ransom said quietly. "It's been all we could manage just to distill enough water to keep alive."

Lomax nodded, controlling himself. "I daresay. Frankly, Charles, you do look a mess. You should have stayed with me. But this drought-they said it would end in ten years. I thought that was why you came!"

On this last word, Lomax's voice rose angrily again, reverberating off the tinsel walls.

"Richard, for heaven's sake…" Ransom tried to pacify him. "You're all obsessed by the subject of water. There seems plenty around. As soon as I arrived I walked straight into a large reservoir."

"That?" Lomax waved a ruffed hand at him, his white woman's face like a powdered mask. Mopping his brow with a soft hand, he noticed his bald pate, then quickly pulled a small peruke from his pocket and slipped it onto his scalp. "That water, Charles, don't you understand-that's all there is left! For ten years I've kept them going, and now that this confounded drought won't end they're turning on me!"

Lomax pulled up another chair. "Charles, the position I'm in is impossible. Quilter is insane, have you seen him, striding about on those stilts?… He's out to destroy me, I know it!"

Cautiously, Ransom said: "He did give me a message- something about drowning, if I remember. There's not much danger of that here?"

"Oh no?" Lomax snapped his fingers. "Drowning-after all I've done for him! If it hadn't been for me they would have died within a week."

He subsided into the chair. Surrounded by all the chromium and tinsel, he looked like a stranded carnival fish, encrusted with pearls and pieces of shell.

"Where did you find all this water?" Ransom asked.

"Here and there, Charles." Lomax gestured vaguely. "I happened to know about one or two old reservoirs, forgotten for years under car parks and football fields, small ones no one ever thought of, but a hell of a lot of water in them all the same. I showed Quilter where it was, and he and the others piped it in here."

"And that lake is the last? But why should Quilter blame you? Surely they're grateful-"

"They're _not_ grateful! You obviously don't understand how their minds work. Look what Quilter's done to my poor Miranda. And those diseased cretinous children! Think what they'll be like if they're allowed to grow up. _Three_ Quilters! Sometimes I think the Almighty brought this drought just to make sure they die of thirst."

"Why don't you pack up and leave?"

"I can't! Don't you realize I'm a prisoner here? That terrible one-armed man Whitman is everywhere with his mad animals. I warn you, don't wander about on your Own too much. And there are a couple of lions around somewhere."

Ransom stood up. "What shall I tell Quilter then?"

Lomax whipped off his wig and slipped it into one of his pockets. "Tell them to go! I'm tired of playing Father Neptune. This is _my_ water, I found it and I'm going to drink it!" With a smirk, he added: "But I'll share it with you, Charles, of course."

"Thank you, Richard, but I think I need to be on my own at present."

"Very well, dear boy." Lomax gazed at him coolly, the smirk on his face puffing out his powdered cheeks. "Don't expect any water, though. Sooner or later it's going to run out, perhaps sooner rather than later."

"I daresay." Ransom gazed down at Lomax, realizing how far he had decayed during the previous ten years. The serpent in this dusty Eden, he was now trying to grasp back his apple, and preserve intact, if only for a few weeks, the world before the drought. By contrast, for Ransom the long journey up the river had been an expedition into his own future, into a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free of the demands of memory and nostalgia, free of the pressures even of thirst and hunger.

"Charles, wait!" As Ransom reached the entrance to the pavilion, Lomax hurried after him. "Don't leave yet, you're the only one I can trust!" Lomax plucked at his sleeve. His voice sank to a plaintive whisper. "They'll kill me, Charles, or turn me into a beast. Look what he's done to Miranda."

Ransom shook his head. "I don't agree, Richard," he said. "I think she's beautiful."

Lomax gazed after him, appalled. Ransom set off across the sand. Watching him in the distance from a dune above the swimming pool, the last smoke of the signal fire rising beside him, was the stilted figure of Quilter, the swan's head wavering against the evening sky.

