Snow White and the Giants (11 page)

No. I didn't want problems to be solved that way.
At last I reached the end of the straight and was able to turn towards
the maelstrom again. Suddenly I braked, briefly, as I saw something
across the road.
Sheila screamed and cut her scream off abruptly. I was able to slow the
car enough to hit the obstruction gently, but not enough to stop short
of it. It looked like molten lava flowing sullenly across the road . . .
There was a brief check, nothing more. It was water flowing across,
turned dull red by the glow in the sky.
The car hit the last rise, and we both coughed. We were breathing thick
wood-smoke. My eyes stung so fiercely so quickly that I braked again,
braked harder as a cloud of smoke swept across the road, obscuring
everything.
Yet it was a practically windless night, and most of the smoke and flames
rose straight up. Nor was there even a breeze to fan the flames. That
was something.
Then we were over the hill, almost at the river, and we saw the hell
that was Shuteley.
Chapter Six
When you try to burn damp garden refuse, you have to create fierce heat
before the green twigs, sappy cuttings and weeds begin to smoke, smolder
and finally burn. Yet no matter how wet everything is, the greedy maw
of a roaring fire will in the end swallow everything.
In Shuteley that summer night, everything inflammable or uninflammable
was as dry as tinder. Everything that would burn was ready to do so at
the first touch of flame; everything that wouldn't was neutral in the
onslaught, neither helping nor hindering.
All along the river on the other side, buildings blazed as if they'd been
prepared for a fire display and then touched off at a dozen points. Orange
flame painted the gaunt shells of buildings which were all that was
left along the riverside. Every few seconds, above the crackling roar
of burning wood, there was a crash as somewhere masonry collapsed.
Nothing could be alive across the river from us. If anyone by some mirade
escaped alive from any of those blazing buildings, there was no sanctuary
in narrow streets swept with flame. I could only hope that the people who
had been in these houses, the most densely populated part of the town,
had already managed to get out.
Nothing could be alive. In such a furnace, even a fireman in full
protective clothing would collapse and melt like a tallow candle.
"The whole town," Sheila whispered beside me. "Everything's burning.
There's nothing left."
She was right: the fire stretched on both sides to the limits of the town,
and although we could see practically nothing through the wall of fire,
the flames and smoke which gushed into the red sky showed that behind
what we could see the fire was just as intense.
Where we were, a hundred yards from the river and looking across it to a
strip of scorched earth and stone and concrete that could burn no more --
perhaps three hundred yards from the nearest flame -- we were facing a
blast of heat that would have killed us in time and must already have
been toasting us, although we were protected by the car's body and were
looking through glass. But we were too fascinated to draw back.
Only after we had seen all there was to be seen on the other side of
the river did we look closer.
Sheila gasped. The Suspension Bridge was buckled, twisted, still spanning
the river but with its metals glowing and a huge pile of rubble in the
river bed below it.
The river was practically dry. Only thin crimson trickles ran through
the mud and stones and weeds.
To the left, the New Bridge was piled high with masonry and still-burning
timber. The warehouses across the river had collapsed into the dry bed.
There were people and machines this side of the New Bridge, a few hundred
yards along from where we stood, but I had little attention to spare
yet for this side of the river, where there were few buildings and those
not on fire.
Instead I looked the other way -- and saw that the Old Bridge was down. It
lay shattered in the bed of the river, an astonishingly vast pile of
rubble, apparently the blockage that was holding back the river. But
that way I couldn't see distinctly, because something close to the Old
Bridge on the opposite side was shooting out dense clouds of smoke.
And I began to realize the full horror of the situation, which I had
scarcely thought, a moment ago, could be worse.
There were two footbridges beyond the bridges I could see, but both were
partly wooden and it could be taken for granted they were impassable. And
the next nearest bridge was twenty miles away.
Shuteley was a backwater at the best of times. Yet in the middle of
a well-populated country, the town could never have been described as
isolated -- until now.
The main road, the big Midland towns, the rest of England were reached
from this side. On the other, lanes meandered through villages, brooks,
farms, woods. Of course help could reach the town that way, but it would
take hours. And this was a lightning fire.
