Resting beside the raft, I stared dispassionately at Sanger. I had managed to light a small fire with pieces of decking and a few drops of fuel from the outboard’s tank, pulling on the engine until a spark from the magneto ignited the vapour. The effort had exhausted me, and I could barely stand on the rolling shingle. Sanger lay against the starboard pontoon, wisely reluctant to part himself from the craft. His hands clasped the broken camera to his chest, this Cyclopean third eye from which he regarded me warily.
Should I abandon him here? He too was infected by the fever and malaise that had poisoned everyone at the barrage. My own condition was little better, and I now needed him to help me row the raft once the fuel was exhausted. I tried to think only of Sanger’s needs, and reminded myself that he was my patient and that I was once again his physician. Nonetheless, I was reluctant to leave him, aware for the first time that I depended upon his presence, almost as if I at last accepted that I was appearing in a drama directed and overseen by him.
However, this logic would lead inevitably to his death, like those of Miss Matsuoka and Mr Pal. For his own sake, I would persuade Sanger to remain on this beach. Once I had found Noon, and revived the Mallory, I would return and collect him. Meanwhile I would leave him the last of my small stock of millet bread and strip the raft’s decking to its minimum in order to provide him with a fire.
At the barrage, planning this last leg of the journey in the wheelhouse of the Salammbo, I had not wanted to take Sanger with me. As I prepared the raft, he had come down from the ferry, tottering among the debris of the crumbling barrage, shouting and arguing with me. The last of the villagers had left, and he could smell disease as the allotments faded, transforming themselves once again into desert. He gazed sightlessly at the silence, well aware that this was a place where a crime had been committed. But even then Sanger had been prepared to place himself in my hands.
I remembered him sitting on the raft as I dragged it into the water above the barrage. The last ebb of Captain Kagwa’s life leaked down to the beach, flowing into the grooves left by the pontoons, a slipway of blood. Without speaking, I held Sanger’s shoulders from behind. He had taken this as a touching gesture of solidarity, but I was about to pull him on to the beach and leave him among the truck tyres and dead rats.
Then I saw Mrs Warrender and her women on the hillside above the pool. Bundles in hand, they stood beside the ore-conveyor, ready to make their way into the remote mountain valleys. On a rusting scoop beside them, two marmosets preened their tails, grimacing at the stench from the river below, only too eager to join the women in their modest paradise. Nora Warrender watched me while I stood behind Sanger, clearly assuming that I would leave him.
Under the women’s disapproving gaze, I had rallied myself, but now, only two days later, I was ready to abandon Sanger again, a blind man marooned on these cold beaches.
‘Sanger – you’re tired.’
‘No, Mallory. It’s possible that I’m stronger than you.’
‘I’ll build a fire. You’ll be safer here.’
‘No.’
‘Remember to move to higher ground. You’ll hear the water rushing towards you.’
‘Rushing water?’
‘Sanger, I’m going to make the river run again.’
‘I must be there, Mallory. It’s the climax of our film …’
‘Perhaps … but I have to find Noon.’
‘I should be with you, Mallory.’
He was holding tightly to the outboard with both hands, revealing the unexpected strength that had sustained him since our journey from Port-la-Nouvelle.
‘Mallory, I must go with you. For your sake.’
I tried to prise his fingers from the propeller, but left only a smear of blood on the blades. I reached down and lifted the camera lanyard from his neck. Sanger scrabbled at the air, kicking me with his small feet.
‘The camera, Mallory! We need that!’
‘Let’s get rid of it now! The damned thing’s been a snare.’
‘No – the film, it’s all that’s left …’
I was about to throw the broken black box into the river, but it seemed to cling to my hands. The pistol grip, contoured to my palm and fingers, sat as easily within my mind, offering a different perspective on our trivial quarrel. Before hurling it from my reach, I put it to my eye, curious to see the fictional space that had haunted my entire journey since Sanger’s arrival.