Chapter 14 – The White Lions

For the next week Ransom remained with Quilter and Miranda, watching the disintegration of Richard Lomax. Ransom decided that as soon as possible he would continue his journey across the drained lake, but at night he could hear the sounds of the lions baying among the white dunes. The tall figure of Jonas would move along the lakeside road through the darkness, calling in his deep voice to the lions, which grumbled back at him. Their survival, confirming the fisher-captain's obsession with a lost river or lake, convinced Ransom that as soon as he had recovered he should carry on his search.

During the day he sat in the shade of the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. In the morning he went off toward the city with Whitman and Quilter to forage for food. At intervals among the dunes, deep shafts had been sunk into the basements. They would slide down them and crawl among the old freezer plant, mining out a few cans from the annealed sand. Most of them had perished, and the rancid contents were flung to the dogs or left among the rubble, where the few birds pecked at them. Ransom was not surprised to find that Quilter's food stores consisted of barely a -day's supplies, nor that Quilter was becoming progressively less interested in replenishing them. He seemed to accept that the coming end of the water in the reservoir would commit him finally to the desert, and that the drained river would now take him on its own terms.

Quilter built a small hutch for his mother in the entrance hall of the house, and she retired here in the evenings after spending the day with Miranda and the children.

Ransom slept in one of the wrecked cars near the pool. Whitman lived in the next vehicle, but after Ransom's arrival he moved off with his dogs and took up residence inside a drained fountain fifty yards from Lomax's pavilion. Keeping to himself, he resented Ransom's approaches.

Quilter, however, spent much of his time wandering around the edges of the pool, apparently trying to form some sort of relationship with Ransom, though unable to find a point of contact. Sometimes he would sit down in the dust a few feet from Ransom, letting the children climb over his shoulders, pulling at his furs and swan's cap.

At intervals this placid domestic scene would be interrupted by the appearance of Richard Lomax.

His performances, as Ransom regarded them, usually took the same form. Shortly before noon there was a sudden commotion from the pavilion, and the sounds of gongs ringing from the gilded spires. Quilter listened to this impassively, drawing obscure patterns in the dust with a finger for his children to puzzle and laugh over. Then there was a sudden shout and crackle as Lomax let off a firework. It fizzed away across the dunes, the bright trail dissolving crisply in the warm air. At last Lomax himself emerged, fully accoutered and pomaded, mincing out in his preposterous gray silk suit. Frowning angrily, he waved his arms, shouting insults at Quilter, and pointing repeatedly toward the reservoir. As Quilter leaned back on one elbow, Whitman crept up on Lomax with his dogs.

Lomax's tirade then mounted to a frenzied babble, his face working itself into a grotesque mask. Watching this tottering desert androgyne, Ransom felt that Lomax was reverting to some primitive level where the differentiation into male and female no longer occurred. Lomax was now a neuter, as sterile physically as he had become mentally.

At last, when the children became frightened, Quilter signaled to Whitman and a dog was let off at Lomax. In a flash of white fur the beast hurled itself at the architect, who turned and fled, slamming the jeweled doors into the dog's face as it flung itself at the decorated grilles.

For the rest of the day there was silence, until the performance the following morning. Although such displays of firecrackers and grimacing had presumably been effective during the previous years in dispersing other desert nomads who stumbled upon the oasis, Quilter seemed immune. Brooding quietly most of the time, and aware of the coming crisis in their lives, he sat among the dunes by the pool, playing with his children and with the birds who ventured up to his hands to collect the pieces of rancid meat. He fondled them all with a strange pity, as if he knew that this temporary period of calm would soon give way and was trying to free them from the need for water and food. Once or twice, as Quilter played with the birds, Ransom heard a sharp strangled croak, and saw the crushed plumage twisting slowly in Quilter's hands. Ransom watched the children as they waddled about under their swollen heads, playing with the dead birds, halfexpecting Quilter to snap their necks in a sudden access of violence.

