J. Ballard - The Drought

Ransom started to walk back to the house, and then noticed that neither Miranda nor the children had moved from the crest. He looked back along the river, hoping for some sign of Philip Jordan or Catherine, but they had vanished along the bank. The long lines of ruins lay quietly in the sunlight. Far away, against the motionless horizon, he could see the rolling waves of the dunes on the lake.

He waited as Whitman approached him, head bowed as he panted between his teeth, the bayonet held in his hand like a chisel. Quilter was looking down at the drained basin of the reservoir, already whitening in the sun, and at the arms of darker sand running away across the dunes.

Whitman feinted with the bayonet, slightly put off when Ransom offered no resistance. "Quilt-?" he called.

Quilter turned and walked back to the house. He glanced at Whitman and waved briefly, his swan's hat carried in his hand by the neck. "Leave him," he said. For the first time since Ransom had known him, his face was completely calm.

The birds had gone. Everywhere light and shade crept on slowly. No longer cooled by the evaporating water, the dunes around the oasis reflected the heat like banks of ash. Ransom rested quietly in the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. His complete surrender to Quilter had left him with a feeling almost of euphoria. The timeless world in which Quilter lived now formed his own universe, and only the shadow of the broken roof above, adjusting its length and perimeter, reminded him of the progress of the sun.

The next day, when Mrs. Quilter died, Ransom helped to bury her. Miranda was too tired to come with them, but Whitman and Ransom carried the old woman on a plank over their heads. They followed Quilter toward the burial ground near the city, waiting as he searched among the rubble, sinking his staff through the sand to the roofs of the cars below. As he had told Ransom, most of the vehicles were already occupied, but at last they found an empty one and buried Mrs. Quilter in a great old limousine. Afterwards, when they had filled in the sand over the roof, the children scattered pieces of paper drawings over it.

Soon afterwards, Philip Jordan went off to search for his father. He came to the oasis to say goodbye to Ransom. Kneeling beside him, he pressed the canteen of water to his lips.

"It's the last I have, but there's a river here somewhere. Quilter told me my father had seen it. When I find him, we'll go off and look for it together. Perhaps we'll see you there one day, doctor."

When he stood up Ransom saw Catherine Austen waving to him from a dune in the distance, hands on hips, her leather boots white with the chalklike sand of the desert. As Philip rejoined her she lifted her whip and the white-flanked lions loped off by her side.

That night, when a sandstorm blew up, Ransom went down to the lake and watched the drifts whirling across the dunes. Far out toward the center of the lake he could see the hull of the old river steamer once commanded by Captain Tulloch. Standing at the helm as the waves of white sand broke across the bow; its fine spray lifting over the funnel, was the tall figure of Jonas.

The storm had subsided the next morning, and Ransom made his farewells to Quilter and Miranda. Leaving the house, he waved to the children who had followed him to the gate, and then walked down the avenue to his old home. Nothing remained except the stumps of the chimneys, but he rested here for a few hours before continuing on his way.

He crossed the rubble and went down to the river, then began to walk along the widening mouth toward the lake. Smoothed by the wind, the white dunes covered the bed like motionless waves. He stepped among them, following the hollows that carried him out of sight of the shore. The sand was smooth and unmarked, gleaming with the bones of untold numbers of fish. The height of the dunes steadily increased, and an hour later the crests were almost twenty feet above his head.

Although it was not yet noon, the sun seemed to be receding into the sky, and the air was gradually becoming colder. To his surprise he noticed that he no longer cast any shadow onto the sand, as if he had at last completed his journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years. As the light failed, the air grew darker. The dust was dull and opaque, the crystals in its surface dead and clouded. An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole of the exterior world were losing its existence.

It was some time later that he failed to notice it had started to rain.