Sitting upright in a rocking chair in the center of the spartan chamber was a gray-haired old Negro. He wore a faded khaki shirt and corduroy trousers, patiently darned with a patchwork of laborious stitching. At first glance Ransom assumed from his broad shoulders and domed head that he was in late middle-age, but as the light cleared he saw from his sticklike shoulders and legs that he was at least seventy-five years old. Despite his advanced age, he held himself erectly, his lined patrician head turning as Philip came toward him. The faint light through the shuttered portholes was reflected in his opaque, blind eyes.
Philip bent down beside him. "Father, it's time for us to leave. We must go south to the coast."
The old Negro nodded. "I understand, Philip. Perhaps you would introduce me to your friends?"
"They will come with us to help. This is Dr. Ransom and Miss-"
"Austen. Catherine Austen." She stepped forward and touched the Negro's clawlike hand. "It's a pleasure, Mr. Jordan."
Ransom glanced around the cabin. Obviously there was no bloodlink between Philip and the elderly Negro, but he assumed that this blind old man was the youth's fosterfather, the invisible presence he had felt behind Philip for so many years. A thousand puzzles were immediately solved-this was why Philip always took his food away to eat, and why, despite Ransom's generous gifts during the winter, he was often close to starvation.
"Philip has told me of you a great deal, doctor," the old man said in his soft voice. "I have always known you to be a good friend to him."
"That's why I want us to leave now, Mr. Jordan, before the drought begins to break up the land. Are you well enough to travel?"
The merest hint of an implied negative made Philip Jordan bridle. "Of course he is!" He stepped between Ransom and the old man. "Don't worry, Father, I won't leave you."
"Thank you, Philip." The old man's voice was still soft. "Perhaps you would get ready. Take only what water and food you can carry." As Philip moved away to the galley the old Negro said: "Dr. Ransom, may I speak with you?"
When they were alone, he looked up at Ransom with his sightless eyes. "It will be a long journey, doctor, perhaps longer for you than for me. You will understand me when I say it will really begin when we get to the beach."
"I agree," Ransom said. "It should be fairly clear until we reach the coast."
"Of course." The Negro smiled faintly, his great domed head veined like a carved teak globe of the earth. "I shall be a great burden to you, doctor; I would rather stay here than be left by the roadside later. May I ask you to be honest with yourself?"
Ransom stood up. Over his shoulder he could see Catherine Austen standing in the sunlight on the deck, her red hair lifting like some Homeric fleece in the moving air. Something about the old Negro's question irritated him. Partly he resented the old man for having taken advantage of him for so many years, but even more for his assumption that Ransom could still make a simple choice between helping him on the one hand and abandoning him on the other. After the events of the previous days, he already felt that, in the new landscape emerging around them, humanitarian considerations were becoming increasingly irrelevant.
"Doctor?"
"Mr. Jordan, I daren't be honest with myself. Most known motives are so suspect these days that I doubt whether the hidden ones are any better. All the same, I'll try to get you to the beach."
Shortly before dusk they began their return journey down the river. Ransom and Philip Jordan stood at bow and stern, each working a puntpole, while Catherine and the old man sat amidships under a makeshift awning.
Around them the baked white surface of the lake stretched from horizon to horizon. Half a mile from the town, where they joined the main channel, they heard a siren sound into the hot afternoon air. Philip Jordan pointed two hundred yards to starboard, where Captain Tulloch's river steamer sat in a small landlocked pool of water. Pennants flying and deck canvas trim over the rows of polished seats, the steamer's engines worked at full ahead, its long prow nudging the curve of a huge sandflat. The screws turned tirelessly, churning the black water into a thick foam. Deserted by his crew, Captain Tulloch stood behind the helm, sounding his siren at the dead flank of the dune as he nudged away at it, as if trying to wake a sleeping whale.
Philip called to Ransom, but the latter shook his head. They swept past, the sounds of the siren receding behind them into the haze.
They reached Larchmont at dusk, and rested behind the hull of a rusting dredger moored by the entrance to the lake. In the fading light, the old Negro slept peacefully, sitting upright in the boat with his head against the metal posts of the awning. Beside him, Catherine Austen leaned her elbows on the jerricans of water, head forward on her wrists.
As darkness settled over the river, Ransom went up onto the bridge of the dredger, where Philip Jordan pointed toward the distant city. Huge fires were burning from the skyline, the flames swept off the rooftops as the immense canopies of smoke lifted into the air over their heads.
"They're trying to burn the whole of Mount Royal down," Ransom said. "This must be Lomax." As the light flickered in Philip Jordan's face, he saw the beaked profile of Jonas. He turned back to the fires and began to count them.
An hour later they walked forward along the drained bed, the heat of the waterfront fires driving across the river like a burning sirocco. The entire horizon was ablaze, enormous fires raging on the outskirts of the city. Larchmont burned along the river, the flames sweeping down the streets. The boathouses along the quays were on fire, the hundreds of fish transfigured in the dancing light. Overhead, myriads of glowing cinders sailed past like fireflies, lying in the distant fields to the south as if the clinkered soil itself was beginning to burn.
"The lions!" Catherine shouted. "Doctor, I can hear them!" She ran forward to the edge of the channel, her face lit by the flames.
"Miss Austen, look!" Philip Jordan took her arm. Above the embankment of the motorbridge, illuminated like an immense screen, stood one of the maned lions. It climbed on to the balustrade and looked down at the inferno below, then leapt away into the darkness. They heard a shout from the slip road, and a man raced past the burning quays, the maned lion hunting him through the shadows.
As they climbed up the bank, a figure moved behind one of the stranded launches. An old crone swathed in a bundle of rags clutched at Ransom before he could push her away.
"Doctor, you wouldn't be leaving an old body like Ma Quilter? To the taggers and the terrible flames, for pity's sake?"
"Mrs. Quilter!" Ransom steadied her, half-afraid that the fumes of whiskey that enveloped her might ignite them both. "What are you doing here?"
"Looking for my boy, doctor…" She gestured like a distraught witch at the opposite bank, her wizened face beaked and fearful in the pulsing light. "It's that Lomax and his filthy Miranda, they've stolen my boy!"
Ransom propelled her up the slope. Catherine and Philip, the old Negro carried between them, had scaled the bank and were taking shelter in one of the gardens. The falling cinders flickered around them. As if set off by some prearranged signal, the whole of the lakeside town was burning simultaneously. Only Lomax's house, at the eye of this hurricane, was immune. Searching for his own home among the collapsing roofs, Ransom heard more shouts carried above the roaring timbers, and saw the two cheetahs racing in pursuit down the burning corridors.
"Philip!"
The cry came to them in a familiar demented voice across the river. Mrs. Quilter turned, peering blindly into the flames, and shouted hoarsely: "That's my boy! That's old Quilty come for his Ma!"