IV
The car stopped on the hard at the top of the beach. The house was silent. When the engine stopped there seemed to be no sound in the world, but as he got out Nigel felt the vibration of the air on his sink.
“What is that – noise?” Leila said , putting her hands over her ears.
“What noise? I can’t hear it”
“Very high pitched like as scream – a whistle. It goes right through my head.”
“perhaps you’re sympathetic to this vibration,” he said, and looked along the jetty.
“The drawbridge is down. I wonder if they’re all right.”
“Better go and see,” she said.
He looked at her. “Can you still hear it?”
“No”
“Hang on,” he said.
“She reached out and caught his arm, turning him towards her.
“Kiss me, Ni,” she said huskily.
“Just – for the last time.”
“You’re not going to do anything - silly, Leila?” he said gently.
“No. I’m just going to stand and watch you until I can’t see you anymore.”
There were tears shining in her eyes.
“I shan’t be so frightened then.”
“Leila, come with me,” he said.
“You can’t stay alone – I didn’t think then. I just wanted to go and see they were all right. I …”
The vibration grew quicker, like strings of a harp beaming tauter, and the air began to drone with a strange, tense sound that seemed to cramp their muscles.
“This is it!” he shouted. “I know it! This is it! Quick! Run, Leila, run!”
She started to run with him towards the jetty. He was dragging her in his frenzy. She knew at last there was no Leila, and never had been. She stopped, their hands broke apart, and she saw his desperate face turn towards her. “Go on. Go on. You must get to them ! ”
He closed his eyes a second, then turned and ran on towards the old barge through the screaming of the tortured air, leaving her standing alone on the old jetty. She smiled as she saw him go in the gathering brassy darkness.
He came to the barge and jumped down on to the deck. One hatch was open; the children had shut the other to keep their party secret.
There seemed to be no sound but the strange screaming of the air, which intensified and stunned the eardrums so that nothing more could be heard. He dropped to the lower deck and grabbed the hatch to close it in a last desperate instinct to save something. As he looked up through the opening, he saw the sloping, gleaming side of a mountain of black sea towering into the coppery sky, and then the barge sloped and began the terrifying ascent of the cliff, thousands of feet into the sky while he clung to the edge of the open hatchway. There was no sound any more, no eardrums that could vibrate. Whipping spray and froth fell on him as he clung there while the barge tossed and rocked like a cork in a whirlpool. There was one sight he saw as the barge tilted.
He looked down thousands of feet on to the towns he had so often seen from the air, but now he saw their white buildings crumbling, fading as in a dream, and a great black wall of water raced on over the wreckage to engulf them and bury them for ever.
For days the barge tossed and suffered on the tumult of the waters, until gradually a strange peace came over them, the great calm peace of victory. In the barge there was suffering and pain, hopelessness and starvation, but there was life. And on the fortieth day there appeared, like the finger of God, the top of a mountain breaking the vast desolation.
THE END
The Giant Stumbles Page 14
