As the dogs rushed off in a pack, the tall man came to life. Lowering his head, he raced off, his long legs carrying him away across the rubble. The dogs gained on him, snapping at his heels, and he pulled an old fishing net from around his waist and whipped It across their faces. Suddenly the dogs entangled themselves around the stump of a telegraph pole and came to a halt, barking over each other as they tumbled in the dust.
Ransom watched the thin figure of the preacher disappear along the lakeshore. Whitman cursed his way over to the dogs, kicking at their flanks. Quilter, meanwhile, was gazing unperturbed at the hillocks of rubble.
"Is Jonas still looking for this lost sea?" Ransom asked him.
"He's found it," Quilter said.
"Where?"
Quilter pointed to the lake, at the white chalklike dunes, the myriads of fine bones washed to the surface by the wind speckling in the sunlight.
"This is his sea?" Ransom said as they set off. "Then why doesn't he go out onto it?"
Quilter shrugged. "Lions there," he said, and then strode on ahead.
A hundred yards away, across the stretch of open ground separating the Lomax's swimming pool from the eastern edge of the estate, a small pavilion appeared in a hollow among the dunes, its glass and metal cornices shining brilliantly in the sunlight. It had been constructed from assorted pieces of chromium and enameled metal-the radiator grilles of cars, reflectors of electric heaters, radio cabinets, and so on-fitted together with remarkable ingenuity to form what appeared at a distance to be a bejeweled miniature temple. In the sunlight the gilded edifice gleamed among the dust and sand like a huge Fabergé gem.
Quilter stopped fifty yards from it. "Lomax," he said by way of introduction. "You tell him if he doesn't find water soon he's going to _drown_."
Leaving Ransom with this paradox, he strode away toward the pool.
Ransom set off across the sand. As he approached the pavilion he compared it with the crude hovels he had constructed out of the same materials at the coast, but the even desert light and neutral sand encouraged fancy and imagination while the damp saltdunes had drained it.
He reached the ornamented portico and peered inside. The walls of the small anteroom were decorated with strips of curved chromium. Colored discs of glass taken from car headlamps had been fitted into a grille and formed one continuous wall, through which the sun shone in dozens of images of itself. Another wall was constructed from the grilles of radio sets, the lines of gilded knobs forming astrological patterns.
An inner door opened. A plump, scented figure darted out from the shadows and seized his arm.
"Charles, my dear boy! They said you were coming! How delightful to see you again!"
"Richard…" For a moment Ransom gaped at Lomax. The latter circled around him, goggling over Ransom's ragged clothes with the eyes of a delirious goldfish. Lomax was completely bald, and now resembled a handsome but hairless woman. His skin had become smooth and creamy, untouched by the desert wind and sun. He wore a gray silk suit of extravagant cut, the pleated trousers like a close-fitting skirt or the bifurcated tail of a huge fish, the embroidered jacket fitted with ruffs and rows of pearl buttons. To Ransom he resembled a grotesque pantomime dame, part amiable scoundrel and part transvestite, stranded in the middle of the desert with his pavilion of delights.
"Charles, what is it?" Lomax stood back. His eyes, above the short hooked nose, were as sharp as ever. "Don't you remember me?" He chortled to himself, happy to prepare the way for his own retort. "Or is that the trouble-you _do_ remember me!"
Tittering to himself, he led Ransom through the pavilion into a small court at the rear, where an ornamental garden decorated with glass and chromium blooms had been laid out around the remains of a fountain.
"Well, Charles, what's going on? You've brought water with you?" He pressed Ransom into a chair, his hand holding Ransom's arm like a claw. "God knows I've waited long enough."
Ransom disengaged the arm. "I'm afraid you'll have to go on waiting, Richard. It must sound like a bad joke after all these years, but one of the reasons we came here from the coast was to look for water."
"What?" Lomax swung on his heel. "What on earth are you talking about? You must be out of your mind. There isn't a drop of water for a hundred miles!" With sudden irritation he drove his little fists together. "What have you been doing about it?"
"We haven't been doing anything," Ransom said quietly. "It's been all we could manage just to distill enough water to keep alive."
Lomax nodded, controlling himself. "I daresay. Frankly, Charles, you do look a mess. You should have stayed with me. But this drought-they said it would end in ten years. I thought that was why you came!"
On this last word, Lomax's voice rose angrily again, reverberating off the tinsel walls.
"Richard, for heaven's sake…" Ransom tried to pacify him. "You're all obsessed by the subject of water. There seems plenty around. As soon as I arrived I walked straight into a large reservoir."
"That?" Lomax waved a ruffed hand at him, his white woman's face like a powdered mask. Mopping his brow with a soft hand, he noticed his bald pate, then quickly pulled a small peruke from his pocket and slipped it onto his scalp. "That water, Charles, don't you understand-that's all there is left! For ten years I've kept them going, and now that this confounded drought won't end they're turning on me!"
Lomax pulled up another chair. "Charles, the position I'm in is impossible. Quilter is insane, have you seen him, striding about on those stilts?… He's out to destroy me, I know it!"
Cautiously, Ransom said: "He did give me a message- something about drowning, if I remember. There's not much danger of that here?"
"Oh no?" Lomax snapped his fingers. "Drowning-after all I've done for him! If it hadn't been for me they would have died within a week."
He subsided into the chair. Surrounded by all the chromium and tinsel, he looked like a stranded carnival fish, encrusted with pearls and pieces of shell.
"Where did you find all this water?" Ransom asked.
"Here and there, Charles." Lomax gestured vaguely. "I happened to know about one or two old reservoirs, forgotten for years under car parks and football fields, small ones no one ever thought of, but a hell of a lot of water in them all the same. I showed Quilter where it was, and he and the others piped it in here."
"And that lake is the last? But why should Quilter blame you? Surely they're grateful-"
"They're _not_ grateful! You obviously don't understand how their minds work. Look what Quilter's done to my poor Miranda. And those diseased cretinous children! Think what they'll be like if they're allowed to grow up. _Three_ Quilters! Sometimes I think the Almighty brought this drought just to make sure they die of thirst."
"Why don't you pack up and leave?"
"I can't! Don't you realize I'm a prisoner here? That terrible one-armed man Whitman is everywhere with his mad animals. I warn you, don't wander about on your Own too much. And there are a couple of lions around somewhere."
Ransom stood up. "What shall I tell Quilter then?"
Lomax whipped off his wig and slipped it into one of his pockets. "Tell them to go! I'm tired of playing Father Neptune. This is _my_ water, I found it and I'm going to drink it!" With a smirk, he added: "But I'll share it with you, Charles, of course."
"Thank you, Richard, but I think I need to be on my own at present."
"Very well, dear boy." Lomax gazed at him coolly, the smirk on his face puffing out his powdered cheeks. "Don't expect any water, though. Sooner or later it's going to run out, perhaps sooner rather than later."
"I daresay." Ransom gazed down at Lomax, realizing how far he had decayed during the previous ten years. The serpent in this dusty Eden, he was now trying to grasp back his apple, and preserve intact, if only for a few weeks, the world before the drought. By contrast, for Ransom the long journey up the river had been an expedition into his own future, into a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free of the demands of memory and nostalgia, free of the pressures even of thirst and hunger.