The Drowned World (16 page)

The next day, by good luck, the storm-clouds moved overhead between himself and the sun, and the air grew markedly cooler, falling to ninety-five degrees at noon. The massive banks of black cumulus, only four or five hundred feet above, dimmed the air like a solar eclipse, and he revived sufficiently to start the outboard and raise his speed to ten miles an hour. Circling between the islands, he moved on southwards, following the sun that pounded in his mind. Later that evening, as the rain-storms lashed down, he felt well enough to stand up on one leg by the mast, letting the torrential bursts rain across his chest and strip away the ragged fabric of his jacket. When the first of the storm-belts moved off the visibility cleared, and he could see the southern edge of the sea, a line of tremendous silt banks over a hundred yards in height. In the spasmodic sunlight they glittered along the horizon like fields of gold, the tops of the jungle beyond rising above them.

Half a mile from the shore the reserve tank of the outboard ran dry. He unbolted the motor and threw it into the water, watched it sink through the brown surface in a faint wreath of bubbles. He furled the sail and paddled slowly against the head-breeze. By the time he reached the shore it was dusk, the shadows sweeping across the huge grey slopes. Limping through the shallows, he beached the craft, then sat down with his back against one of the drums. Staring out over the immense loneliness of this dead terminal beach, he soon fell into an exhausted sleep.

The next morning he dismantled the craft, ported the sections one by one up the enormous sludge-covered slopes, hoping for a southward extension of the water-way. Around him the great banks undulated for miles, the curving dunes dotted with cuttlefish and nautiloids. The sea was no longer visible, and he was alone with these few lifeless objects, like the debris of a vanished continuum, one dune giving way to another as he dragged the heavy fifty-gallon drums from crest to crest. Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days. At times, after he had dropped one burden, he would totter down into the hollow of the wrong dune, find himself stumbling about the silent basins, their floors cracked into hexagonal plates, like a dreamer searching for an invisible door out of his nightmare.

Finally he abandoned the craft and trudged on ahead with a small parcel of supplies, looking back as the drums sank slowly beiow the surface. Carefully avoiding the quicksands between the dunes, he moved on towards the jungle in the distance, where the green spires of the great horsetails and fern trees reached a hundred feet into the air.

He rested again below a tree on the edge of the forest, carefully cleaning his pistol. Ahead of him he could hear the bats screech and dive among the dark trunks in the endless twilight world of the forest floor, the iguanas snarl and lunge. His ankle had begun to swell painfully; the continual extension of the damaged muscle had spread its original infection. Cutting a branch off one of the trees, he hobbled forwards into the shadows.

By evening the rainfall started, slashing at the huge umbrellas a hundred feet above, the black light only broken when phosphorescent rivers of water broke and poured down on him. Frightened of resting for the night, he pressed on, shooting off the attacking iguanas, darting from the shelter of one massive tree-trunk to the next. Here and there he found a narrow breach in the canopy overhead, and a pale light would illuminate a small clearing where the ruined top floor of a sunken building loomed through the foliage, the rain beating across it. But the evidence of any man-made structures was increasingly scanty, the towns and cities of the south swallowed by the rising silt and vegetation.

For three days he pushed ahead sleeplessly through the forest, feeding on giant berries like clusters of apples, cutting a heavier branch as a crutch. Periodically, to his left, he glimpsed the silver back of a jungle river, its surface dancing in the rain-storms, but massive mangroves formed the banks and he was unable to reach it.

So his descent into the phantasmagoric forest continued, the rain sweeping relentlessly across his face and shoulders. Sometimes it would stop abruptly, and clouds of steam filled the intervals between the trees, hanging over the waterlogged floor like diaphanous fleeces, only dispersing when the downpour resumed.

It was during one of these intermissions that he climbed a steep rise in the centre of a broad clearing, hoping to escape the drenching mists, found himself in a narrow valley between wooded slopes. Crowded with vegetation, the hills rolled around the valley like the dunes he had crossed earlier, enclosing him in a green dripping world. Occasionally, as the mists swirled and lifted, he caught a glimpse of the jungle river between the peaks half a mile away. The wet sky was stained by the setting sun, the pale crimson mists tracing the hill crests in the distance. Pulling himself over the wet clay-like soil, he stumbled into what seemed to be the remains of a small temple. Tilting gate posts led towards a semi-circle of shallow steps, where five ruined columns formed a ragged entrance. The roof had collapsed, and only a few feet of the side walls still stood. At the far end of the nave the battered altar looked out over an uninterrupted view of the valley, where the sun sank slowly from sight, its giant orange disc veiled by the mists.

