With a shout, Philip Jordan slammed his foot at the halfopen door, kicking it into the frame. The muscles of his neck and cheeks were knotted like ropes, as if all the frustration of the past years were tearing his face apart. With a wrench he ripped the windscreen wiper from its pinion, then drummed his fists angrily on the hood, denting the polished metal.
"It's got to go, doctor, if I have to push it myself all the way!" He threw Ransom aside, then bent down and put his shoulder to the door frame. With animal energy he drove the car forward on its wheels. There was a clatter as the blocks toppled to the floor, and the back axle and bumper crashed onto the concrete. The car sagged downwards, its body panels groaning. Philip raced around it, pulling at the doors and fenders with his strong hands.
Ransom stepped out into the sunlight and waited there for Philip. Ten minutes later he came out, head bowed, his right hand bleeding across his wrist.
Ransom took his arm. "We don't need the car, Philip. Mount Royal is only a hundred miles away, we can walk it comfortably in two or three weeks. The river will take us straight there."
PART III
Chapter 11 – The Illuminated River
Like a bleached white bone, the flat deck of the river stretched away to the north. At its margins, where the remains of the stone embankment formed a ragged windbreak, the dunes had gathered together in high drifts, and these defined the slow-winding course of the drained bed. Beyond the dunes was the desert floor, littered with rocks and stones, and with fragments of dried mud like burnt shards of pottery. Now and then the stump of a tree marked the distance of a concealed ridge from the river, or a metal windmill, its rusty vanes held like a cipher above the empty wastes, stood guard over a dried-up creek. In the coastal hills, the upper slopes of the valley had flowered with a few clumps of hardy gorse sustained by the drifts of spray, but ten miles from the sea the desert was completely arid, the surface crumbling beneath the foot into a fine white powder. The metal refuse scattered about the dunes provided the only floral decoration-twisted bedsteads rose like clumps of desert thorns, water pumps and farm machinery formed angular sculptures, the dust spuming from their vanes in the light breeze.
Revived by the spring sunlight, the small party moved at a steady pace along the drained bed. In the three days since setting out they had covered twenty miles, walking unhurriedly over the lanes of firmer sand that wound along the bed. In part their rate of progress was dictated by Mrs. Quilter, who insisted on walking for a few miles each morning. During the afternoon she agrsed to sit on the cart, half asleep under the awning, while Ransom and Catherine Austen took turns with Philip Jordan to push it. With its large wooden wheels and light frame the cart was easy to move. Inside its locker were the few essentials of their expedition-a tent and blankets, a case of smoked herring and edible kelp, and half a dozen large cans of water, enough, Ransom estimated, for three weeks. Unless they found water during the journey to Mount Royal, they would have to give up and turn back before reaching the city, but they all tacitly accepted that they would not be returning to the coast.
The appearance of the lion convinced Ransom that there was water within twenty or thirty miles of the coast, probably released from a spring or underground river. Without this, the lion would not have survived, and its hasty retreat up the river indicated that the drained bed had been its route to the coast. They came across no spoors of the crealure, but each morning their own footprints around the camp Were soon smoothed over by the wind. Nonetheless Ransom and Jordan kept a sharp watch for the animal, their hands never far from the spears fastened to the sides of the cart.
From Mrs. Quilter, Ransom gathered that the three of them had been preparing for the journey for the past two years. At no time had there been any formal plan or route, but merely a shared sense of the need to retrace their steps toward the city and the small town by the drained lake. Mrs. Quilter was obviously looking for her son, convinced that he was still alive somewhere in the ruins of the city.
Philip Jordan's motives, like Catherine's, were more concealed. Whether, in fact, he was searching for Jonas or for tile painted houseboat he had shared with the old Negro, Ransom could not discover. He guessed that Mrs. Quilter had sensed these undercurrents during Philip's visits to her booth, and then carefully played on them, knowing that she and Catherine could never make the journey on their own. When Philip revealed the whereabouts of the car to her, Mrs. Quilter had needed no further persuasion.
Ironically, the collapse of the plan to drive in style to Mount Royal in the magnificently appointed hearse had returned Ransom to her favor.
"It was a grand car, doctor," she told him sadly for the tenth time, as they finished an early lunch under the shade of the cart. "That would have shown my old Quilty, wouldn't it?" She gazed into the distant haze, this vision of the prodigal mother's return hovering over the dunes. "Now I'll be sitting up in this old cart like a sack of potatoes."
"He'll be just as glad to see you, Mrs. Quilter." Ransom buried the remains of their meal in the sand. "Anyway, the car would have broken down within ten miles."
"Not if you'd been driving, doctor. I remember how you brought us here." Mrs. Quilter leaned back against the wheel. "You just started those cars with a press of your little finger."
Philip Jordan paced across to her, resenting this swing in her loyalties. "Mrs. Quilter, the battery was flat. It had been there for ten years."
Mrs. Quilter brushed this aside scornfully. "Batteries…! Help me up, would you, doctor? We'd best be pushing this cart on a bit more. Perhaps Philip will find us an old donkey somewhere."
They lifted her up under the awning. Ransom leaned against the shaft next to Catherine, while Philip Jordan patrolled the bank fifty yards ahead, spear in hand. Mrs. Quilter's upgrad ing of Ransom's status had not yet extended to Catherine Austen. She pushed away steadily at the handle, her leather. jacket fastened by its sleeves around her strong shoulders. When the wheel on Ransom's side lodged itself in the cracked surface, she chided him: "Come on, doctor, or do you want to sit up there with Mrs. Quilter?"
Ransom bided his time, thinking of when he had first seen, Catherine in the zoo at Mount Royal, exciting the lions in the cages. Since leaving them she had been subdued and guarded, but he could feel her reviving again, drawn to the empty savannahs and the quickening pulse of the desert cats.
Slowly they moved along the river, as Mrs. Quilter drowsed under the awning, her violet silks ruffled like half-furled sails in the warm air. Ahead of them the river continued its serpentine course between the dunes. Its broad surface, nearly three hundred yards wide, reflected the sunlight like a chalk deck. The draining water had grooved the surface, and it resembled the weathered dusty hide of an albino elephant The wheels broke the crust, and their footsteps churned the dust into soft plumes that drifted away on the air behind them. Everywhere the sand was mingled with the fine bones of small fish, the white flakes of mollusk shells.
Once or twice Ransom glanced over his shoulder toward the coast, glad to see that the dust obscured his view of the hills above the beach. Already he had forgotten the long ten years on the saltflats, the cold winter nights crouched among the draining brine pools, and the running battles with the men of the settlement.
The river turned to the northeast. They passed the remains of a line of wharfs. Stranded lighters, almost buried under the sand, lay beside them, their gray hulks blanched and empty. A group of ruined warehouses stood on the bank, jingle walls rising into the air with their upper windows intact. A series of concrete telegraph poles marked the progress of a road running toward the hills across the alluvial plain.