Sheila was pulling at my arm, trying to make me reverse back over the
hill. But before I did anything else, I looked back at the New Bridge.
It was hard to see exactly what was going on there, because sheds and
warehouses cut off the view and at this point there was no road along
the bank. But I saw two fire engines and men in gleaming helmets.
And they were on this side of the river.
I tried to start the car, and only after several seconds did I realize
I'd never killed the motor. I put the car in reverse . . .
There were two faint pops and the front settled. At the same time,
I noticed steam rising from the front of the car. Above all the other
burning smells, I smelt burning rubber.
Protected by the car, I hadn't realized that the fierce heat from across
the river was capable of melting the tires and boiling the water in the
radiator. However, the car did move jerkily, and in a few seconds we
were back over the brow of the hill, protected by it.
"What can we do?" Sheila said.
Well, what could we do? Nothing, probably. Nobody could do anything that
I could see -- it was too late for any measures that I could imagine.
It was ironic and symbolic, rather than really important, that the firemen
were trapped this side of the river. Certainly they could do nothing if
they crossed the bridge -- if it were possible to cross the bridge. The
fire engines were rubber-shod, like my car, and there was water in the
radiators. Anyway, firemen in conventional uniform couldn't get near a
conflagration like that.
Since the only sign of life we had seen had been at this end of the
New Bridge, I turned the car, and running on the rims, with a steaming
radiator, drove along the lane behind the warehouses.
I stopped.
Here in the semi-gloom, lit by the blaze in the sky but unaffected by the
outbreak as yet, were old huts, sheds, stores. And in the lane in front of
us, blazing fiercely, was a wood brand a foot thick and three feet long.
We got out of the car and looked at the blazing balk rather helplessly.
Thrown into the sky from the other side of the river, no doubt, it
had fallen precisely in the middle of the lane and was spluttering
harmlessly. Even a small spark, falling on a tarred felt roof, would
have started a blaze on this side of the river too. A fire on this side
would never rival the destruction of Shuteley itself, but would make
this night of destruction appallingly complete.
I found a spade in a shed and covered the balk with earth and stones.
Without much of a struggle, the fire went out. But I was almost certainly
wasting my time. If a great blazing balk of timber could be thrown a
quarter of a mile, millions of equally dangerous sparks must be coming
over all the time. Indeed, I could see them flying across the sky.
Sheila caught my ann. "Val, please," she said. "Let's go back."
"Back?" I echoed blankly, wondering whether she meant to the place just
over the hill where we had watched our town being burned to death, or
to the roadhouse, or to our home a quarter of a mile along the river on
the side we were on.
"Anywhere," she said. "We can't do anything here. No one can."
It was true, of course. The firemen we were trying to join couldn't do
anything. Fires differ in kind rather than merely in degree. You can
spit on a tiny fire and put it out. A fire in a long-unused grate won't
go, despite all your efforts and the fact that you're using specially
selected combustible material.
But when the temperature goes up, when water boils, when rubber smolders,
when wood, untouched by flame, gradually glows and blazes through the
effect of high temperature alone, when human beings simply can't go near
. . . that's a fire that simply has to be left alone.
As if to reinforce what Sheila was saying, a flying spark dropped and
imbedded itself in her fur wrap. She threw it off, and I stamped on,
it. And then, startlingly, we were drenched in a shower of water.
"Rain!" I exclaimed. "If it would only pour -- "
Sheila, in her green dress which was short top and bottom, soaked,
didn't shiver. "Hot rain?" she murmured, puzzled.
I took her arm. She wanted to escape, to leave the fire to burn itself
out, which was sensible but impossible. With the other arm I picked up
her wrap, and pushed it rather roughly around her. Then we went on.
The men at this end of the New Bridge were nearly all firemen. There
were a few children, a few old men.
The firemen, protected from the direct blast of the heat by the very
obstruction which kept them from attempting to cross the bridge, were
spraying water this side of the river, which was sensible. Jets directed
across the river would not even land. Anyway, the jets they were directing
were more like trickles, possibly of some value on this side of the river,
of none if directed the other way.