Hoping to shelter there during the night, Kerans walked down the aisle, pausing listlessly as the rain renewed itself. Reaching the altar, he rested his arms on the chest-high marble table, and watched the contracting disc of the sun, its surface stirring rhythmically like the slag on a bowl of molten metal.

"Aaa-ah!" A faint almost inhuman cry sounded thinly into the wet air, like the groan of a stricken animal. Kerans looked around him quickly, wondering if an iguana had followed him into the ruin. But the jungle and the valley and the whole place of stones were silent and motionless, the rain streaming across the cracks in the collapsing walls.

"Aah-ah!" This time the sound came from in front of him, somewhere towards the fading sun. The disc had pulsed again, apparently drawing forth this strangled response, half in protest, half in gratitude.

Wiping the moisture from his face, Kerans stepped cautiously around the altar, drew back with a start when he almost tripped over the ragged remains of a man sitting with his back to the altar, head propped against the stone. The sounds had obviously come from this emaciated figure, but it was so inert and blackened that Kerans assumed it must be dead.

The man's long legs, like two charred poles of wood, stuck out uselessly in front of him, sheathed in a collection of tattered black rags and bits of bark. His arms and sunken chest were similarly clothed, strung together with short lengths of creeper. A once luxuriant but now thinning black beard covered most of his face, and the rain poured across his hollowed but jutting jaw, which was raised to the fading light. Fitfully the sun shone on the exposed skin of his face and hands. One of the latter, a skeletal green claw, suddenly rose like a hand from a grave and pointed at the sun as if identifying it, then fell limply to the ground. As the disc pulsed again the face showed some slight reaction. The deep recesses around the mouth and nose, the hollowed cheeks that encroached so deeply over the broad jaw that they seemed to leave no space for the buccal cavity within, filled for a moment as if a single breath of life had passed momentarily through the body.

Unable to advance, Kerans watched the huge emaciated figure on the ground before him. The man was no more than a resurrected corpse, without food or equipment, propped against the altar like someone jerked from his grave and abandoned to await the Day of Judgement.

Then he realised why the man had failed to notice him. The dirt and raw sun-blistered skin around the deep eye sockets turned them into blackened funnels, at the base of which a dull festering gleam reflected faintly the distant sun. Both eyes were almost completely occluded by corneal cancers, and Kerans guessed that they would be able to see little more than the dying sun. As the disc fell away behind the jungle in front of them and the dusk swept like a pall through the grey rain, the man's head raised itself painfully, as if trying to retain the image that had burnt itself so devastatingly upon his retinas, then slumped to one side against his stone pillow. Flies began to swarm across the ground and buzzed over his streaming cheeks.

Kerans bent down to speak to the man, who seemed to sense his movement. Blindly, the hollowed eyes searched the dull nimbus beside him.

"Hey, fellow." His voice was a feeble rasp. "You there, soldier, come here! Where have you come from?" His left hand scuttled around the wet stony clay like a crab, as if looking for something. Then he turned back to the vanished sun, oblivious of the flies settling on his face and beard. "It's gone again! Aa-aah! It's moving away from me! Help me up, soldier, we'll follow it. Now, before it goes for ever."

He held his claw out to Kerans, like a dying beggar. Then his bead slumped back again and the rain poured over his black skull.

Kerans knelt down. Despite the effects of the sun and rain, the remnants of the man's uniform trousers showed him to be an officer. His right hand, which had remained closed, now opened feebly. In his palm was a small silver cylinder with a circular dial, a pocket compass carried in aircrew rescue kits.

"Hey, soldier!" The man had revived abruptly, his eyeless head turning towards Kerans. "I order you, don't leave me! You can rest now, while I keep watch. Tomorrow we'll move on."

Kerans sat down beside him, undid his small parcel and began to wipe the rain and dead flies from the man's face. Taking the ravaged cheeks in his hands like a child's, he said carefully: "Hardman, this is Kerans—Doctor Kerans. I'll go with you, but try to rest." Hardman showed no response to the name, his brows creasing slightly in puzzlement.