More and more Quilter treated Whitman and Ransom in the same way, switching them out of his path with a long fur-topped staff. For the time being, Ransom accepted these blows, as a bond between -himself and the further possibilities of his life into which Quilter was leading him. Only with Miranda did Quilter retain his equable temper. The two of them would sit together in the concrete pool, as the water evaporated in the reservoir and the dunes outside drew nearer, like a last Adam and Eve waiting for the end of time.

Ransom saw nothing of Philip Jordan and Catherine. One morning when they climbed the dunes by the reservoir a familiar dark-faced figure was filling a canteen by the water. Quilter barely noticed him as he strode stiffly across the wet sand on his stilts, and by the time Whitman had released the dogs the youth had vanished.

Catherine Austen never appeared, but at night they heard the lions coming nearer, crying from the dunes by the lakeside.

"Quilter, you depraved beast! Come here, my Caliban, show yourself to your master!"

Sitting among the metal litter by the pool, Ransom ignored the shouts from Lomax's pavilion and continued to play with the eldest of Quilter's children. The five-year-old boy was his favorite companion. A large birthscar disfigured his right cheek and illuminated his face like a star, and his liquid eyes hovered below his swollen forehead like shy dragonflies. Each time Ransom held out his hands he peered brightly into Ransom's eyes, and with unerring insight touched the hand containing the stone. At times, he would reverse his choice, picking the empty hand as if out of sympathy.

"Caliban! For the last time…!"

Ransom looked up at the distant figure of Lomax, who had advanced twenty yards from his pavilion, the sunlight shimmering off his silk suit He postured among the low dunes, his small powdered face puckered like an obscene shriveled fig. In one hand he waved a small silvertopped cane like a wand.

"Quilter…!" Lomax's voice rose to a shriek. Quilter had gone off somewhere, and he could only see Ransom sitting among the fallen columns of the loggia, like a mendicant attached to the fringes of a tribal court.

Ransom nodded encouragingly to the child, and said: "Go on. Which one?" The child watched him with his drifting smile, eyes wide and bright as if about to divulge some delightful secret He shook his head, arms held firmly behind his back. Reluctantly Ransom opened his empty hands, and the child eyed him with a pleased nod.

"Pretty good," Ransom commented. He pointed at the shouting figure of Lomax. "It looks as if your father is frying the same technique. I'm afraid Mr. Lomax isn't as clever as you." He pulled a tin from his pocket and took off the lid. Inside were two pieces of dried meat. First wiping his fingers, he gave one to the child. Holding it tightly, he toddled away among the ruins.

Ransom leaned back against the column. He was debating when to leave the oasis and take his chances with the lions when a stinging blow struck his left arm above the elbow.

He looked up into the grimacing, powdered mask of Richard Lomax, silvertopped cane in one hand.

"Ransom…!" he hissed. "Get out…!" His suit was puffed up, the lapels flaring like the gills of an angry fish. "Stealing my water! Get _out!_"

"Richard, for God's sake-" Ransom stood up. There was a soft clatter among the stones, and the child reappeared. In his hands he carried a small white gull, apparently dead, its wings neatly furled.

Lomax gazed down at the child, a demented Prospero examining the offspring of his violated daughter. He looked around at the dusty garbage-strewn oasis, as if stunned by the horror of this island infested by nightmares. He raised his cane to strike the child. It stepped back, eyes suddenly still, and opened its hands. With a squawk the bird rose into the air and flashed past Lomax's face.

There was a shout across the dunes. The stilted figure of Quilter came striding over the rubble a hundred yards away, furs lifting in the hot sunlight. Beside him with the dogs was Whitman, pushing along the broken figure of Jonas, the dogs tearing at the rags of his trousers.

Ignoring Ransom, Lomax spun on his white shoes and raced off across the sand. The dogs broke leash and ran after him, Quilter at their heels, the stilts carrying him in sixfoot strides. Whitman fumbled with the leash, and the bending figure of Jonas straightened up and swung a fist at the back of his neck, felling him to the ground. Whitman scrambled to his feet, and Jonas unfurled a net from his waist and with a twist of his hands rolled Whitman into the dust again. Retrieving the net, he leapt away on his long legs.

