The lieutenant pushed Catherine behind the edge of the old sea wall. To Ransom he shouted: "Take his gun and keep firing! Over their heads, but if they come at you bring one of them down!"
The soldiers moved off, and Ransom joined Catherine behind the wall. The sea was only fifty yards away, the waves sluicing across the wet sand. Exhausted by the noise, Catherine leaned limply against the wall.
Two or three figures came racing across the flat channel. Ransom raised his pistol, but they ran straight toward him. Then the last of them appeared, Philip Jordan with the old Negro in his arms. He saw Ransom standing in front of him, the pistol raised in his hand, but ran on, limping on his bare feet.
Ransom threw away the pistol. All along the beach small groups of people were lying in the shallows as the waves splashed across them, watched by the soldiers. Running after the others, Ransom saw Philip Jordan on his knees by the water's edge, lowering the old man to the waves. Ransom felt the water sting his legs, and then fell headlong into the shallows, his suit soaked by the receding waves, retching emptily into the cold, bitter stream.
PART II
Chapter 8 – Dune Limbo
Under the empty winter sky, the salt-dunes ran on for miles. Seldom varying more than a few feet from trough to crest, they shone damply in the cold air, the pools of brine disturbed by the in-shore wind. Sometimes, in a distant foretaste of the spring to come, their crests would be touched with white streaks as a few crystals evaporated out into the sunlight, but by the early afternoon these began to deliquesce, and the gray flanks of the dunes would run with a pale light.
To the east and west the dunes stretched along the coast to the horizon, occasionally giving way to a small lake of stagnant brine or part of a lost creek cut off from the rest of its channel. To the south, in the direction of the sea, the dunes gradually became more shallow, extending into long saltflats. At high tide they were covered by a few inches of clear water, the narrowing causeways of firmer salt reaching out into the sea.
Nowhere was there a defined margin between the shore and sea, and the endless shallows formed the only dividing zone, land and water both submerged in this gray liquid limbo. At intervals the skeleton of a derelict conveyer emerged from the salt and seemed to point toward the sea, but then, after a few hundred yards, sank from sight again. Gradually the pools of water congregated into larger lakes, small creeks formed into continuous channels, but the water never seemed to move. Even after an hour's walk, knee-deep in the dissolving slush, the sea remained as distant as ever, always present and yet lost beyond the horizon, haunting the cold mists that drifted across the salt-dunes.
To the north, the dunes steadily consolidated themselves, the pools of water between them never more than a few inches deep. Eventually, where they overran the shore, they rose into a series of large white hillocks, like industrial tippings, which partly concealed the coastal hills. The foreshore itself, over the former beaches, was covered by the slopes of dry salt running down to the dunes. The rusty spires of old distillation columns rose into the air, and the roofs of metal huts carried off their foundations floated like half-submerged wrecks. Further out there were the shells of old pumping gear and the conveyers that once carried the waste salt back into the sea.
A few hundred yards from the shore, the hulks of two or three ships were buried to their upper decks in the salt, their gray superstructures reflected in the brine-pools. Small shacks of waste metal sheltered against their sides and beneath the overhangs of the sterns. Outside their lean-to doors, smoke drifted from the chimneys of crude stills.
Beside each of these dwellings, sometimes protected by a palisade of stakes, was a small pond of brine. The banks had been laboriously beaten into a hard margin, but the water seeping everywhere continually dissolved them. Despite the to-and-fro movements of the inhabitants of the salt wastes, no traces of their footsteps marked the surface, blurred within a few minutes by the leaking water.
Only toward the sea, far across the dunes and creeks, was there any activity.
Shortly after dawn, as the tide extended slowly across the margins of the coastal flats, the narrow creeks and channels began to fill with water. The long salt-dunes darkened with the moisture seeping through them, and sheets of open water spread outwards among the channels, carrying with them a few fish and nautiloids. Reaching toward the firmer shore, the cold water infiltrated among the saddles and culverts like the advance front of an invading army, its approach almost unnoticed. A cold wind blew overhead and dissolved in the dawn mists, lifting a few uneager gulls across the banks.
Almost a mile from the shore, the tide began to spill through a large breach in one of the salt bars. The water sluiced outwards into a lagoon some three hundred yards in diameter, inundating the shallow dunes in the center. As it filled this artificial basin, it smoothed itself into a mirror of the cloudless sky.
The margins of the lagoon had been raised a few feet above the level of the surrounding saltflats, and the wet crystals formed a continuous bank almost half a mile in length. As the water poured into the breach it carried away the nearer sections of the mouth, and then, as the tide began to slacken, swilled quietly away along the banks.
Overhead the gulls dived, picking at the hundreds of fish swimming below the surface. In equilibrium, the water ceased to move, and for a moment the great lagoon, and the long arms of brine seeping away northwards through the gray light, were like immense sheets of polished ice.
At this moment, a shout crossed the air. A dozen men rose from behind the bank surrounding the lagoon and with long paddles of whalebone began to shovel the wet salt into the breach. Sliding up to their waists in the gray slush, they worked furiOusly as the wet crystals drained backwards toward the sea. Their arms and chests were strung with strips of rag and rubbber. They drove each other on with sharp cries and shouts, their backs bent as they ladled the salt up into the breach, trying to contain the water in the lagoon before the tide turned.
Watching them from the edge of the bank was a tall, thinfaced man wearing a sealskin cape over his left shoulder, his right hand on the shaft of his double-bladed paddle. His dark face, from which all flesh had been drained away, seemed to be made up of a series of flintlike points, the sharp cheekbones and jaw almost piercing the hard skin. He gazed across the captured water, his eyes counting the fish that gleamed and darted. Over his shoulder he watched the tide recede, dissolving the banks as it moved along them. The men in the breach began to shout to him as the wet salt poured across them, sliding and falling as they struggled to hold back the bank. The man in the cape ignored them, jerking the sealskin with his shoulder, his eyes on the falling table of water beyond the banks and the shining deck of the trapped sea within the lagoon.
At the last moment, when the water seemed about to burst from the lagoon at a dozen points, he raised his paddle and swung it vigorously at the opposite bank toward the shore. A cry like a gull's scream tore from his throat. As he raced off along the bank, leaving the exhausted men in the breach to drag themselves from the salt, a dozen men emerged from behind the northern bank. Their paddles whirling, they cut an opening in the wall twenty yards wide, then waded out to their chests in the water and drove it through the breach.
Carried by its own weight, the water poured in a torrent into the surrounding creeks, drawing the rest of the lagoon behind it. By the time the man in the cape had reached this new breach, half the lagoon had drained, rushing out in a deep channel. Like a demented canal, it poured onwards toward the shore, washing away the smaller dunes in its path. It swerved to the northeast, the foam boiling around the bend, then entered a narrow channel cut between two dunes. Veering to the left, it set off again for the shore, the man in the cape racing along beside it. Now and then he stopped to scan the course ahead, where the artificial channel had been strengthened with banks of drier salt, then turned and shouted to his men. They followed along the banks, their paddles driving the water on as it raced past.