As he emptied the cylinder, a woman in a white beachrobe made her way down the bank fifty yards from him. She walked with the slow unhurried step of someone who has recovered from a long malady and feels that all the time in the world lies before her. The crumbling surface of the bank rose around her like clouds of bone-meal. She looked down with preoccupied eyes at the thin stream of water. For a moment, as she lifted her head to the sky, her solitary figure seemed to Ransom like the specter of the renascent dust.
Her strong face turned its level gaze upon Ransom, as if unsurprised to find him standing on the bed of the empty river. Although he had not seen her for some weeks, Ransom, conversely, knew that she would be among the last people to remain in the abandoned town. Since the death of her father, the former curator of the zoo at Mount Royal, Catherine Austen had lived alone in the house by the river. Often Ransom saw her walking along the bank in the evening, her long red hair reflected in the liquid colors of the water at sunset. Sometimes he waved to her as he sailed past in the houseboat, but she never bothered to reply.
She knelt down by the water's edge, frowning at the dead fish and birds that drifted past. She stood up and walked across to Ransom's jetty.
She pointed to an old bucket hanging from the wooden housing of the raingauge. "May I borrow that?"
Ransom handed it to her, then watched as she tried to fill it from the edge of the gangway. "Haven't you any water left?"
"A little to drink. It's so hot, I wanted to bathe." She lifted the bucket from the water, then decanted the dark fluid carefully into the river. The inside of the bucket was cloaked by a black oily veil. Without turning her head, she said: "I thought you'd gone, doctor. With everyone else, to the coast."
Ransom shook his head. "I spent the week sailing on the lake." He pointed to the glistening mudflats that stretched away beyond the entrance to the river. "You'll be able to walk across it soon. Are you going to stay on here?"
"Perhaps." She watched a fishing boat enter the river and approach them, its motor beating slowly. Two men stood in the bows, scanning the deserted wharfs. A crude black awning covered the stern of the boat, where three more men sat around the tiller, their pinched faces looking across the water at Ransom and Catherine Austen. The craft's empty nets lay amidships, but the sides of the boat had been ornamented in a way unusual for the fishermen of the river. A large carp, slit down its belly, had been fastened to each of the rowlocks, and then turned outwards to face the water. The silver bodies of the six fish stood upright on both sides of the boat like sentinels. Ransom assumed that the boat and its crew came from one of the settlements among the marshes, and that with the drought and the end of the lake the small colonies were being drawn toward the river and Mount Royal.
Yet the significance of the mounted fish eluded him. Most of the fishermen from the marshes lived close to nature, and the carp were probably some kind of rudimentary totem, expressing the fishermen's faith in their own existence.
With a smile, Catherine Austen touched his arm. "Did you see their faces, doctor? They think you're to blame."
"For the lake?" Ransom shrugged. "I dare say." He watched the boat disappear below the bridge. "Poor devils, I hope they find better catches at sea."
Catherine shook her head. "They won't leave here, doctor. Can't you see? What do you think the fish mean on the sides of the boat?" She strolled to the end of the jetty, the white robe sweeping from her hips to the dusty boards. "It's an interesting period, don't you agree? Nothing moves, but so much is happening."
"Too much. There's barely enough time to hunt for water."
"Don't be prosaic. Water is the least of our problems." She added: "I take it you'll also be here, doctor?"
"Why do you say that?" Ransom turned to look up at a truck towing a large trailer across the bridge. "As a matter of fact, I intend to leave in a day or two."
"Really?" Catherine gazed out at the exposed lakebed. "It's almost dry," she said reflectively. "Do you feel, doctor, that everything is being drained and washed away, all the memories and the stale sentiments?"
For some reason this question, with its peculiar ironic emphasis, surprised Ransom. He looked down at the hard eyes that watched his own. "Do I take that as a warning? Perhaps I should change my mooring?"
"Not at all, doctor," Catherine said blandly. "I need you here." She handed him the bucket. "Have you got any water to spare?"
Ransom slipped his hands into the pockets of his trousers. The endless obsession with water during the previous months had forged powerful reflexes. "I haven't. Or is that an appeal to sentiment?"
Catherine waited, and then shrugged and turned away. Fastening her robe, she bent down and filled the bucket.
Ransom went over and took her arm. He pointed to the slip road leading down from the embankment. Directly below the bridge the trailer had parked, and the families of four or five adults and half a dozen children were setting up a small camp. Two of the men carried a chemical closet out of the trailer. Followed by the children, they walked down the bank, sinking up to their knees in the white dust. When they reached the water they emptied the closet and carefully washed it out.
"For God's sake…!" Catherine Austen searched the sky. "Doctor, people are filthy."
Ransom took the half-filled bucket from her and lowered it into the water. Catherine watched it glide away on the oily current, her face pale and expressionless. Professor Austen's wife, a noted zoologist in her own right, had died in Africa while Catherine was a child, and Ransom suspected the daughter's eccentricities were less a sign of innate character than of loneliness and vulnerability. Watching her, Ransom reflected that however isolated a man might be, women at least remained his companions, but an isolated woman was isolated absolutely.
Gathering her robe around her, Catherine began to make her way up the bank.
"Wait," Ransom called. "I'll lend you some water." With forced humor, he added: "You can repay me when the pressure comes on again."
He guided her on board the houseboat and went off into the galley. The tank in the roof contained little more than twenty-five gallons, laboriously filled from jerricans he had taken down to the river in his car. The public water supplies, a pathetic trickle all summer, had finally been discontinued three weeks earlier, and since then he had been unable to make good the constant drain on the tank.
He half-filled a can of water and carried it into the cabin. Catherine Austen was strolling up and down, inspecting his books and curios.
"You're well prepared, doctor," she commented. "I see you have your own little world here. Everything outside must seem very remote." She took the can and turned to leave. "I'll give it back to you. I'm sure you'll need it."
Ransom caught her elbow. "Forget the water. Please. I'd hate you to think I'm smug, of all things. If I am well prepared it's just that…" He searched for a phrase. "… I've always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area."
She watched him with a critical eye. "Perhaps, but I think you've missed my point, doctor."
She walked slowly up the bank, and without looking back disappeared toward her villa.
Below the bridge, in the shadow of the pylons, the trailer families sat around a huge garbage fire, their faces blazing like voodoo cultists in the serpentlike flames. Down on the water the solitary figure of Quilter watched them from his coracle, leaning on his pole among the dead fish like a waterborne shepherd's boy resting among his sleeping flock. As Ransom returned to the houseboat Quilter bent down and scooped a handful of the brackish water to his mouth, drank quickly, and then punted himself away below the bridge with his awkward grace.