"Philip! Dr. Ransom!" Catherine Austen had stopped some twenty yards behind the others and was pointing down the river behind them.
A mile away, where the bridge crossed the river, the empty train was burning briskly in the sunlight, billows of smoke pouring upwards into the air. The flames moved from one coach to the next, the bright embers falling between the tracks onto the site of the camp below. Within a few minutes the entire train had been engulfed. The sky to the south was stained by the dark smoke.
Ransom walked over to the others. "There's a signal, at least," he said quietly. "If there's anyone here they'll know we've arrived."
Philip Jordan's hands fretted on the shaft of his spear. "It must have been the fire. Didn't you put it out, doctor?"
"Of course. An ember must have blown up onto the track during the night."
They watched the fire burn itself out among the last coaches on the approach lines to the bridge. Collecting himself, Philip turned to Mrs. Quilter and motioned her toward the cart.
Ransom took his place at the shaft They moved off at a brisk pace, all three pushing the cart along. Over his shoulder, when they reached a bend in the river, Ransom looked back at the burning bridge. The smoke still drifted up from the train, its curtain sealing off the south behind them.
By noon they had covered ten miles more. They stopped to prepare their midday meal. Pleased with their progress, Philip Jordan helped Mrs. Quilter down from the cart and set up the awning for her, trailing it from the hull of an old lighter.
After the meal Ransom strolled away along the bank. Cloaked by the sand, the remains of wharfs and jetties straggled past the hulks of barges. The river widened into a small harbor. Ransom climbed a wooden quay and walked past the leaning cranes through the outer streets of a small town. The facades of half-ruined buildings and warehouses marked out the buried streets. He passed a hardware store and then a small bank, its doors shattered by ax blows. The burntout remains of a bus depot lay in a heap of smashed glass plate and dulled chromium.
A large bus stood in the court, its roof and sides smothered under the sand, in which the eyes of the windows were set like mirrors of an interior world. Ransom ploughed his way down the center of the road, passing the submerged forms of abandoned cars. The succession of humps, the barest residue of identity, interrupted the smooth flow of the dunes down the street. He remembered the cars excavated from the quarry on the beach. There they had emerged intact from their ten-year burial, the scratched fenders and bright chrome mined straight from the past. By contrast, the half-covered cars in the street were like idealized images of themselves, the essences of their own geometry, the smooth curvatures like the eddies flowing out of some platonic future.
Submerged by the sand, everything had been transvalued in the same way. Ransom stopped by one of the stores in the main street. The sand blowing across it had reduced the square glass plate to an elliptical window three feet wide. Peering through it, he saw a dozen faces gazing out at him from the dim light with the waxy expressions of plastic mannequins. Their arms were raised in placid postures, the glacé smiles as drained as the world around them.
Abruptly, Ransom caught his breath. Among the blank faces, partly obscured by the reflections of the buildings behind him, was a grinning head. It swam into focus, like a congealing memory, and Ransom started as a shadow moved in the street behind him.
"Quilt-!" He watched the empty streets and sidewalks, trying to remember if all the footprints in the sand were his own. The wind passed flatly down the street, and a wooden sign swung from the roof of the store opposite.
Ransom walked toward it, and then turned and hurried away through the drifting sand.
They continued their progress up the river. Pausing less frequently to rest, they pushed the cart along the baked white deck. Far behind them the embers of the burnt-out train sent their long plumes into the sky.
Then, during the midafternoon, when the town was five miles behind them, they looked back and saw dark billows of smoke rising from its streets. The flames raced across the rooftops, and within ten minutes an immense pall of smoke cut off the southern horizon.
"Dr. Ransom!" Philip Jordan strode over to him as he leaned against the shaft of the cart. "Did you light a fire while you were there? You went for a walk."
Ransom shook his head. "I don't think so, Philip. I had some matches with me-I suppose I might have done."
"But did you? Can't you remember?" Philip watched him closely.
"No. I'm sure I didn't. Why should I?"
"All right, then. But I'll take those matches, doctor."
From then on, despite Philip's suspicions that he had started the fires-suspicions that for some obscure reason he found himself sharing-Ransom was certain they were being followed. The landscape had changed perceptibly. The placid open reaches of the coastal plain, its perspectives marked by an isolated tree or silo, had vanished. Here the remains of small towns gave the alluvial bench an uneven appearance, the wrecks of cars were parked among the dunes by the river and along the roads approaching it Everywhere the shells of metal towers and chimneys rose into the air. Even the channel of the river was more crowded, and they wound their way past scores of derelict craft.
They passed below the spans of the demolished road bridge that had interrupted their drive to the coast ten years earlier. As they stepped through the collapsed arches, and the familiar perspectives reappeared in front of them, Ransom remembered the solitary figure they had seen walking slowly away up the drained bed. He left the cart and went on ahead, searching for the footsteps of this enigmatic figure. In front of him the light was hazy and obscured, and for a moment, as he tried to clear his eyes, he saw a sudden glimpse of someone three hundred yards away, his back touched by the sunlight as he moved off among the empty basins.
Chapter 12 – The Smoke Fires
This image remained with him as they completed the final stages of the journey to Mount Royal. Ten days later, when they reached the western outskirts of the city, it had become for Ransom inextricably confused with all the other specters of the landscape they had crossed. The aridity of the central plain, with its desolation and endless deserts stretching across the continent, numbed him by its extent. The unvarying desert light, the absence of all color, and the brilliant whiteness of the stony landscape made him feel that he was advancing across an immense graveyard. Above all, the lack of movement gave to even the slightest disturbance an almost hallucinatory intensity. By night, as they rested in a hollow cut into the dunes along the bank, they would hear the same unseen animal somewhere to the northwest, howling to itself at their approach. Always it was several miles away from them, its cries echoing across the desert, reflected off the isolated walls that loomed like megaliths in the gray light.
By day, when they set out again, they would see the fires burning behind them. The dark plumes rose from the desert floor, marking the progress of the river bed front the south. Sometimes six or seven fires wtuld burn simultaneously in a long line, their billows leaning against the sky.
Their supplies of water were now almost exhausted, and the failure to find any trace of springs or underground channels had put an end to the original purpose of the expedition. However, none of them mentioned the need to turn back for the coast, or made a serious attempt to dig for water in the sand. Backs bent against the cart, they plodded on toward the rising skyline of the city.