Halfway to the pavilion, Lomax turned to face the dogs. From his pockets he pulled out handfuls of firecrackers, and hurled them down at their feet. The thunderfiashes burst and flared, and the dogs broke off as Quilter charged through them.

He reached one hand toward Lomax. There was a gleam of silver in the air and a long blade appeared from the shaft of Lomax's cane. He darted forwards on one foot and pierced Quilter's shoulder. Before Quilter could recover, he danced off behind the safety of the doors.

Gazing at the blood on his hand, Quilter walked slowly back to the swimming pool, the gongs beating from the pavilion behind him. Glancing at Ransom, who was holding his child, he shouted to Whitman. The two men called the dogs together, and set off along the river in pursuit of Jonas.

An hour later, when they had not returned, Ransom carried the child down into the pool.

"Doctor, do come in," Miranda greeted him, as he pushed back the flaps of the inner courtyard. "Have I missed another of Richard's firework displays?"

"Probably the last," Ransom said. "It wasn't meant to amuse."

Miranda gestured him into a chair. In a cubicle beyond the curtain the old woman was crooning herself to sleep over the children. Miranda sat up on one elbow. Her sleek face and giant body covered by its black negligee made her look like a large seal reclining on the floor of its pool. Each day her features seemed to get smaller, the minute mouth with its cupid's lips subsiding into the overlaying flesh in the same way that the objects in the drained river had become submerged and smoothed by the enveloping sand.

"Your brother is obsessed by the water in the reservoir," Ransom said. "Have you any influence with Quilter? If Richard goes on provoking him there may be a bloodbath."

"Don't worry." Miranda fanned herself with a plump hand. "Quilter is still a child. He wouldn't hurt a thing."

"Miranda, I've seen him crush a sea gull to death in one hand."

Miranda waved this aside. "That's just to show he understands it. In a way, it's a sign he loves the bird."

"That's a fierce love," Ransom commented.

"What love isn't?"

Ransom looked up, noticing the barely concealed question in her voice. Miranda lay on the divan, watching him with her bland eyes, her face composed. She seemed unaware of the dunes and dust around her. Ransom stood up and went over to her. Taking her hands, he sat down on the divan. "Miranda…" he began. Looking at her great seal-like waist, he thought of the dead fishermen whose bodies had helped to swell its girth, drowned here in its warm seas, unnamed Jonahs reborn in the strange idiot-children. He remembered Quilter and the long knives in the crossed shoulder-straps under his furs, but the danger seemed to recede. The blurring of everything during his journey from the coast carried with it the equation of all emotions and relationships. Simultaneously he would become the children's father and Quilter's brother, Mrs. Quilter's son, and Miranda's husband. Only Lomax, the androgyne, remained isolated.

As he watched Miranda's smile form itself, the image of a river flowed through his mind, a clear stream that broke and illuminated the sunlight.

"Doctor!" He looked up to see Mrs. Quilter's frightened face through the tenting. "There's water leaking!"

Ransom pulled back the canopy. Spilling on to the floor of the pool was a steady stream of water, pouring off the concrete verge above. The water swilled along the floor, soaking the piles of bedding, and then ran to the fireplace in the center where the tiles had been removed.

"Mrs. Quilter, take the children!" Ransom turned to Miranda, who was sitting upright on the divan. "There's water running past the house, it must come from the reservoir! I'll see if I can head Lomax off."

As he climbed the stairway out of the pool the figures of Quilter and Whitman raced past, the dogs at their heels.

Winding between the dunes were a dozen arms of silver water, pouring across the bleached earth from the direction of the reservoir. Ransom splashed across the streams, feeling the pressure of the water as it broke and spurted. Beyond the next line of dunes there was a deeper channel. Three feet deep, the water slid away among the ruined walls, spilling into the cracks and mine-holes, sucked down by the porous earth.