A hundred yards upstream there was a glimmer from the water. Through the viewfinder I saw Noon’s silver shell float past a rocky shoulder. Noon stood in the stern, supporting herself on the punt pole.
‘Noon – she’s here, Sanger! She needs us to follow her …’
I stared through the viewfinder. Was she playing up to the camera, even acting out some solitary death modelled on Sanger’s fictions, or was I imposing this climax upon her? I had hoped that I could draw her towards me with the promise of these dreams of herself, but it was I who had been ensnared, just as the Mallory had trapped me within its dream of a great river.
‘Doctor … we’re both too tired to argue with you.’ Sanger seized my foot, throwing me on to the shingle. He scrambled across the blue stones, lunging to left and right, seized the camera from my hands and struck me across the face.
Stunned by the blow, and too weak to defend myself, I lay back on the shingle, feeling the old wound to my scalp. The sutures of my skull were opening, letting the cool wind into the chambers of my brain. I stared up at the cloudless, cyanide sky, like the domed roof of some deep psychosis. It occurred to me that perhaps I could remain here, resting beside a small fire while Sanger sailed on …
‘Doctor?’ I felt his hands on my chest and forehead. ‘You’re in a poor state. I must have caught your head …’
‘It’s all right…’ I sat up and climbed to my knees. ‘I’ll take you with me.’
‘You need my help, doctor.’
‘I know – I can’t start the motor again.’
‘We’ll have to row. You’re strong enough.’
He guided me down to the water and leaned me against the raft. We pushed out into the stream, and then clambered aboard and sat beside the motor. Sanger settled himself, camera slung around his neck, massaging my thighs with his hands.
‘Come on, Mallory. You can paddle – the river is almost still. Don’t lose faith in your dream.’
‘Paddle?’ I began to push the water with one hand while Sanger worked away with the oar. Framed by the granite cliffs, Noon and her skiff slipped away into the mist. I watched her cross the partly submerged pillars of rock, her interrupted image reminding me of the stuttering light in the cabin of the Diana. I had been able to embrace Noon only through the flickering image of an antique seduction. To sustain me now I needed Sanger to tell me of some heroic voyage, against self-doubt and the fall of night, in search of a private myth, like those of Pizarro or Cortés.
‘Tell me, Sanger. About your film …?’
‘Which film, doctor? Paddle now. I’ve made many films.’
‘Your film about the Mallory. The one you started at Port-la-Nouvelle.’
Sanger turned to face me, the oar motionless in the water. He had lost his sunglasses, and his myopic eyes, like closed glass, seemed to see me for the first time. ‘You want to hear about the film? You wish me to describe it to you?’
‘Yes …’ The thought of this bogus documentary was strangely comforting. Already I could feel the commentary reassuring and encouraging me, in the soft sing-song of Mr Pal. ‘Tell me about the film, Sanger. Be my eyes …’
34
The Source
Six days later, sustained by these desperate stratagems, we at last reached the source of the Mallory.
During our final passage through the misty gorges of the river, I lay beside the silent outboard at the stern of the raft, paddling with one hand as I listened to Sanger describe landscapes of imaginary splendour. In its ambiguous way, the broken camera of this blind filmmaker had ke
pt us going. Its cracked lens supported us both in the illusion that we were making a lasting record of our hunt for the Mallory. I was happy to collude in this, aware that I could distance myself from that other person I had known, a physician at Port-la-Nouvelle who had allowed a grand obsession to capture him.
The day after my brawl with Sanger, on whom I soon became almost wholly dependent, we entered an area of chilling rain cloud. The fluted cliffs which had lined the gorges of the Mallory now fell back, leaving the river to meander through a wide valley. Here we rested, and I was at last able to start the engine. On all sides there were traces of recent volcanic activity. Igneous rocks and pumice were mixed with coarse-grained gneisses marked with bands of granular material like the symbols of some stratified alphabet. On the cold shore-line there grew only a few ferns, and the empty slopes were covered with a green glaze of lichens and stunted grasses. The river, little more than fifty feet in width, flowed between small islands of red mud, and the water was opaque with a thick russet silt. The sluggish wavelets that swilled across the raft left a copper scum across the wooden frame. As a bleary sunlight shone through the mist we seemed to dissolve in this primordial soup, at one with the trilobites and ammonites washed on to the deck.
