He continued walking northwards, feeling the immense drag weakening still further. The landscape around him was dark and featureless, and he paid no attention to it. Only one thought dominated his mind: that he must move sufficiently far forward before he rested so that he would not be dragged back again to that zone of pressure. He knew now a basic truth of this world, that the ground was indeed moving as Collings had said. Up north, where the city existed, the ground moved with an almost imperceptible slowness: about one mile in a period of ten days. But further south it moved faster, and its acceleration was exponential. He had seen it in the way the bodies of the girls had changed: in the space of one night the ground had moved sufficiently far for their bodies to be affected by the lateral distortions to which they — and not he — were subjected.
The city could not rest. It was destined to move forever, because if it halted it would start the long slow movement down here — down past — where it would come eventually to the zone where mountains became ridges a few inches high, where an irresistible pressure would sweep it to its destruction.
At that moment, as Helward walked slowly northwards across the strange, dark terrain, he could give no rationale to what he had experienced. Everything conflicted with logic: ground was stable, it could not move. Mountains did not distort as one sprawled across their face. Human beings did not become twelve inches high; chasms did not narrow; babies did not choke on their mothers’ milk.
Though the night was well advanced, Helward felt no tiredness beyond the residue of the physical strain he had endured on the side of the mountain. It occurred to him that the day had passed quickly; faster than he could have credited.
He was well beyond the zone of maximum pressure now, but he was still too aware of it to halt. It was not a pleasant thought to sleep while the ground moved beneath him, bearing him ineluctably southwards.
He was a microcosm of the city: he could no more rest than it.
Tiredness came at last and he sprawled on the hard ground, and slept.
He was awakened by the sunrise, and his first thought was of the southwards pressure. Alarmed, he sprang to his feet and tested his balance: the pressure was there, but not measurably worse than it had been at his last recollection.
He looked towards the south.
There, incredibly, the mountains stood.
It could not be so. He had seen them, felt them reduce to a ridge of hard ground, no more than an inch or two in height. Yet they were clearly there: steep, irregularly shaped, capped with snow.
Helward found his pack, and checked its contents. He had lost the rope and grapple, and much of his equipment had been with the girls when he left them, but he still had one canteen of water, a sleeping-bag, and several packets of the dehydrated food. It would be enough to keep him going for a while.
He ate a little of the food, then strapped his pack in place.
He glanced up at the sun, determined this time to keep his bearings.
He walked south towards the mountains.
The pressure grew about him slowly, dragging him forward. As he watched the mountains they appeared to reduce in height. The substance of the soil on which he walked became thicker, and the terrain once more took on its appearance of fused lateral streaks.
Overhead, the sun moved faster than it had any right to do.
Fighting against the pressure, Helward stopped when he saw that the mountains were once again not much more than an undulating line of low hills.
He was not equipped to go further. He turned, and moved north. Night fell an hour later,
He walked on through the darkness until he felt the pressure was acceptably low, then rested.
When daylight came again, the mountains were clearly in view… and as mountains.
He made no attempt to move, but waited in his place. As the day advanced the pressure grew. He was being borne southwards by the motion of the ground towards the mountains… and as he watched and waited he saw them slowly spread laterally.
He moved camp, went northwards before night fell. He had seen enough; it was time to return to the city.
Unaccountably, the thought of this worried him. Would he have to make some kind of report on what had happened?
There was much he felt incapable of even absorbing into his own experience, let alone coalescing what he had seen and felt into a coherent order that he could describe to someone else.
At the centre of it all was the stupefying sight of the world spread before him. Had any man ever been privy to such an experience? How could the mind encompass a concept of which the eye had been incapable of seeing even the entire extent? To left and right — and, for all he knew, to the south of him — the surface of the world had extended seemingly without bound. Only in the north, due north, was there a definition of form: that curving, rising pinnacle of land which stretched to no visible end.
Likewise the sun, likewise the moon. And, for all he knew, likewise every body in the visible universe.
The three girls: how could he report on their safe conduct to their village when they had passed into a state in which he could not communicate with them, nor even see them? They had passed on into their own world, utterly alien to him.
The baby: what had happened to that? Manifestly of the city, for like him it had not been affected by the distortions that were otherwise all about them, presumably it had been abandoned by Rosario… and was now presumably dead. Even if it still lived, the motion of the ground would bear it southwards to that zone of pressure where it could not survive.
Lost in such thoughts, Helward walked on, taking little account of his surroundings. Only when he stopped to take a drink of water did he look about, and it was with a start of surprise that he realized that he recognized the terrain.
This was the rocky land to the north of the chasm where the bridge had been built.
He took a few mouthfuls of the water, then retraced his steps. If he was to find his way back to the city he must relocate the tracks, and the site of the bridge would be a better landmark than most.
He encountered a stream which, in his preoccupied state, he must have crossed without noticing. He followed its course, wondering if this could possibly be the same stream, for it appeared to be a tiny rivulet. In due time the banks of the stream became steeper and rougher, but there was no sign of the chasm.
Helward scrambled up the bank, and walked back against the direction of the water-flow. Though naggingly familiar, the appearance of the stream was distended and distorted, and it could be another stream entirely.
Then he noticed a long black oval near the edge of the water. He went down and examined it. There was a faint smell of burning… and on closer inspection he realized this was the scar of a fire. His camp-fire.
The stream next to it was no more than a yard wide, and yet when he had been here with the girls it had been at least twelve feet across. He went back to the top of the bank. After a long search he found some marks on the ground which could have been the traces of one of the suspension towers.
From the top of one bank to the next, the distance could have been no more than five or six yards. The drop to the water was a matter of feet.
At this point the city had crossed.
He walked northwards, and in a short while found the trace of a sleeper. It was about seventeen feet long. The one next to it was three inches away.
By the following night the scale of the landscape had assumed proportions that were more familiar to him. Trees looked like trees, not sprawling bushes. Pebbles were round, grass grew in clumps, not spread like a smear of green. The tracks by which he walked were still too widely spread to have any resemblance to the gauge used by the city, but Helward thought that his journey should not be much longer.