J. Ballard - The Drought

"A lion," Ransom said. "A small lion. It looked hungry, but I doubt if it will come back." He pulled Philip's shoulder. "Philip! Do you realize what this means? You remember Quilter and the zoo? The lion must have come all the way from Mount Royal! It means…" He broke off, the dust in his throat and mouth. A feeling of immense relief surged through him, washing away all the pain and bitterness of the past ten years.

Philip Jordan nodded, waiting for Ransom to catch his breath. "I know, doctor. It means there's water between here and Mount Royal."

A concrete ramp curved down behind the wall into the basement garage of the house. The dust and rockfalls had been cleared away, and a palisade of wooden stakes carefully wired together held back the drifts of sand.

Still lightheaded, Ransom pointed to the smooth concrete, and to the fifty yards of clear roadway excavated from the side of the valley. "You've worked hard, Philip. The old man would be proud of you."

Philip Jordan smiled faintly. He took a key from the wallet on his belt and unlocked the door. "Here we, are, doctor." He gestured Ransom forward. "What do you think of it?"

Standing in the center of the garage, its chromium grille gleaming in the shadows, was an enormous black hearse. The metal roof and body had been polished to a mirrorlike brilliance, the hubcaps shining like burnished shields. To Ransom, who for years had seen nothing but damp rags and rusting iron, whose only homes had been a succession of dismal hovels, the limousine seemed like an embalmed fragment of an unremembered past.

"Philip," he said slowly. "It's magnificent, of course, but…" Cautiously he walked around the great black vehicle. Three of the tires were intact and pumped up, but the fourth wheel had been removed and the axle jacked up onto a set of wooden blocks. Unable to see into the glowing leatherwork and mahogany interior, he wondered if the old Negro's body reposed in a casket in the back. Perhaps Philip, casting his mind back to the most impressive memories of his childhood, had carried with him all these years a grotesque image of the ornate hearses he had seen rolling around on their way to the cerneteries.

Cautiously he peered through the rear window. The wooden bier was empty, the chromium tapers clean and polished.

"Philip, where is he? Old Mr. Jordan?"

Philip gestured offhandedly. "Miles from here. He's buried in a cave above the sea. This is what I wanted to show you, doctor. What do you think of it?"

Collecting himself, Ransom said: "But they told me, everyone thought-all this time you've been coming here, Philip? To this… car?"

Philip unlocked the driver's door. "I found it five years ago. You understand I couldn't drive, there wasn't any point then, but it gave me an idea. I started looking after it, a year ago I found a couple of new tires…" He spoke quickly, eager to bring Ransom up-to-date, as if the discovery and renovation of the hearse were the only events of importance to have taken place in the previous ten years.

"What are you going to do with it?" Ransom asked. He opened the driver's door. "Can I get in?"

"Of course." Philip wound down the window when Ransom was seated. "As a matter of fact, doctor, I want you to start it for me."

The ignition keys were in the dashboard. Ransom switched on. He looked around, to- see Philip watching him intently in the half-light, his dark face, like an intelligent savage's, filled with a strange childlike hope. Wondering how far he was still a dispensable tool, Ransom said: "I'll be glad to, Philip. I understand how you feel about the car. It's been a long ten years, the car takes one back…"

Philip smiled, showing a broken tooth and the white scar below his left eye. "But please carry on. The tank is full of fuel, there's oil in, and the radiator is full."

Nodding, Ransom pressed the starter. As he expected, nothing happened. He pressed the starter several times, then released the handbrake and played with the gear lever. Philip Jordan slowly shook his head, only a faint look of disappointment on his face.

Ransom handed the keys to him. He stepped from the car. "It won't go, Philip, you understand that, don't you? The battery is flat, and all the electrical wiring will have corroded. You'll never start it, not in a hundred years. I'm sorry, it's a beautiful car."

With a shout, Philip Jordan slammed his foot at the halfopen door, kicking it into the frame. The muscles of his neck and cheeks were knotted like ropes, as if all the frustration of the past years were tearing his face apart. With a wrench he ripped the windscreen wiper from its pinion, then drummed his fists angrily on the hood, denting the polished metal.

"It's got to go, doctor, if I have to push it myself all the way!" He threw Ransom aside, then bent down and put his shoulder to the door frame. With animal energy he drove the car forward on its wheels. There was a clatter as the blocks toppled to the floor, and the back axle and bumper crashed onto the concrete. The car sagged downwards, its body panels groaning. Philip raced around it, pulling at the doors and fenders with his strong hands.

Ransom stepped out into the sunlight and waited there for Philip. Ten minutes later he came out, head bowed, his right hand bleeding across his wrist.

Ransom took his arm. "We don't need the car, Philip. Mount Royal is only a hundred miles away, we can walk it comfortably in two or three weeks. The river will take us straight there."

Like a bleached white bone, the flat deck of the river stretched away to the north. At its margins, where the remains of the stone embankment formed a ragged windbreak, the dunes had gathered together in high drifts, and these defined the slow-winding course of the drained bed. Beyond the dunes was the desert floor, littered with rocks and stones, and with fragments of dried mud like burnt shards of pottery. Now and then the stump of a tree marked the distance of a concealed ridge from the river, or a metal windmill, its rusty vanes held like a cipher above the empty wastes, stood guard over a dried-up creek. In the coastal hills, the upper slopes of the valley had flowered with a few clumps of hardy gorse sustained by the drifts of spray, but ten miles from the sea the desert was completely arid, the surface crumbling beneath the foot into a fine white powder. The metal refuse scattered about the dunes provided the only floral decoration-twisted bedsteads rose like clumps of desert thorns, water pumps and farm machinery formed angular sculptures, the dust spuming from their vanes in the light breeze.

Revived by the spring sunlight, the small party moved at a steady pace along the drained bed. In the three days since setting out they had covered twenty miles, walking unhurriedly over the lanes of firmer sand that wound along the bed. In part their rate of progress was dictated by Mrs. Quilter, who insisted on walking for a few miles each morning. During the afternoon she agrsed to sit on the cart, half asleep under the awning, while Ransom and Catherine Austen took turns with Philip Jordan to push it. With its large wooden wheels and light frame the cart was easy to move. Inside its locker were the few essentials of their expedition-a tent and blankets, a case of smoked herring and edible kelp, and half a dozen large cans of water, enough, Ransom estimated, for three weeks. Unless they found water during the journey to Mount Royal, they would have to give up and turn back before reaching the city, but they all tacitly accepted that they would not be returning to the coast.

The appearance of the lion convinced Ransom that there was water within twenty or thirty miles of the coast, probably released from a spring or underground river. Without this, the lion would not have survived, and its hasty retreat up the river indicated that the drained bed had been its route to the coast. They came across no spoors of the crealure, but each morning their own footprints around the camp Were soon smoothed over by the wind. Nonetheless Ransom and Jordan kept a sharp watch for the animal, their hands never far from the spears fastened to the sides of the cart.