On the fifth afternoon the outboard engine failed for the last time, and I then discovered that I was too weak to help Sanger with his rowing. However, the endless archipelagos of waterlogged islands allowed us to keep up with Noon. She squatted with the punt pole in the stern of the steel shell, like a fatigued acrobat, wearily testing the maze of channels. At times she seemed to lose interest in us altogether, for hours moving away into the mist in search of that secret treasure which I now knew lay at the source of the Mallory.
On the next morning the mist was suddenly dispelled by a strong and unbroken sun, whose beams probed around us like the gaze of a friendly sentry. We had spent the dawn in a frozen sleep, adrift among the islands of mud. As the air cleared we woke to find that the mountains had receded almost to the horizon. We had entered a vast plateau, covered with red laval mud and shallow pools, the floor of a huge lake some twenty miles in width.
‘Sanger … we’re home.’
He was already awake, lying across the raft with his blistered face to the sky. Without thinking, he reached one hand into the water and paddled feebly.
The raft had grounded on the bank of a shallow pool. I eased myself into the warm sulphurated water, and looked out at the damp vistas of this marine world, the bed of an immense lake that had once covered the plateau. I assumed that at some time in the recent past a tectonic shift along a deep plate-line had fractured its floor and walls. The displaced waters of this lake had formed the Mallory, first flowing through the subterranean conduit which surfaced at the Port-la-Nouvelle airstrip, and later in the channel of the Mallory itself. Nonetheless, I still believed that I had created the river. By dislodging the stump of the ancient oak 1 had allowed a current to flow which in turn had encouraged the waters of the lake to burst their banks.
‘Sanger … it’s still flowing.’ I waded around the raft, feeling the faint southward tug of the current, moving across the plateau from the secret headwaters of the river. Somewhere beyond these shallow pools, in the northern slopes of this drained lake, lay the source of the Mallory.
I released the raft and let it drift on to the muddy bank. Sanger was fretting at the water with one hand, still testing the current. He had now become more determined than I was to hunt down the Mallory to its end. He had slept fitfully through the night, constantly waking to see that I was still alive, and trying to revive me with his commentary on the shifting darkness, part delirium and part imaginary travelogue.
With his free hand he shielded his face from the vivid sun, and then launched again into his rambling exposition.
‘A primaeval lake, Mallory, the original mud world, covered by a strange light … our lens won’t care for it, so we picture you in close-up, an aggressive mammal answering a deep migratory call … can you see the source?’
‘Ahead of us – perhaps half a mile.’
‘Prepare yourself, Mallory … now we reach our climax, returning to that primitive fount from which all the rivers of the earth have sprung, the moment when consciousness moved into the daylight, from the reptile to the mammalian brain … now God exists, Mallory, perhaps you have returned to Eden to destroy Him … a messiah for the age of cable television.’
But I no longer needed his commentary. A shadow wavered across the surface of the lake; the mist had lifted, taking with it the watery, confused light. Through the clear air Noon’s silver craft slid through a narrow neck of water into the larger lake to the north. She sat upright in the stern, hips pivoting as her frail arms swung the punt pole. She had recovered her strength now that the river’s source was in sight.
Leaving the raft, I waded through the water, following a bank of viscous mud. I strode through the shallows, my hands warding off the hot spray that leapt into my face.
When I reached the inlet Noon had already crossed the adjacent lake. Exhausted, I sank into the warm water. My feet had dislodged part of the isthmus of laval mud that separated the two pools. As I rinsed the water across my legs, the warm mud dissolved and flowed across me, a soothing quilt that tempted me to rest for ever beneath its balmy covers.
Released now, the water slid past, a brief tidal rush that raced across the surface. The quickening current carried Sanger and the raft for fifty feet, and then beached them on a shelf of copper silt.