Quilter flung himself along on his stilts. Whitman was pulled by the dogs, hunting bayonet clasped in his teeth. They splashed through the water, barely pausing to watch its progress, and then reached the embankment. Quilter shouted as the long-legged figure of Jonas, kneeling by the water with his net, took off like a startled hare around the verges of the reservoir. The dogs bounded after him, kicking the wet sand into a damp spray.

Ransom leaned against a chimney stump. The reservoir was almost drained, the shallow pool in the center leaking out in a last quiet glide. At four or five points around the reservoir large breaches had been cut in the bank, and the water had poured out through these. The edges of the damp basin were already drying in the sunlight.

Quilter stopped by the bank and gazed down blankly at the vanishing mirror of blue light. His swan's hat hung over one ear. Absentmindedly he pulled it off and let it fall onto the wet sand.

Ransom watched the chase around the opposite bank. Jonas was halfway around the reservoir, arms held out at his sides as he raced up and down the dunes. The dogs gained on him, and began to leap up at his back. Once he stumbled, and a dog tore the black shirt from his shoulders. Knocking the animal away, he ran on, the dogs all around him.

Then two more figures appeared, running out of the dunes across the dog's path, and Ransom heard the roaring of the white lions.

"Catherine!" As he shouted, she was running beside the lions, driving them on with her whip. Behind her was Philip Jordan, a canteen strapped to his back, spear in one hand. He feinted with it at Whitman as the dogs veered and scuttled away from the lions, scrambling frantically across the empty basin of the reservoir. Catherine and the lions ran on, disappearing across the dunes as suddenly as they had come. Still running, Philip Jordan took Jonas' arm, but the older man broke free and darted left and right between the dunes.

A dog crossed the empty pool, tail between its legs, and sped past Ransom. As he and Quilter turned to follow it they saw the tottering figure of Richard Lomax on the bank fifty yards away. The sounds of ffight and pursuit faded, and Lomax's helpless laughter crossed the settling air.

"Quilter, you bloody fool…!" he managed to get out, choking in a paroxysm of mirth. The pleated trousers of his gray silk suit were soaked to the knees, and the ruffs of his jacket were spattered with wet sand. A long-handled spade lay on the bank behind him.

Ransom looked back toward the house. Beyond the bank, where only a few minutes earlier deep streams of water had raced along, the wet channels were drained and empty. The water had sunk without trace into the cracks and holes, and the air was blank and without sparkle.

"I did warn you, didn't I, Quilter?" Lomax called.

Quilter strode slowly along the bank, his eyes on Lomax.

"Now, Quilter, don't get any ideas." Lomax flashed a warning smile at Quilter, then backed away up the slope. On his left, Whitman moved along the far side of the bank to cut him off. "Quilter!" Lomax stopped, putting on a show of dignity. "This is my water, and I do what I choose with it!"

They cornered him among the ruins thirty yards from the reservoir. Behind him, among the dunes, Miranda had appeared with Mrs. Quilter and the children. They sat down on one of the crests to watch.

Lomax began to straighten his sleeves, pulling out the ruffs. Quilter waited ten yards from him, while Whitman crept up slowly with the bayonet, his stump raised. Lomax sidestepped awkwardly, and then the sword-stick flashed in Whitman's face.

"Richard!"

Lomax turned at his sister's voice. Before he could recover, Whitman lunged forward and slashed the blade from his hand, then stabbed him in the midriff like a drover piercing a pig. With a squeal of pain, Lomax tottered backwards against a low wail, and Whitman dropped the bayonet and bent down. With a shout he jerked Lomax's heels into the air and tossed him backwards into an old mineshaft filled with dust. A huge cloud of white talcum shot into the air, churned up by the flailing Lomax, stuck upside-down in the narrow shaft.

