Jonas crossed the bridge and stood by the fore-rail. His slow movements along the deck were full of a kind of deliberate authority, as if this were the largest vessel he had ever commanded and he was carefully measuring himself against it, taking no chances that a sudden swell might not topple him from his bridge. His face had the tanned hardness of beaten leather, drained of all moisture by sun and wind. As he looked into the hold, his long arms reaching out to the rail, Ransom immediately recognized the marked slope of his forehead and the sharp arrowlike cheekbones. His eyes had the overintense look of some halfeducated migrant preacher constantly distracted by the need to find food and shelter.
He nodded at the supine figures of Ransom and the drunken tramp. "Good. Two more to join us in the search. Now back to your nets and sweep the streets. There'll be good catches f or the next two nights."
The men clambered to their feet, but the blond-haired bosun shouted: "Jonas! We don't need the old men now!" He waved contemptuously at the hold. "They're dead bait, they'll just weigh us down!" He launched into a half-coherent tirade, to which Jonas listened impassively, head bowed as if trying to control some inner compulsive nervousness. The men sat down again, grumbling to each other, some agreeing with Saul's complaints with forceful nods, others shifting about uncertainly. The loyalties of the group swerved from one man to the other, held together only by the unstated elements that they all sensed in Jonas' isolated figure.
"Saul!" The tall captain silenced him. He had huge, long hands, which he used like an actor. Watching him, Ransom noticed the calculation in all his movements, stepping about on the high stage of the bridge. "Saul, we reject no one. They need our help now. Remember, there is nothing here."
"But, Jonas-!"
"Saul!"
The blond bosun gave up, nodding to himself with a ticlike jerk. As the men shuffled along the deck and climbed down the gangway, he gave Jonas a bitter backward glance.
Left alone, Jonas gazed across the darkening streets, watching the men go off, nets over their shoulders, with the narrow compassion of a man born into a hard, restricted world. He paced the bridge of his skeleton ship, looking up at the smoke billows rising from the city as if debating whether to trim his sails before a storm.
The old tramp moaned on the mattress beside Ransom, blood running from one ear. His overcoat was stained by some pink fluid that Ransom guessed to be antifreeze. Now and then he woke for a brief, lucid interval, and then sank off again, gazing at the sky with wild, sad eyes.
Ransom stood up and groped across the hold. Above him Jonas came to the rail and beckoned him forwards, smiling at Ransom as if he had been waiting for him to wake. He called the look-out, and a ladder was lowered into the hold.
Painfully, Ransom managed to climb halfway to the rail. Jonas' strong hands reached down and seized his arms. He lifted Ransom onto the deck, then pressed him to sit down.
Ransom pointed to the tramp. "He's injured. Can you bring him up here? I'm a doctor, I'll do what I can."
"Of course." Jonas waved a long arm at the look-out. "Go down and we'll lift him out." As he held the ladder he said to Ransom: "A doctor, good. You'll come with us, we need everyone we can find for the search."
Ransom leaned on the rail, feeling his head slowly clear. "Search for where? What are you looking for?"
"For a new river." Jonas gestured with a sweep of his long arms, encompassing the fading skyline and half the land. "Somewhere there. My bosun tells them to laugh at me, but I have _seen_ it!" He seemed to half-believe his own boast.
The sounds of running feet came from the distant streets. Ransom listened to them approach. He waited as the lookout climbed down into the hold, a net over one shoulder. Within a minute any chance of escape would have gone. Ten feet away was the gangway. Beside the warehouse a small alley led away into the nearby streets.
Jonas leaned over the rail, his long body bent like a gallows. The tramp lay in the cradle of the net, and Jonas' huge arms lifted him slowly into the air, like a fisherman hauling in an immense catch.
Ransom stood up, as if offering to help, then turned and ran for the gangway. As the boards sprang below his feet Jonas cried out, as if trying to warn him of his error, but Ransom was across the wharf and racing up the alley.
Behind the warehouse he saw the fishermen coming down the street, a struggling man caught in the oustretched nets between them. At their head was the blond-haired bosun. He saw Ransom and broke into a run, his short hooked arms flashing in front of him.
Ransom ran on past the houses, but within thirty yards Saul was at his shoulder, his feet kicking at Ransom's as they swerved in and out of the cars.
Suddenly two brown whirling forms leapt out from behind a wall, with a flash of teeth hurled themselves on the bosun. Out of breath, Ransom ran forward for another fifty yards, then stopped behind a car as the two Alsatians snarled and jumped at Saul's head, tearing at his swinging fists.
"Doctor! This way!"
Ransom turned to see the bright-eyed figure of Quilter, the peacock hanging from his waist, waving at him further along the road. Leaving the yelping dogs, Ransom limped forward after the youth as he ran on, the tail speckling at his heels.
Lost in a maze of dusty streets, he followed Quilter across the fences and gardens, sometimes losing sight of the faunlike figure as it leapt through the drifting smoke of the refuse fires. Once, searching about in a walled garden into which he had blundered, he found the youth gazing down at the half-burned carcass of a large dog lying across a heap of embers, his face staring at it with childlike seriousness.
Finally they stepped over a low parapet on to the bank of the river, the distant span of the motorbridge on their left. Below them, across the white bed of the channel, Philip Jordan stood in the stern of his skiff, leaning watchfully on his pole. Quilter strode down the bank, sinking to his knees through the dry crust, the peacock's tail brushing the dust up into Ransom's face.
Ransom followed him down the slope, pausing by a stranded lighter. The sun was now half-hidden by the western horizon, and the smoke plumes overhead were darker and more numerous, but the basin of the river gleamed with an almost spectral whiteness.
"Ransom! Come on, doctor! You can rest later."
Surprised by this brusque call, Ransom looked round at Philip Jordan, uneasy at this association between Quilter, the grotesque Caliban of all his nightmares, and the calm-eyed Ariel of the river. He walked down to the skiff, his feet sinking in the damper mud by the water's edge. As the evening light began to fade, the burnt yellow of the old lion's skin shone in Philip Jordan's arrowlike face. Impatient to leave, he watched Ransom with remote eyes.
Quilter sat alone in the stern, a water-borne Buddha, the shadows of the oily surface mottling his face. As Ransom stepped aboard, he let out two piercing whistles. They echoed away across the bank, reflected against the concrete parapet. One of the dogs appeared. Tail high, it sprang down onto the bank, in a flurry of dust raced to the skiff, leaping aboard over Ransom's shoulder. Settling itself between Quilter's feet, it whined at the dusk. Quilter waited, watching the parapet. A frown briefly crossed his face. The Alsation whined again softly. Quilter nodded to Philip Jordan, and the craft surged away across the darkening mirror of the surface, the peacock's tail sweeping above the water like a jeweled sail.
Three miles away, the intervals in its skyline closed by the dusk, the dark bulk of Mount Royal below the smoke plumes like a somber volcano.
Chapter 5 – The Burning Altar
The next morning, after a night of uproar and violence, Ransom began his preparations for departure. Shortly before dawn, when the sounds of gunfire finally subsided, he fell asleep on the settee in the sitting room, the last embers of the burnt-out house across the avenue spurting into the air like clouds of fireflies.