At this point the river had been dredged and widened. They passed more launches and rivercraft, half-submerged under the drifting sandhills. Ransom stopped and let the others move on ahead. He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The bnvarying light and absence of all movement made Ransom feel that he was advancing across an inner landscape where the elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without association.
They stopped by the hulk of a river steamer, a large graceful craft with a tall white funnel, which had run aground in the center of the channel. The deck was level with the surrounding sand. Ransom walked to the rail and stepped over it, then strolled across the deck to the open doors of the saloon below the bridge. Inside, the dust lay over the floor and tables, its slopes cloaking the seats and corner upholstery.
Catherine and Philip Jordan climbed onto the bridge and looked out over the plain for any signs of movement Two miles away the aluminum towers of a grain silo shone against the hills.
"Can you see anything?" Ransom called up. "If there are hot springs they should send up steam clouds."
They shook their heads. "Nothing, doctor."
Ransom walked forward to the bow, and sat down on the capstan. Lowering his head, he saw that its shadow lay across his hands. Cupping them together, he altered the outline of his skull, varying its shape and length. He noticed Mrs. Quilter eying him curiously from her seat atop the cart.
"Doctor, that's a trick my Quilty had. You looked like him then. Poor lad, he was trying to straighten his head like everyone else's."
Ransom crossed the rail and went over to her. On an impulse he reached up and held her hand. Small and round, its pulse fluttered faintly, like a trembling sparrow. Mrs. Quilter gazed down at him with her vague eyes, her mind far away. Suddenly Ransom found himself hoping against all logic that they would discover Quilter somewhere.
"We'll find him, Mrs. Quilter. He'll still be there."
"It's a dream, doctor, just a dream, a woman's fancy. But I couldn't rest until I've tried."
Ahead of them was a sharp bend in the river. A herd of cattle had been driven down the bank toward the last trickle of fluid, and their collapsed skeletons lay in the sand. The huge dented skulls lolled on their sides, each one like Quilter's, the grains of quartz glittering in the empty orbits.
Two miles further on a railway bridge crossed the river. A stationary train stood among the cantilevers, the doors of the carriages open onto the line. Ransom assumed that the route ahead had been blocked, and that the crew and passengers had decided to complete the journey to the coast by steamer.
They stopped in the shade below the bridge, and looked out at the endless expanse of the dry bed framed within its pillars. In the afternoon light the thousands of shadows cast by the metal refuse covered the surface with calligraphic patterns.
"We'll camp here tonight," Philip Jordan said. "We'll make an early start; by this time tomorrow we'll be well on the way."
Each evening it took them at least two hours to prepare their camp. They pushed., the cart into the shelter of one of the pillars, then drove the spears into the sand and draped the tent from the frame. Catherine and Ransom dug a deep trench around the tent, piling the warm sand into a windbreak. Philip walked up to the bank and searched the dunes for metal stakes. At night a cold wind blew across the desert, and the few blankets tkey had brought with them were barely adequate to keep them warm.
By dusk they had built a semicircular embankment three feet high around the tent and cart, held together by the pieces of metal. Inside this small burrow they sat together, cooking their meal at a fire of tinder and driftwood. The smoke wreathed upwards through the girders, drifting away into the cold night air.
While the two women prepared their meal, Ransom and Philip Jordan climbed up onto the bridge. The dried and splitting hulks of the passenger coaches sat between the cantilevers, the stars shining through the rents in their roofs. Philip began to tear armfuls of the dry wood from the sides of the coaches. Rotted suitcases and haversacks lay in the dust by the tracks. Ransom walked forward along the line to the locomotive. He climbed into the cabin and searched for a water tap among the rusted controls. He leaned his elbows on the sill of the driver's window and for half an hour looked out along the track as it crossed the bridge and wound away over the desert.
At night, as he slept, he was awakened by Philip Jordan. "Doctor! Listen!"
He felt the young man's hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see the glowing embers of the fire reflected in his eyes as he stared across the river. "What is it?"
Far away to the northwest, where the dried trees and husks of the desert merged into the foothills of the night, an animal howled wearily. Its lost cries echoed faintly among the steel pillars of the bridge, reverberating across the white river that lay beside them, as if trying to resurrect this longdormant skeleton of the dead land.
At dawn the next morning they dismantled the camp and loaded their equipment into the cart. The disturbed night, and the earlier appearance of the sun each morning, delayed their departure. Philip Jordan paced around the cart as he waited for Mrs. Quilter, tapping his spear restlessly against the spokes of the wheel. In the sunlight his dark beaked face gave him the appearance of a nervous desert nomad, scion of some dwindling aristocratic tribe.
"Did you hear the sounds?" he asked Catherine when she appeared. "What was it-a lion or a panther?"
Catherine shook her head. She had loosened her hair, and the long tresses lifted about her head in the cool air. Unlike Philip, the sounds of the night seemed to have calmed her. "Neither. A dog of some sort. Perhaps a wolf. It was far away."
"Not more than five miles." Philip climbed up on to the remains of the camp and peered across the riverbed. "We'll be on it by noon. Keep your eyes open." He glanced sharply at Catherine, and then looked down at Ransom, who was squatting by the fire, warming his hands over the embers. "Doctor?"
"Of course, Philip. But I shouldn't worry. After ten years they'll be more frightened of us than we are of them."
"That's wishful thinking, doctor." To Catherine, he added tersely as he strode down the embankment: "On the cliff we saw a _lion_."
When Mrs. Quilter was ready, he tried to persuade her to take her seat on the cart Although she had slept badly and was already becoming overtired by the journey, Mrs. Quilter insisted on walking for the first hour. She moved along at a snail's pace, her tiny booted feet advancing over the cracked sand like timorous mice.
Philip strode beside her, barely controlling his impatience, steering the cart with one hand. Now and then Catherine would take Mrs. Quilter's arm, but she insisted on making her own way, pausing to mumble to herself and shake her head.
Ransom took advantage of her slow pace to stroll away across the surface of the river, picking among the windblown debris that had spilled down onto the bank-windmill blades and the detached doors of cars. The cold morning air refreshed him, and he was glad that Mrs. Quilter was slowing the party's progress. The few minutes alone allowed him to collect the stray thoughts that had preoccupied him more and more during their advance up the river. As he pondered on the real reasons for their journey, he had begun to sense its true inner compass. At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs. Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life; but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all into the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking, but nonetheless they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the drained bed.