While Hardman lay back against the altar, Kerans began to dig up some of the cracked flagstones from the aisle with his clasp knife, carried the pieces back through the rain and built a crude stone shelter around the supine figure, covering the cracks with creeper torn from the walls. Although shielded from the rain, Hardman became slightly restless in the dark alcove, but soon fell into a shallow sleep, now and then breaking into stertorous breaths. Kerans went back through the darkness to the jungle edge, picked an armful of edible berries from the trees, then returned to the shelter and sat beside Hardman until the dawn broke over the hills behind them.

He stayed with Hardman for the next three days, feeding him with the berries and spraying his eyes with what was left of the penicillin. He strengthened the hut with more of the flagstones, and built a rough pallaisse of leaves for them to sleep on. During the afternoon and evening Hardman would sit in the open doorway, watching the distant sun through the mists. In the intervals between the storms its rain-washed beams lit his green-tinged skin with a strange intense glow. He failed to remember Kerans, and addressed him simply as 'Soldier', sometimes rousing himself from his torpor to issue a series of disconnected orders for the morrow. Increasingly, Kerans felt that Hardman's real personality was now submerged deep within his mind, and that his external behaviour and responses were merely pallid reflections of this, overlayed by his delirium and exposure symptoms. Kerans guessed that his sight had been lost about a month earlier, and that he had crawled instinctively to the higher ground supporting the ruin. From there he could best perceive the sun, the sole entity now strong enough to impinge its image upon his fading retinas.

On the second day Hardman began to eat voraciously, as if preparing himself for another advance through the jungle, by the end of the third day had consumed several bunches of the giant berries. The strength seemed to return suddenly to his great ragged frame, and during the afternoon he managed to support himself on his legs, leaning back against the doorway as the sun sank behind the wooded hills. Whether he now recognised Kerans the latter was unsure, but the monologue of orders and instructions ceased.

Kerans felt little surprise when he woke the next morning and found Hardman had gone. Rousing himself in the thin dawn light, Kerans limped down the valley towards the edge of the forest, where a small stream forked on its way towards the distant river. He looked up at the dark boughs of the fern trees hanging in the silence. Feebly he shouted Hardman's name, listening to its muted echoes fall away among the sombre trunks, and then returned to the hut. He accepted Hardman's decision to move on without comment, assuming that he might or might not see the man again in the course of their common odyssey southwards. As long as his eyes were strong enough to sense the distant signals transmitted by the sun, and as long as the iguanas failed to scent him, Hardman would move forwards feeling his way through the forest hand over hand, head raised to the sunlight breaking among the branches.

Kerans waited a further two days at the hut, in case Hardman chose to return, then set out himself. His medical supplies were now exhausted, and all he carried was a bag of berries and the Colt, containing two shells. His watch was still running, and he used it as a compass, also keeping a careful record of the passage of the days by notching his belt each morning.

Following the valley, he waded through the shallow stream, intending to reach the shores of the distant river. Intermittently heavy rain-storms beat the surface of the water, but these now seemed concentrated during a few hours in the afternoon and evening.

When the course of the river required him to move in a westerly direction for several miles to reach its banks, he gave up the attempt and pressed on southwards, leaving the deeper jungle of the hill region and entering a lighter forest, which in turn gave way to large tracts of swamp.

Skirting these, he abruptly stepped out on to the shores of an immense lagoon, over a mile in diameter, ringed by a beach of white sand, through which protruded the top floors of a few ruined apartment houses, like beach chalets seen at a distance. In one of these he rested for a day, trying to mend his ankle, which had become black and swollen. Looking out from the window at the disc of water, he watched the afternoon rain discharge itself into the surface with relentless fury; as the clouds moved away and the water smoothed itself into a glass sheet its colours seemed to recapitulate all the changes he had witnessed in his dreams.

That he had travelled over a hundred and fifty miles southward he could tell from the marked rise in temperature. Again the heat had become all-pervading, rising to a hundred and forty degrees, and he felt reluctant to leave the lagoon, with its empty beaches and quiet ring of jungle. For some reason he knew that Hardman would soon die, and that his own life might not long survive the massive unbroken jungles to the south.