"Under the galley. Get in round the other side." As Philip stepped over the roof and began to drive the sand away, Ransom peered down again through the window. The care he had given to furnishing the houseboat, the mementos with which he had stocked it like some psychic ark, made him feel that it had been prepared in the future and stranded here ten years earlier in anticipation of his present needs.
"Over here, doctor!" Philip called. Ransom left the window and crossed the dust-covered roof. Catherine Austen was climbing the bank, gazing up at the ruins of her villa.
"Have you found it, Philip?"
Philip pointed down through the window; the floor of the galley had been ripped back to the walls, revealing the rungs of a stairwell into the pontoon.
"Someone else found it first, doctor." Philip stood up. He rubbed his throat, leaving a white streak across his neck. He turned and looked back down the river to the fishing trawler in the breaker's yard.
Ransom left him and began to climb the slope to the embankment of the bridge. The sand shifted, pouring away around his knees. With his feet he touched a bladed metal object, the outboard motor he had abandoned by the houseboat. For some reason, he now wanted to get away from the others. During the journey from the coast they had relied on one another, but with their arrival at Mount Royal, at the very point from which they,, had set out ten years earlier, he felt that all his obligations to them had been discharged. Ar he climbed the embankment he looked down at them, isolated from each other in the unvarying light, held together only by the sand pouring between their feet.
He climbed over the balustrade and limped slowly along the pavement toward the center of the span. The surface was covered with the strips of metal and old tires that he remembered. He rested on the rail, looking out across the dunecovered ruins around the empty towers of the distant city. To the northeast, the white surface of the drained lake rolled onwards to the horizon.
He sat down by a gap in the balustrade, surrounded by the empty cans and litter, like an exhausted mendicant, Below him Philip Jordan made his way down the riverbed, a spear in one hand and one of the two canteens over his shoulder. Catherine Austen was moving diagonally away from him up the bank, searching for something among the splinters of driftwood. Only Mrs. Quilter still sat on the cart below her tattered awning.
For ten minutes Ransom leaned against the balustrade on the deserted bridge, watching the figures below move away. Like an old crab, Mrs. Quilter crawled slowly up the far bank.
Vaguely hoping for a glimpse of his own house, his eye was distracted by a gleam of light. Cradled among the dunes near the site of Lomax's mansion was a small pond of blue water, its smooth surface ruffled into vivid patterns. Watching it, Ransom decided that the pond was a mirage of remarkable intensity. At least a hundred feet in diameter, the water was ringed by a narrow beach of smooth sand shaped like the banks of a miniature reservoir. The dunes and ruined walls surrounded it on all sides.
As he waited for the mirage to fade, a small white bird crossed the ruins and swooped down over the water. Furling its wings, it landed on the surface, gliding along a wake of breaking light.
Ransom clambered to his feet and hurried forward across the bridge. Giving up any attempt to find the others, he climbed the rail at the lower end and slid down the embankment. Pausing to rest every fifty yards, he ran on along the waterfront streets, stepping on the roofs of the cars buried under the sand.
"Doctor!" As he sidestepped over a low wall, Ransom almost jumped onto the diminutive form of Mrs. Quilter, crouching below him in a crevice. She gazed up at him with timid eyes. Somehow she had managed to dismount from the cart and make her way up the bank. "Doctor," she sighed plaintively, "I can't move myself."
When Ransom began to run on she fished the other canteen from beneath her silks. "I'll share it with you, doctor."
"Come on, then." Ransom took her arm and helped her to her feet. They set off slowly together. Once she tripped over a partly buried cable and sat down panting in the dust Ransom chafed at the delay. Finally he knelt down and hoisted her onto his back, her small, dry hands clasped around his neck.
Surprisingly, she was as light as a child. Along the open stretches, he was able to run for a few paces. Now and then he put her down and climbed one of the walls to take his bearings. Sitting in a sandfilled swimming pool by a lean-to of burnt timber, the embers of an old fire around her, she watched Ransom like an amiable witch.
As they took their final leave of the river, Mrs. Quilter pinched his ear.
"Doctor, look back for a minute!"
Half a mile away, below the motorbridge, clouds of smoke rose from the houseboat, the flames burning brightly in the shadows below the bridge. A few seconds later the cart began to burn, as if touched by some invisible torch.
"Never mind!" Tightening his grip on her legs, Ransom stumbled away across the rubble, like a lunatic Sinbad bearing the old woman of the desert sea. He turned in and out of the sloping streets, the dust rising behind them. Ahead he saw the ring of higher dunes that surrounded the lake of water. With a last effort he ran up the nearest slope.
When he reached the crest he stopped and let Mrs. Quilter slide from his shoulders. He walked slowly down to the silent disc of blue water. Stirred by the wind, a few wavelets lapped at the beach, a strip of dark sand that merged into the rubble. The lake was a small reservoir, the banks of sand built along a convenient perimeter of ruined walls. To Ransom, however, it seemed to have dropped from the sky, a distillation of all the lost rain of a decade.
Ten feet from the water's edge he broke into a run, and stumbled across the loose bricks to the firmer sand. The white bird sat in the center, watching him circumspectly. As the water leapt around his feet, the foam was as brilliant as its plumage. Kneeling in the shallow water, he bathed his head and face, then soaked his shirt, letting the cool crystal-like liquid run down his arms. The powdery blue water stretched to the opposite shore, the dunes hiding all sight of the wilderness.
With a short cry, the bird flew off across the surface. Ransom gazed around the bank. Then, over his shoulder, he became aware of a huge figure standing on the sand behind him.
Well over six feet tall, and with its broad shoulders covered by a loose cloak of cheetah skins, an immense feathered cap on its head, the figure towered above him like a grotesque primitive idol bedecked with the unrelated possessions of an entire tribe. Girdled around its waist by a gold cord was a flowing caftan that had once been a blue paisley dressing gown, cut back to reveal a stout leather belt hitching up a pair of trousers. These had apparently been cut from odd lengths of turkish carpeting, and terminated their uneven progress in a set of hefty sea boots. Clamped to them by metal braces were two stout wooden stilts nailed down to a pair of sandshoes. Together they raised their owner two feet further above the ground.
Ransom knelt in the water, watching the figure's scowling face. The expression was one of almost preposterous ferocity. The long russet hair fell to the shoulders, enclosing the face like a curtained exhibit in a fairground freak show. Above the notched cheekbones, the feathered cap sprouted laterally into two black wings, like a Norseman's helmet, and between them a long wavering appendage pointed down at Ransom.
"Quilter-!" he began, recognizing the stuffed body of the black swan. "Quilter, I'm-"
Before he had climbed to his feet the figure was suddenly galvanized into life, and with a shout launched itself through the air at Ransom. Knocked sideways into the water, Ransom felt the heavy knees in the small of his back, strong hands forcing his shoulders into the water. A fist pounded on the back of his head like a drum. Gasping for air, Ransom had a last glimpse through the flailing furs of Mrs. Quilter hobbling down the bank, her beaked face wearing a stunned smile as she croaked: "It's my Quilty boy… come here, lad, it's your old mother come to save you…"