Mrs. Quilter snorted in disgust. "Where's all the cars gone off to, doctor? We'll be wanting one for my old legs, you know."
"There may be some soon. You'll simply have to walk until we find one."
Already he was losing interest in her. The poles of the litter pressed into his shoulders. He labored slowly along the road, still thinking of the solitary man on the riverbed.
Two hours later, after they had found a car, they reached the foothills of the coastal range. Slowly they followed the road upwards, winding past burnt-out orchards and groves of brittle trees like the remnants of a petrified forest. Around them in the hills drifted the smoke of small fires, the white plumes wandering down the valleys. Here and there they saw the low roofs of primitive hovels built up on the crests. The wooded slopes below were littered with the shells of cars tipped over the edge of the road. They began to descend through a narrow cutting, and emerged on to one side of a wide canyon. At the bottom, in the bed of a dried-up stream, a timber fire burned briskly. Two men worked beside a small still, their bare chests blackened by charcoal, ignored the passing car.
The trees receded to give them a view of a distant headland, partly veiled by the long plumes of smoke moving inland. Suddenly the car was filled with the sharp tang of brine. A final bend lay ahead, and then in front of them was the gray hazy disc of the sea. On the edge of the bluff, partly blocking their view, two men sat on the roof of a car, gazing down at the coastal shelf below. They glanced back at the approaching car, their faces thin and drawn in the sunlight. More cars were parked around the bend, and along the road as it wound downwards to the shore. People sat on the roofs and hoods, gazing at the sea.
Ransom stopped the car and switched off the engine. Below them, stretching along the entire extent of the coastal shelf, were tens of thousands of cars and trailers, jammed together like vehicles in an immense parking lot. Tents and wooden shacks were squeezed between them, packed more and more tightly together as they neared the beach, where they overran the dunes and sandflats. A small group of naval craft-gray patrol boats and coast-guard cutters-were moored a quarter of a mile offshore. Long metal piers had been built out into the water toward them, and there was no clear dividing line between the sea and the shore. At intervals along the dunes stood a number of large metal huts, almost the size of aircraft hangers. Around them tall distillation columns steamed into the air, their vapor mingling with the smoke of the fires burning across the whole eighthundred-yard width of the coastal shelf. The distant sounds of machinery were carried across to the cliff, and for a moment the clanking noise of the pumping gear and the bright galvanized iron roofs along the dunes made the whole area resemble a gigantic beachside funfair, the carparks crammed with millions of would-be participants.
Catherine Austen took Ransom's arm. "Charles, we'll never get down there. All these people!"
Ransom opened his door. The car seemed as overcrowded as the vast concourse below, a meaningless replication of identity in which an infinite number of doubles of himself were being generated by some cancerous division of time. He peered down through the smoke, trying to find even a single free space. Here and there, in the garden of a house or behind a derelict filling station, there was room for a few more vehicles, but the approach lanes were closed. One or two cars crawled about the churned-up roadways, like ants blindly moving with no notion of their overall direction; but otherwise the whole congested extent of the shore had settled into an immovable jam. Everywhere people sat on the roofs of cars and trailers, staring out through the smoke toward the sea.
The only signs of organized activity came from the beach area. Trucks sped along a road between the dunes, and the lines of cars parked behind the metal huts formed neat patterns. Lines of tents shone in the sunlight, grouped around communal kitchens and service units.
"Wait here." Ransom stepped from the car and walked along to the two men sitting on the roof of the car nearby.
He nodded to them. "We've just arrived. How do we get down to the beach?"
The older of the two, a man of sixty, ignored Ransom. He was staring, not at the congestion below, but at the far horizon, where the sea dissolved in a pale haze. The fixity of his expression reminded Ransom of the obsessed cloudwatchers on their towers in Larchmont.
"We need water," Ransom explained patiently. "We've come a hundred miles today. There's an elderly cripple in the car."
The other man, a trilby pulled down to shade his face, eyed Ransom curiously. He seemed to detect the lack of conviction in Ransom's voice, and gave him a thin smile, almost of encouragement, as if Ransom had successfully passed this first hurdle.
Ransom walked back to the car. The road wound down the side of the cliff, past the people who had retreated to this last vantage point. It leveled out and approached the first of the shanty camps.
Immediately all sense of the sea was lost, the distant dunes hidden from sight by the roofs of trucks and trailers, and by the drifting smoke of garbage fires. Thousands of people squatted among the cars or sat on their doorsteps. Small groups of men moved about silenfly. The road divided, one section running parallel with the beach along the foot of the hills, the other heading diagonally toward the sea. Ransom stopped at the junction and searched for any signs of police or an army control post. On their right, smashed to pieces at the roadside, were the remains of a large sign, the metal scaffolding stripped of its wooden panels.
Choosing the beachward road, Ransom entered the shanty town. Twenty yards ahead was a crude barricade. As they stopped, four or five men appeared from the doorways of the trailers. They waved at Ransom, gesturing him back. One of them carried a metal fencing post. He walked up to the car and banged it against the grille.
Ransom held his ground. Ahead the road disappeared within fifty yards into the jungle of shacks and cars. The ground was churned into huge ruts.
A dirty hand spread across the windshield. A man's unshaven face poked through the window like a muzzle. "Come on, mister! Back the hell out of here!"
Ransom started to argue, but then gave up and reversed back to the road junction. They set off along the coast road below the cliffs. The huge motorcamps stretched ahead of them to the right, the backs of trailers jutting out over the empty sidewalk. On the left, where the cliffs had been cut back at intervals to provide small lay-bys, single families squatted under makeshift awnings, out of sight of sea and sky, gazing with drained eyes at the shack camps separating them from the beach.
Half a mile ahead they climbed a small rise, and could see the endless extent of the camps, reaching far into the haze beyond the cape ten miles away. Ransom stopped in a deserted filling station, peering down a narrow lane that ran into the trailer camp. Small children squatted with their mothers, watching the men stand and argue. The smoke of garbage fires drifted across the blank sky, and the air was touched by the sweet, acrid smells of unburied sewage.
A few dust-streaked cars cruised past in the opposite direction, faces pressed to the windows as their occupants searched for some foothold off the road.
Ransom pointed to the license plates. "Some of these people must have been driving along the coast for days." He opened the door. "There's probably little point in going on any further. I'll get out and have another look around."
He walked down the road, glancing between the lines of vehicles. People were lying about in the shade, or had walled in the narrow alleys with squares of canvas. Further in, a crowd of people surrounded a large chromium-sided trailer and began to rock it from side to side, drumming on the doors and windows with spades and pickax handles.
An old cigarette kiosk leaned against a concrete telegraph pole by the side of the road. Ransom managed to lift one foot on to the counter, then climbed up onto it. Far into the distance the silver roofs of the metal hangers along the shore glistened in the sunlight like some unattainable El Dorado. The sounds of pumping equipment drummed across to him, overlaid by the murmur and babble of the people in the camps.