Ransom listened as the shouts became more and more muffled. For five minutes the dust continued to rise in small spurts, like the gentle boiling of a lava vent in an almost dormant volcano. Then the movement subsided almost completely, now and then sending up a faint spume.

Ransom started to walk back to the house, and then noticed that neither Miranda nor the children had moved from the crest. He looked back along the river, hoping for some sign of Philip Jordan or Catherine, but they had vanished along the bank. The long lines of ruins lay quietly in the sunlight. Far away, against the motionless horizon, he could see the rolling waves of the dunes on the lake.

He waited as Whitman approached him, head bowed as he panted between his teeth, the bayonet held in his hand like a chisel. Quilter was looking down at the drained basin of the reservoir, already whitening in the sun, and at the arms of darker sand running away across the dunes.

Whitman feinted with the bayonet, slightly put off when Ransom offered no resistance. "Quilt-?" he called.

Quilter turned and walked back to the house. He glanced at Whitman and waved briefly, his swan's hat carried in his hand by the neck. "Leave him," he said. For the first time since Ransom had known him, his face was completely calm.

Chapter 15 – "Jours de Lenteur"

The birds had gone. Everywhere light and shade crept on slowly. No longer cooled by the evaporating water, the dunes around the oasis reflected the heat like banks of ash. Ransom rested quietly in the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. His complete surrender to Quilter had left him with a feeling almost of euphoria. The timeless world in which Quilter lived now formed his own universe, and only the shadow of the broken roof above, adjusting its length and perimeter, reminded him of the progress of the sun.

The next day, when Mrs. Quilter died, Ransom helped to bury her. Miranda was too tired to come with them, but Whitman and Ransom carried the old woman on a plank over their heads. They followed Quilter toward the burial ground near the city, waiting as he searched among the rubble, sinking his staff through the sand to the roofs of the cars below. As he had told Ransom, most of the vehicles were already occupied, but at last they found an empty one and buried Mrs. Quilter in a great old limousine. Afterwards, when they had filled in the sand over the roof, the children scattered pieces of paper drawings over it.

Soon afterwards, Philip Jordan went off to search for his father. He came to the oasis to say goodbye to Ransom. Kneeling beside him, he pressed the canteen of water to his lips.

"It's the last I have, but there's a river here somewhere. Quilter told me my father had seen it. When I find him, we'll go off and look for it together. Perhaps we'll see you there one day, doctor."

When he stood up Ransom saw Catherine Austen waving to him from a dune in the distance, hands on hips, her leather boots white with the chalklike sand of the desert. As Philip rejoined her she lifted her whip and the white-flanked lions loped off by her side.

That night, when a sandstorm blew up, Ransom went down to the lake and watched the drifts whirling across the dunes. Far out toward the center of the lake he could see the hull of the old river steamer once commanded by Captain Tulloch. Standing at the helm as the waves of white sand broke across the bow; its fine spray lifting over the funnel, was the tall figure of Jonas.

The storm had subsided the next morning, and Ransom made his farewells to Quilter and Miranda. Leaving the house, he waved to the children who had followed him to the gate, and then walked down the avenue to his old home. Nothing remained except the stumps of the chimneys, but he rested here for a few hours before continuing on his way.

He crossed the rubble and went down to the river, then began to walk along the widening mouth toward the lake. Smoothed by the wind, the white dunes covered the bed like motionless waves. He stepped among them, following the hollows that carried him out of sight of the shore. The sand was smooth and unmarked, gleaming with the bones of untold numbers of fish. The height of the dunes steadily increased, and an hour later the crests were almost twenty feet above his head.

Although it was not yet noon, the sun seemed to be receding into the sky, and the air was gradually becoming colder. To his surprise he noticed that he no longer cast any shadow onto the sand, as if he had at last completed his journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years. As the light failed, the air grew darker. The dust was dull and opaque, the crystals in its surface dead and clouded. An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole of the exterior world were losing its existence.

It was some time later that he failed to notice it had started to rain.