I recognized Fire Officer Sayell, brother of the wit of my office.
"How did it start?" I asked.
His face twitched in annoyance, and I realized how silly my question
was. Undoubtedly later there would be an investigation, and it might
even be possible to establish the original cause of the fire. Meantime
there were a million things that mattered more.
"Excuse me, Mr. Mathers," he said, and I recognized the carefully
controlled tone of a man near the end of his tether, impotent, with an
impossible job on his hands. "There's not much I can do, but I've got
to get on with it anyway."
"There's help coming?"
"Lots of it. Mostly to the other side. Nobody can do anything much
here. We've tried the ladders. They don't reach the other side, not from
any place we can put the tenders."
It would not, I thought, have made much difference if the ladders had
spanned the bed. Nobody could go across there and live. Anyway, the
steel ladders would buckle in the heat.
Sayell swore as one of the jets failed, closely followed by the other.
"Everything's wrong," he said bitterly. "The river's dried up. Blocked
higher up."
"How about the Winshell brook?" Sheila suggested.
"Dry before this happened. Dry yesterday."
"Have you looked?" I demanded.
He stared at me with desperation in his eyes. The interference of local
VIPs was another penultimate straw.
"No, I haven't bloody looked," he snapped. "The bloody brook was dry
when the river was still -- "
"Send somebody," I said.
Suddenly quiet, he said: "Do you want me to hit you, Mr. Mathers? Do
you want me to cleave your skull with my axe? Because so help me -- "
"Send somebody to look," I said, and turned slightly away. If I tried
to outface him, maybe he would cleave my skull with his axe. Many men
with impossible jobs on their hands get like Sayell then. A breath of
opposition sends them into spontaneous combustion.
But if someone says casually "Do so-and-so," and moves on, they've got
something to try, something that isn't likely to make the situation any
worse and might improve it. And if it fails utterly, it's not their fault.
Behind me, Sayell shouted: "Horner! Take a look over the hill and try
the Winshell brook. And look lively!"
The Winshell brook was a tiny tributary of the Shute. It went the wrong
way, meeting the river head on rather than quietly trickling into it. The
meeting place, called not unexpectedly The Meeting of the Waters, was
only a short distance downriver from where we stood.
I had remembered the water running across the road.
At the giants' camp, at our house, probably even just beyond the mound
of debris at the Old Bridge which I had glimpsed through the smoke, the
river was still running. It was only in Shuteley itself, at the moment
when it was most needed, that it had run dry. But all that water was
still flowing somewhere; some of it, though not nearly enough, was still
getting through along the old river bed. Some of it was perhaps going
on the other side of the river, doing something to limit the blaze. That
was unlikely, however, because it would have to get round Castle Hill.
The rest of it must be flowing along the other side of the hill which
for so many miles had cut off our view of Shuteley. And the Winshell
brook was there.
The human animal has survived, and will continue to survive, because of
its enormous talent for adaptation -- and rapid adaptation at that.
We were living in a world of smoke which stung our eyes and made breathing
always difficult, sometimes painful and occasionally impossible.
We were living in a world of heat which made sweat run from us
continuously. We were all so thirsty that we would have drunk anything,
even the muddy crimson trickles that were still meandering down the
river bed.
We were living in a world where thirst, pain, hunger and comfort had to
be set apart. All of us had small burns where sparks had landed. Several
of us had small smoldering spots in our clothes which we beat out
absently. We were hungry from our exertions, at least I was, but that
didn't mean the thought of eating was present. Drinking was different. All
of us, given the chance, would have knocked down a pint or two of water,
milk, lemonade, beer, anything. We couldn't say drinking no longer
mattered. We'd have drunk greedily if we could. But if we couldn't,
it would have to wait.
We were living in a nightmare world where only one thing could be held
in the mind at one time. At the moment it was the Winshell brook. Even
Sayell, who had wanted to kill me for bothering him, was waiting, praying.