Upstream, the next lake was emptying itself. Stranded by the falling water-level, Noon stepped from her craft. She threw the pole aside and strode through the water towards a narrow cleft in the bank. Here the last remnants of the Mallory flowed from the lava flats that formed the northern rim of the plateau.
The tepid water slid past my ankles as I followed her across the lake. Silhouetted against the lava dunes, her strong shoulders emerged through the steaming air. Watching her confident stride, I could see that Noon was now a young woman. Somewhere in this maze of pools, we would lie together and conceive a second Mallory.
I waded past her steel skiff, and approached the narrow stream that vented itself from the bank. Only three feet wide, this was all that remained of the river. Noon, however, was undismayed. Following the stream, she strode with the jaunty step of a returning traveller at last in sight of her home village.
The prints of her feet, the scarred right instep like a diagonal arrow, moved in front of me along the edge of the stream. Marooned by the falling river, islands of water lay in the sand-pits. The Mallory moved among the dunes, a faint thread only a few inches deep.
Clumsily, I scattered the drying sand into the water. I knelt down and scooped away the wet grains, trying not to disturb the stream, and hoping that in some way Noon’s arrival might revive it.
In the silence of the valley floor I heard Noon’s footsteps fade among the caking hills. Losing my bearings, I climbed to the crest of a dune beside the stream, and saw her fifty paces ahead. She stared at a dark scar in the sand. When she looked back at me for the last time, her eyes were those of a woman of my own age.
‘Noon …!’ As I ran towards her, the Mallory shrank into a spur of water no wider than my hand. Head down, I traced it around the base of a large shoe-shaped rock. The thin groove ran back to a basin drying under the sun.
I knelt down, trying to separate the sand grains from the winking vein. A last trickle ran between my hands as I fell to my knees and clasped it.
The Mallory died in my arms.
*
When I roused myself and began to search for Noon, I found no trace of her. The shallow hills of crusting lava ran for a further mile towards the northern edge of the plateau. I wandered into the hollows between them, but the scum of algae and water-weed was unmarked. A few paces from the grave of the Mallory her footprints vanished into the sand.
For an hour I blundered among the hills, calling out her name as the lake-bed dried arou
nd me. A few islands of water surrounded the draining pool in which Noon’s skiff lay stranded. Kicking away their walls, I released the water in a last attempt to revive the Mallory. As I reached the skiff and collapsed into its metal shell there was a brief race of water. The wave turned the bows of the craft towards the south, then swept me into the next pool where Sanger’s raft was coasting towards the gates of the valley below.
Steered by his demented monologue, we sailed into the gorge together, carried between the warning rocks and the mourning beaches, as the Mallory set out on its last journey to the sea.
35
Memory and Desire
The desert is closer today. Standing beside the abandoned airstrip at Port-la-Nouvelle, on the eroded shoulder of the dam which I once hoped would halt the waters of the Mallory, I can see the dust advancing from the northern horizon. The sharp grains slip between the stumps of the dead trees that stand along the banks of the river. An immense white dream flows silently across the land, spreading over the drained surface of the lake.
Blanched by the sun, the landscape has become a fossil of itself. Although abandoned only two years ago, Port-la-Nouvelle seems as remote as Pompeii. The police barracks, the tobacco factory and the Toyota agency are all covered with the same dust. Out on the lake the towers of the drilling project loom through the strange light like memories dressed in their shrouds. The roof of the clinic has collapsed, but the trailer is still serviceable, and on my visits to Port-la-Nouvelle I sleep on that same mattress from which I first heard the waters of the Mallory stealing across the lake.
For the past two years, since my recovery, I have worked at the WHO unit thirty miles to the south-west, but every weekend I drive here and camp beside the trailer in the car park of the clinic. Ostensibly I am still exploring the possibilities of an irrigation project, but this is no more than an excuse. As I search the sandy bed of the river I am really thinking of Noon, and waiting for her to appear again.
The Day of Creation Page 26
