"Well," he temporized, "I know it sounds quixotic, Miranda, but I wanted to see Lomax and yourself-and Quilter, of course. Perhaps you don't understand?"
Miranda sat up. "But I _do_. I don't know about Richard, he's rather awkward and unpredictable these days, and Quilter does look a bit fed up with you already, but _I_ understand." She patted her huge stomach, looking down with tolerant affection at its giant girth. "If you haven't brought any water, well things won't be quite the same, let's be honest, but you can certainly stay for a few days. Can't he, Quilter?"
Before Quilter could reply Mrs. Quilter began to sway on her stool. Ransom caught her arm. "She needs some rest," he said. "Can she lie down somewhere?"
Quilter carried her away to a small cubicle behind the curtains. In a few minutes he came back and handed Ransom a pail of tepid water. Although his stomach was still full of the water he had swallowed in the lake, Ransom made a pretense of drinking gratefully, assuming that Quilter now accepted him.
To Miranda he said casually: "I take it you had us followed here?"
"We knew someone was struggling along. Not many people come up from the coast-most of them seem to get tired or disappear." She flashed Ransom a sharp smile. "I think they get eaten on the way-by the lions, I mean."
Ransom nodded. "As a matter of interest, what have you been eating? Apart from a few weary travelers like myself."
Miranda hooted. "Don't worry, doctor, you're much too stringy. Anyway, those days are past, aren't they, Quilty? Now we've got organized there's just about enough to eat- you'd be amazed how many cans you can find under these ruins-but to begin with it was difficult. I know you think everyone went off to the coast, but an awful lot stayed behind. After a while they thinned out." She patted her stomach reflectively. "Ten years is a long time."
Above them, from the dunes by the pool, there was a sharp crackling, and the pumping sounds of a bellows being worked. A fire of sticks and oil rags began to burn, sending up a cloud of smoke. Ransom looked up at the huge black pillar, rising almost from the very ground at his feet. It was identical with all the other smoke columns that had followed them across the desert, and Ransom had the sudden feeling that he had at last arrived at his destination, despite the ambiguous nature of his reception-no one had mentioned Catherine or Philip Jordan, but he assumed that people drifted about the desert without formality, taking their chances with Quilter. Some he drowned in the pool out of habit, while others he might take back to his den.
Miranda snuffled some phlegm up one nostril. "Whitman's here," she said to Quilter, who was gazing through a crack in the screen at his mother's sleeping face.
There was a patter of wooden clogs from behind the curtains, and three small children ran out from another cubicle. Surprised by the fire lifting from the edge of the swimming pool, they toddled out, squeaking softly at their mother.
Their swollen heads and puckish faces were perfect replicas of Miranda and Quilter. Each had the same brachycephalie skull, the same downward eyes and hollow cheeks. Their small necks and bodies seemed barely strong enough to carry their huge rolling heads. To Ransom they first resembled the children of the congenitally insane, but then he saw their eyes watching him. Still half asleep, their huge pupils were full of strange dreams.
Quilter ignored them as they scrambled around his feet for a better view of the fire. A man's hunchbacked figure was silhouetted against the screens. There seemed no point in lighting the fire, and Ransom decided that its significance was ritual, part of some established desert practice. Like so many defunct and forgotten rituals, it was now more frightening in its mystery than when it had served some real purpose.
Miranda watched the children scurry among the curtains. "My infants, doctor, or the few that lived. Tell me you think they're beautiful."
"They are," Ransom assured her hastily. He took one of the children by the arm and felt the huge bony skull. Its eyes were illuminated by a ceaseless ripple of thoughts. "He looks like a genius."
Miranda nodded sagely. "That's very right, doctor, they all are. What's still locked up inside poor old Quilter I've brought out in them."
There was a shout from above. A one-eyed man with a stooped crablike walk, his left arm ending in a stump above the wrist, the other blackened by charcoal, peered down at them. His face and ragged clothes were covered with dust, as if he had been living in the wild for several months. Ransom recognized the driver of the water tanker who had taken him to the zoo. A scar on the right cheek had deepened during the previous years, twisting his face into a caricature of an angry grimace, so that the man was less frightening than pathetic, a scarred wreck of himself.
Addressing Quilter, he said: "The Jonas boy and the woman went off along the river. The lions will get them tonight."
Quilter stared at the floor of the pool. At intervals he reached up and scratched his tonsure. His preoccupied manner suggested that he was struggling with some insoluble conundrum.
"Have they got any water?" Miranda asked.
"Not a drop," Whitman rejoined with a sharp laugh. His twisted face, which Ransom had seen reflected over his shoulder in the store window, gazed down at him with its fierce eye. Whitman wiped his forehead with his stump, and Ransom remembered the mannequins torn to pieces by the dogs. Perhaps this was how the man took his revenge, hating even the residuum of human identity in the blurred features of the mannequins, standing quietly in the piazza like the drained images of the vanished people of the city left behind far into the future. Everything around Ransom now seemed as isolated, the idealized residue of a landscape and human figures whose primitive forbears had long since gone. He wondered what Whitman would do if he knew that Ransom too had once amputated the dead. Neither past nor future could change, only the mirror between them.
Whitman was about to move off when the sounds of a distant voice echoed across the dunes. A confused harangue, addressed to itself as much as to the world at large, it was held together by a mournful dirgelike rhythm.
Whitman scuttled about. "Jonas!" He seemed uncertain whether to advance or flee. "I'll catch him this time!"
Quilter stood up. He placed the swan's cap on his head.
"Quilter," Miranda called after him. "Take the doctor. He can have a word with Lomax, and find out what he's up to."
Quilter remounted his stilts. They climbed out of the pool and set off past the remains of the fire burning itself out, following Whitman across the dunes. Tethered to the stump of a watchtower in one of the hollows were the dogs. The small pack, now on leash, tugged at Whitman's hand. He crept along the low walls, peering over the rough terrain. Twenty yards behind him, towering into the air like an idol in his full regalia, came Quilter, Ransom at his heels. From somewhere ahead of them the low monotonous harangue sounded into the air.
Then, as they mounted one of the dunes, they saw the tall solitary figure of Jonas a hundred yards away, moving slowly among the ruins by the edge of the drained lake. His dark face raised to the sunlight, he walked with the same entranced motion, declaiming at the white bone-like dust that reached across the lake to the horizon. His voice droned on, part prophecy, part lamentation, and twice Ransom caught the word "sea." His arms rose at each crescendo, then fell again as he disappeared from sight.
Obliquely behind him, Whitman scurried along, holding back the straining bodies of the dogs. He hesitated behind the base of a ruined tower, waiting for Jonas to emerge on to the more open stretch of the old lakeside road. He placed the leash in his mouth, and with his one hand began to undo the thong.
"Jonas-"
The call came softly from among the dunes out on the lake. Jonas stopped and looked around, searching for the caller, then saw the grotesque capped figure of Quilter behind him and the dogs jerking away from the hapless Whitman.