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but nonetheless they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the
drained bed.
"Philip! Dr. Ransom!" Catherine Austen had stopped some twenty yards behind
the others and was pointing down the river behind them.
A mile away, where the bridge crossed the river, the empty train was burning
briskly in the sunlight, billows of smoke pouring upwards into the air. The
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flames moved from one coach to the next, the bright embers falling between the
tracks onto the site of the camp below. Within a few minutes the entire train
had been engulfed. The sky to the south was stained by the dark smoke.
Ransom walked over to the others. "There's a signal, at least," he said
quietly. "If there's anyone here they'll know we've arrived."
Philip Jordan's hands fretted on the shaft of his spear. "It must have been
the fire. Didn't you put it out, doctor?"
"Of course. An ember must have blown up onto the track during the night."
They watched the fire burn itself out among the last coaches on the approach
lines to the bridge. Collecting himself, Philip turned to Mrs.
Quilter and motioned her toward the cart.
Ransom took his place at the shaft They moved off at a brisk pace, all three
pushing the cart along. Over his shoulder, when they reached a bend in the
river, Ransom looked back at the burning bridge. The smoke still drifted up
from the train, its curtain sealing off the south behind them.
By noon they had covered ten miles more. They stopped to prepare their midday
meal. Pleased with their progress, Philip Jordan helped Mrs. Quilter down from
the cart and set up the awning for her, trailing it from the hull of an old
lighter.
After the meal Ransom strolled away along the bank. Cloaked by the sand, the
remains of wharfs and jetties straggled past the hulks of barges. The river
widened into a small harbor. Ransom climbed a wooden quay and walked past the
leaning cranes through the outer streets of a small town. The facades of
half-ruined buildings and warehouses marked out the buried streets. He passed
a hardware store and then a small bank, its doors shattered by ax blows. The
burntout remains of a bus depot lay in a heap of smashed glass plate and
dulled chromium.
A large bus stood in the court, its roof and sides smothered under the sand,
in which the eyes of the windows were set like mirrors of an interior world.
Ransom ploughed his way down the center of the road, passing the submerged
forms of abandoned cars. The succession of humps, the barest residue of
identity, interrupted the smooth flow of the dunes down the street. He
remembered the cars excavated from the quarry on the beach. There they had
emerged intact from their ten-year burial, the scratched fenders and bright
chrome mined straight from the past. By contrast, the half-covered cars in the
street were like idealized images of themselves, the essences of their own
geometry, the smooth curvatures like the eddies flowing out of some platonic
future.
Submerged by the sand, everything had been transvalued in the same way.
Ransom stopped by one of the stores in the main street. The sand blowing
across it had reduced the square glass plate to an elliptical window three
feet wide. Peering through it, he saw a dozen faces gazing out at him from the
dim light with the waxy expressions of plastic mannequins. Their arms were
raised in placid postures, the glacé smiles as drained as the world around
them.
Abruptly, Ransom caught his breath. Among the blank faces, partly obscured by
the reflections of the buildings behind him, was a grinning head.
It swam into focus, like a congealing memory, and Ransom started as a shadow
moved in the street behind him.
"Quilt--!" He watched the empty streets and sidewalks, trying to remember if
all the footprints in the sand were his own. The wind passed flatly down the
street, and a wooden sign swung from the roof of the store opposite.
Ransom walked toward it, and then turned and hurried away through the drifting
sand.
They continued their progress up the river. Pausing less frequently to rest,
they pushed the cart along the baked white deck. Far behind them the embers of
the burnt-out train sent their long plumes into the sky.
Then, during the midafternoon, when the town was five miles behind them, they
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looked back and saw dark billows of smoke rising from its streets. The flames
raced across the rooftops, and within ten minutes an immense pall of smoke cut
off the southern horizon.
"Dr. Ransom!" Philip Jordan strode over to him as he leaned against the shaft
of the cart. "Did you light a fire while you were there? You went for a walk."
Ransom shook his head. "I don't think so, Philip. I had some matches with
me--I suppose I might have done."
"But did you? Can't you remember?" Philip watched him closely.
"No. I'm sure I didn't. Why should I?"
"All right, then. But I'll take those matches, doctor."
From then on, despite Philip's suspicions that he had started the
fires--suspicions that for some obscure reason he found himself
sharing--Ransom was certain they were being followed. The landscape had
changed perceptibly. The placid open reaches of the coastal plain, its
perspectives marked by an isolated tree or silo, had vanished. Here the
remains of small towns gave the alluvial bench an uneven appearance, the
wrecks of cars were parked among the dunes by the river and along the roads
approaching it Everywhere the shells of metal towers and chimneys rose into
the air. Even the channel of the river was more crowded, and they wound their
way past scores of derelict craft.
They passed below the spans of the demolished road bridge that had interrupted
their drive to the coast ten years earlier. As they stepped through the
collapsed arches, and the familiar perspectives reappeared in front of them,
Ransom remembered the solitary figure they had seen walking slowly away up the
drained bed. He left the cart and went on ahead, searching for the footsteps
of this enigmatic figure. In front of him the light was hazy and obscured, and
for a moment, as he tried to clear his eyes, he saw a sudden glimpse of
someone three hundred yards away, his back touched by the sunlight as he moved
off among the empty basins.
Chapter 12 -- The Smoke Fires
This image remained with him as they completed the final stages of the journey
to Mount Royal. Ten days later, when they reached the western outskirts of the
city, it had become for Ransom inextricably confused with all the other
specters of the landscape they had crossed. The aridity of the central plain,
with its desolation and endless deserts stretching across the
continent, numbed him by its extent. The unvarying desert light, the absence
of all color, and the brilliant whiteness of the stony landscape made him feel
that he was advancing across an immense graveyard. Above all, the lack of
movement gave to even the slightest disturbance an almost hallucinatory
intensity. By night, as they rested in a hollow cut into the dunes along the
bank, they would hear the same unseen animal somewhere to the northwest,
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