The reduction in their daily water ration made them uneager to talk to each other. Most of the time Mrs. Quilter sat tied to the back-rest atop the cart, swaying and muttering to herself. Philip Jordan, his dust-streaked face more and more lizardlike in the heat, carefully scanned the verges of the river, taking his spear and running on ahead whenever the others rested. Pushing away at the cart, Catherine Austen kept to herself. Only the cries of the animal at night drew any response from her.
On the night before they reached the city, Ransom woke to the distant howling and saw her a hundred yards from the camp. She was walking on the dunes beyond the river's edge, the dark night wind whipping her long hair off her shoulders.
The next morning, as they knelt by the fire, sipping at one of the two remaining canteens, he asked her: "Catherine, we're almost there. What are you looking for?"
She picked up a handful of the dust and clenched it in her fist, then let the white crystals dissolve between her fingers.
Surrounded on all sides by the encroaching desert, the city seemed to have drawn in upon itself, the ridges of brick and stone running off into the sandhills. As they neared the city, the burnt-out roofs rose above the warehouses by the dockyards. Ransom looked up at the wharfs and riverside streets, waiting for any signs of movement, but the roads were deserted, filled with sand like the floors of canyons. The buildings receded in dusty tiers, transforming the whole place into a prehistoric terrace city, a dead metropolis that turned its forbidding stare on them as they passed.
Beyond the outskirts of the city, the riverside towns had vanished. Huge dunes sloped among the ruined walls, pieces of burnt timber sticking from the smooth flanks. Philip Jordan and Ransom climbed onto the bank and looked out across the causeways of rubble stretching away like the foundation stones of a city still waiting to be laid. Here and there the remains of a shanty leaned against a wall, or a small group of buildings stood alone like a deserted fort. Half a mile away they could see the curve of the motorbridge, and beyond it an indistinct series of earthworks that marked the remains of Larchmont.
Ransom stared out at the lake. Where the open water had once been, a sea of white dunes stretched away toward. the horizon, their rolling crests touched by the sunlight. Ransom waited for them to move, the soft waves sweeping across the shore. The symmetry of the dunes, their drained slopes like polished chalk, illuminated the entire landscape.
Shaking his head at the desolation around him, Philip Jordan muttered: "There's no water here, Ransom. Those fires were an accident. Quilter, everyone, they're all dead."
Ransom looked back at the dark plumes lifting into the sky behind them. The nearest was only half a mile away, burning somewhere by the harbor authority wharf. "Philip, there must be someone. If they're here, there'll be water."
Below them, Catherine Austen leaned against the side of the cart. Under her awning Mrs. Quilter rocked like a child from side to side. Philip began to walk down to them when a harsh barking crossed the air from a two-story building a hundred yards from the bank.
Philip crouched down behind a section of metal fencing, but Ransom beckoned to him. "Philip, come on! Those dogs are given water by someone."
They made their way along the fence, darting from the cover of one ruined house to another. The humps of car roofs and the blackened stumps of old watchtowers broke through the surface. The noise of the dogs rose from the far side of the building. A stairway led to the shopping level on the second floor. Ransom and Philip moved carefully up the steps to the open balcony. Drifts of dust, mingled with old cans and pieces of broken furniture, had been blown against the metal balustrade overlooking the piazza. Holding their spears, they crawled across to the railing. For a moment Philip hesitated, as if frightened by whom he might see below, but Ransom pulled his arm.
In the center of the piazza, some fifty. yards to their left, five or six dogs were attacking a group of plastic mannequins taken from one of the stores and set out on the pavement. The lean white forms leapt and snarled, tearing at the faces of the mannequins and stripping off the rags of clothing draped across their shoulders and waists. One after the other, the mannequins were knocked over, their arms and legs torn off by the snapping mouths.
A whiplike crack came from beyond the far end of the building, and the pack turned and raced off, two of them dragging a headless mannequin across the dust. Rounding the corner of the building, they disappeared among the ruined streets, the sharp cracks of the whip driving them on.
Ransom pointed to a detached head rocking in the gutter, seeing in the savaged faces the waxy images behind the store window in the riverside town. "A warning to travelers, Philip? Or just practice for the dogs?"
They returned to Catherine and Mrs. Quilter, and rested for a few minutes in the shade inside the hull of a wrecked barge. In a breaker's yard across the river was the skeleton of a large fishing trawler, its long hull topped by the high sternbridge that Jonas had paced like some desert Ahab, hunting for his white sea. Ransom glanced at Philip Jordan, and saw that he was staring up at the bridge, his eyes searching the empty portholes.
Mrs. Quilter sat up weakly. "Can you see my old Quilty?" she asked. During the past few days, as they neared Mount Royal, each of them had been generous with their water rations to Mrs. Quilter, as if this in some way would appease the daunting specter of her son. Now, however, with only two canteens left and the city apparently deserted, Ransom noticed that she received barely her own ration.
"He'll be here, doctor," she said, aware of this change of heart. "He'll be somewhere, I can feel it."
Ransom wiped the dust from his beard. The thinning hair was now as white as Miranda Lomax's had ever been. He watched the distant plumes of smoke rising along the course of the river. "Perhaps he is, Mrs. Quilter."
They left the trawler and set off toward the motorbridge, which they reached half an hour later. Outside the entrance to the yacht basin the remains of Mrs. Quilter's barge lay in the sunlight, a few burnt beams dimly out-lining its shape. She pottered over them, stirring the charred timbers with a stick, and then let herself be lifted back into the carts.
As they ploughed through the fine dust below the fishermen's quays, Ransom noticed that from here out to the white dunes of the lake the surface was composed almost entirely of the ground skeletons of thousands of small fish. Spurs of tiny bones and vertebrae shone in the dust at his feet. This coating of bone meal formed the brilliant reflector that illuminated the lake and the surrounding desert.
As they passed below the intact span of the motorbridge, Ransom let go of the shaft. "Philip, the houseboat!" Recognizing the rectangular outline buried in the sand, he ran through the drifts toward it.
He knelt down in the flowing sand, and brushed it away from the windows, then peered through the scored glass as Philip Jordan clambered up beside him.
Some years earlier the cabin had been ransacked. Books were scattered about, the desk drawers pulled out onto the floor; but at a glance Ransom could see that all his mementos, which he had gathered together before leaving Larchmont, were still within the cabin. A window on the port side was broken, and the sand poured across the desk, half-submerging the framed reproduction, Tanguy's image of drained strands. Ransom's paperweight, the fragment of Jurassic limestone, lay just beyond reach of the sand.
"Doctor, what about the water?" Philip Jordan knelt beside him, clearing the sand away from the window. "You had some water in a secret tank."