J. Ballard - The Drought

From Mrs. Quilter, Ransom gathered that the three of them had been preparing for the journey for the past two years. At no time had there been any formal plan or route, but merely a shared sense of the need to retrace their steps toward the city and the small town by the drained lake. Mrs. Quilter was obviously looking for her son, convinced that he was still alive somewhere in the ruins of the city.

Philip Jordan's motives, like Catherine's, were more concealed. Whether, in fact, he was searching for Jonas or for tile painted houseboat he had shared with the old Negro, Ransom could not discover. He guessed that Mrs. Quilter had sensed these undercurrents during Philip's visits to her booth, and then carefully played on them, knowing that she and Catherine could never make the journey on their own. When Philip revealed the whereabouts of the car to her, Mrs. Quilter had needed no further persuasion.

Ironically, the collapse of the plan to drive in style to Mount Royal in the magnificently appointed hearse had returned Ransom to her favor.

"It was a grand car, doctor," she told him sadly for the tenth time, as they finished an early lunch under the shade of the cart. "That would have shown my old Quilty, wouldn't it?" She gazed into the distant haze, this vision of the prodigal mother's return hovering over the dunes. "Now I'll be sitting up in this old cart like a sack of potatoes."

"He'll be just as glad to see you, Mrs. Quilter." Ransom buried the remains of their meal in the sand. "Anyway, the car would have broken down within ten miles."

"Not if you'd been driving, doctor. I remember how you brought us here." Mrs. Quilter leaned back against the wheel. "You just started those cars with a press of your little finger."

Philip Jordan paced across to her, resenting this swing in her loyalties. "Mrs. Quilter, the battery was flat. It had been there for ten years."

Mrs. Quilter brushed this aside scornfully. "Batteries…! Help me up, would you, doctor? We'd best be pushing this cart on a bit more. Perhaps Philip will find us an old donkey somewhere."

They lifted her up under the awning. Ransom leaned against the shaft next to Catherine, while Philip Jordan patrolled the bank fifty yards ahead, spear in hand. Mrs. Quilter's upgrad ing of Ransom's status had not yet extended to Catherine Austen. She pushed away steadily at the handle, her leather. jacket fastened by its sleeves around her strong shoulders. When the wheel on Ransom's side lodged itself in the cracked surface, she chided him: "Come on, doctor, or do you want to sit up there with Mrs. Quilter?"

Ransom bided his time, thinking of when he had first seen, Catherine in the zoo at Mount Royal, exciting the lions in the cages. Since leaving them she had been subdued and guarded, but he could feel her reviving again, drawn to the empty savannahs and the quickening pulse of the desert cats.

Slowly they moved along the river, as Mrs. Quilter drowsed under the awning, her violet silks ruffled like half-furled sails in the warm air. Ahead of them the river continued its serpentine course between the dunes. Its broad surface, nearly three hundred yards wide, reflected the sunlight like a chalk deck. The draining water had grooved the surface, and it resembled the weathered dusty hide of an albino elephant The wheels broke the crust, and their footsteps churned the dust into soft plumes that drifted away on the air behind them. Everywhere the sand was mingled with the fine bones of small fish, the white flakes of mollusk shells.

Once or twice Ransom glanced over his shoulder toward the coast, glad to see that the dust obscured his view of the hills above the beach. Already he had forgotten the long ten years on the saltflats, the cold winter nights crouched among the draining brine pools, and the running battles with the men of the settlement.

The river turned to the northeast. They passed the remains of a line of wharfs. Stranded lighters, almost buried under the sand, lay beside them, their gray hulks blanched and empty. A group of ruined warehouses stood on the bank, jingle walls rising into the air with their upper windows intact. A series of concrete telegraph poles marked the progress of a road running toward the hills across the alluvial plain.

At this point the river had been dredged and widened. They passed more launches and rivercraft, half-submerged under the drifting sandhills. Ransom stopped and let the others move on ahead. He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The bnvarying light and absence of all movement made Ransom feel that he was advancing across an inner landscape where the elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without association.

They stopped by the hulk of a river steamer, a large graceful craft with a tall white funnel, which had run aground in the center of the channel. The deck was level with the surrounding sand. Ransom walked to the rail and stepped over it, then strolled across the deck to the open doors of the saloon below the bridge. Inside, the dust lay over the floor and tables, its slopes cloaking the seats and corner upholstery.

Catherine and Philip Jordan climbed onto the bridge and looked out over the plain for any signs of movement Two miles away the aluminum towers of a grain silo shone against the hills.

"Can you see anything?" Ransom called up. "If there are hot springs they should send up steam clouds."

They shook their heads. "Nothing, doctor."

Ransom walked forward to the bow, and sat down on the capstan. Lowering his head, he saw that its shadow lay across his hands. Cupping them together, he altered the outline of his skull, varying its shape and length. He noticed Mrs. Quilter eying him curiously from her seat atop the cart.

"Doctor, that's a trick my Quilty had. You looked like him then. Poor lad, he was trying to straighten his head like everyone else's."

Ransom crossed the rail and went over to her. On an impulse he reached up and held her hand. Small and round, its pulse fluttered faintly, like a trembling sparrow. Mrs. Quilter gazed down at him with her vague eyes, her mind far away. Suddenly Ransom found himself hoping against all logic that they would discover Quilter somewhere.

"We'll find him, Mrs. Quilter. He'll still be there."

"It's a dream, doctor, just a dream, a woman's fancy. But I couldn't rest until I've tried."

Ahead of them was a sharp bend in the river. A herd of cattle had been driven down the bank toward the last trickle of fluid, and their collapsed skeletons lay in the sand. The huge dented skulls lolled on their sides, each one like Quilter's, the grains of quartz glittering in the empty orbits.

Two miles further on a railway bridge crossed the river. A stationary train stood among the cantilevers, the doors of the carriages open onto the line. Ransom assumed that the route ahead had been blocked, and that the crew and passengers had decided to complete the journey to the coast by steamer.

They stopped in the shade below the bridge, and looked out at the endless expanse of the dry bed framed within its pillars. In the afternoon light the thousands of shadows cast by the metal refuse covered the surface with calligraphic patterns.

"We'll camp here tonight," Philip Jordan said. "We'll make an early start; by this time tomorrow we'll be well on the way."

Each evening it took them at least two hours to prepare their camp. They pushed., the cart into the shelter of one of the pillars, then drove the spears into the sand and draped the tent from the frame. Catherine and Ransom dug a deep trench around the tent, piling the warm sand into a windbreak. Philip walked up to the bank and searched the dunes for metal stakes. At night a cold wind blew across the desert, and the few blankets tkey had brought with them were barely adequate to keep them warm.