When Philip Jordan had gone Ransom climbed down the stairway and stepped out onto the deck of the lightship. Beyond the rail a single melancholy herring circled the tank-Grady had come to demand his due while Ransom was at the settlement-and the prospect of the dismal meal to be made of the small fish caused Ransom to turn abruptly from the shack. Judith was asleep, exhausted by her altercation with Grady. Below him the deck shelved toward the saltdunes sliding across the beach. Crossing the rail, Ransom walked off toward the shore, avoiding the shallow pools of brine disturbed by the wind.
The salt slopes became firmer. He climbed up toward the salt tips, rising against the hills like white pyramids. The remains of a large still jutted through the surface of the slope, the corroded valve-gear decorating the rusty shaft. He stepped across the brown shell of a metal hut, his feet sinking through the lace-like iron, then climbed past a pile of derelict motorcar bodies half-buried in the salt. When he reached the tips he searched the ground for Philip Jordan's footprints, but the dry salt was covered with dozens of tracks left by the sledges pulled by the quarry workers.
Beyond the salt tips stretched what had once been the coastal shelf. The original dunes had been buried under the salt washed up from the beach during the storms, and by the drifts of sand and dust blown down from the hills. The gray sandy soil, in which a few clumps of grass gained a precarious purchase, was strewn with half-buried pieces of ironwork and metal litter. Somewhere beneath Ransom's feet were the wrecks of thousands of cars and trucks. Isolated hoods and windscreens poked through the sand, and sections of barbed wire fencing rose into the air for a few yards. Here and there the roof-timbers of one of the beachside villas sheltered the remains of an old hearth.
Some four hundred yards to his right was the mouth of the drained river, along which he had first reached the shore ten years earlier. Partly hidden by the quarry workings, the banks had been buried under the thousands of tons of sand and loose rock slipping down into the empty bed from the adjacent hills. Ransom skirted the edges of the quarry, making his way carefully through the wasteland of old chassis and smashed fenders thrown to one side.
The entrance to the quarry sloped to his left, the ramp leading down to the original beach. In the sandy face of the quarry were the half-excavated shells of a dozen cars and trailers, their fractured windows and grilles like veins of fossil quartz, embedded in the gritty face like the intact bodies of armored saurians. Here, at the quarry, the men from the settlement were digging out the old car shells, picking through them for tires, seats, and old rags of clothing.
Beyond the quarry the dunes gave way to a small hollow, from which protruded the faded gilt roof of an old fairground booth. The striped wooden awning hung over the silent horses of the merry-go-round, frozen like magical unicorns on their spiral shafts. Next to it was another of the booths, a line of washing strung from its decorated eaves. Ransom followed one of the pathways cut through the dunes into this little dell. Here Mrs. Quilter lived out of sight of the sea and shore, visited by the quarry-workers and womenfolk of the settlement, for whom she practised her mild necromancy and fortune-telling. Although frowned upon by the Reverend Jobnstone and his captains, these visits across the dunes served a useful purpose, introducing into their sterile lives,. Ransom believed, those random elements, that awareness of chance and time, without which they would soon have lost all sense of identity.
As he entered the dell, Mrs. Quilter was sitting in the doorway of her booth, darning an old shawl. At the sound of footsteps she put away her needle and closed the lower half of the painted door, then kicked it open again when she identified Ransom. In the ten years among the dunes she had barely aged. If anything her beaked face was softer, giving her the expression of a quaint and amiable owl. Her small round body was swathed in layers of colored fabrics stitched together from the oddments salvaged by the quarry workers- squares of tartan blanket, black velvet, and faded corduroy, ruffed with strips of embroidered damask.
Beside her, outside the door, was a large jar of fish-oil. A dozen herrings, part of her recent take, dried in the sun. On the slopes around her, lines of shells and conches had been laid out in the sand to form a series of pentacles and crescents.
Dusting the sand off the shells as Ransom approached was Catherine Austen. She looked up, greeting him with a nod. Despite the warm sunlight in the hollow, she had turned up the leather collar of her fleece-lined jacket, hiding her lined face. Her self-immersed eyes reminded Ransom of the first hard years she had spent with the old woman, eking out their existence among the shells of the old motorcars. The success of their present relationship-their fading red hair made them seem like mother and daughter-was based on their absolute dependence on each other and the rigorous exclusion of everyone else.
On the sloping sand Catherine had set out the signs of the zodiac, the dotted lines outlining the crab, ram, and scorpion.
"That looks professional," Ransom commented. "What's my horoscope for the day?"
"When were you born? Which month?"
"Cathy!" Mrs. Quilter waved her little fist at Ransom from her booth. "That'll be a herring, doctor. Don't give him charity, dear."
Catherine nodded at the old woman, then turned to Ransom with a faint smile. Her strong, darkly tanned face was hardened by the spray and wind. "Which month? Don't tell me you've forgotten?"
"June," Ransom said. "Aquarius, I assume."
"Cancer," Catherine corrected. "The sign of the crab, doctor, the sign of deserts. I wish I'd known."
"Fair enough," Ransom said. They walked past the merrygo-round. He raised his hand to one of the horses and touched its eyes. "Deserts? Yes, I'll take the rest as read."
"But which desert, doctor? There's a question for you."
Ransom shrugged. "Does it matter? It seems we have a knack of turning everything we touch into sand and dust. We've even sown the sea with its own salt."
"That's a despairing view, doctor. I hope you give your patients a better prognosis."
Ransom looked down into her keen eyes. As she well knew, he had no patients. During the early years at the beach he had tended htindreds of sick and wounded, but almost all of them had died, from exposure and malnutrition, and by now he was regarded as a pariah by the people of the settlement, on the principle that a person who needed a doctor would soon die.
"I haven't got any patients," he said quietly. "They refuse to let me treat them. Perhaps they prefer your brand of reassurance." He looked around at the hills above. "For a doctor there's no greater failure. Have you seen Philip Jordan? About half an hour ago?"
"He went by. I've no idea where."
For half an hour Ransom climbed the dunes, wandering, in and out of the foothills below the cliffs. Old caves studded the base, crude glass windows and tin doors let into their mouths, but the dwellings had been abandoned for years. The sand retained something of the sun's warmth, and for ten minutes Ransom lay down and played with the tags of wastepaper caught in its surface. Behind him the slopes rose to a smooth bluff a hundred feet above the dunes, the small headland jutting out over the surrounding hills. Slowly Ransom climbed up its flank, hoping that from here he would see Philip Jordan when he returned to the settlement.