The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  31

  THE WHITE LION

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, as Ransom climbed the slope to what he guessed was the old negro’s secret grave, a rock hurtled through the air past his head. He crouched down and watched the rock, the size of a fist, bound away off the sand.

  ‘Philip!’ he shouted into the sunlight. ‘It’s Ransom!’

  Philip Jordan’s narrow face appeared at the edge of the road. ‘Go away, Ransom,’ he called brusquely. ‘Get back to the beach.’ He picked up a second stone. ‘I’ve already let you off once today.’

  Ransom held his footing in the shifting sand. He pointed to the ruined villa. ‘Philip, don’t forget who brought him here. But for me he wouldn’t be buried at all.’

  Philip Jordan stepped forward to the edge of the road. Holding the rock loosely in one hand, he watched Ransom begin the climb up to him. He raised the rock above his head. ‘Ransom . . . !’ he called warningly.

  Ransom stopped again. Despite Philip Jordan’s advantages in strength and years, Ransom found himself seizing at this final confrontation. As he edged up the slope, remembering the knife hidden in his right boot, he knew that Philip Jordan was at last repaying him for all the help Ransom had given to the river-borne waif fifteen years earlier. No one could incur such an obligation without settling it to the full one day in its reverse coin. But above all, perhaps, Philip saw in Ransom’s face a likeness of his true father, the wandering fisher-captain who had called to him from the river-bank and from whom he had run away for a second time.

  Ransom climbed upwards, feeling with his feet for spurs of buried rock. His eyes watched the stone in Philip’s hand, shining in the sunlight against the open sky.

  Standing on a ledge twenty feet above the road, unaware of the scene below, was a thin, long-bodied animal with a ragged mane. Its grey skin was streaked white by the dust, the narrow flanks scarred with thorn marks, and for a moment Ransom failed to recognize it. Then he raised his hand and pointed, as the beast gazed out at the wet salt flats and the distant sea.

  ‘Philip,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘There, on the ledge!’

  Philip Jordan glanced over his shoulder, then dropped to one knee and hurled the stone from his hand. As the piece burst into a dozen fragments at its feet, the small lion leapt frantically to one side. With its tail down it bolted away across the rocky slopes, legs carrying it in a blur of dust.

  As Ransom clambered up on to the road he felt Philip’s hand on his arm. The young man was still watching the lion as it raced along the dry river-bed. His hand was shaking, less with fear than some deep unrestrainable excitement.

  ‘What’s that—a white panther?’ he asked thickly, his eyes following the distant plume of dust vanishing among the dunes.

  ‘A lion,’ Ransom said. ‘A small lion. It looked hungry.’ He pulled Philip’s shoulder. ‘Philip! Do you realize—? You remember Quilter and the zoo? The lion must have come all the way from Mount Royal! It means . . .’ He broke off, the dust in his throat and mouth. A feeling of immense relief surged through him, washing away the pain and bitterness of the past ten years.

  Philip Jordan waited for Ransom to catch his breath. ‘I know, doctor. It means there’s water between here and Mount Royal.’

  A CONCRETE RAMP curved down behind the wall into the basement garage of the house. The dust and rock-falls had been cleared away, and a palisade of wooden stakes carefully wired together held back the drifts of sand.

  Still light-headed, Ransom pointed to the smooth concrete, and to the fifty yards of clear roadway excavated from the side of the valley. ‘You’ve worked hard, Philip. The old man would be proud of you.’

  Philip Jordan took a key from the wallet on his belt and unlocked the door. ‘Here we are doctor.’ He gestured Ransom forward. ‘What do you think of it?’

  Standing in the centre of the garage, its chromium grille gleaming in the shadows, was an enormous black hearse. The metal roof and body had been polished to a mirror-like brilliance, and the hubcaps shone like burnished shields. To Ransom, who for years had seen nothing but damp rags and rusting iron, whose only homes had been a succession of dismal hovels, the limousine seemed like an embalmed fragment of an unremembered past.

  ‘Philip,’ he said. ‘It’s magnificent, of course . . .’ Cautiously he walked around the huge black vehicle. Three of the tyres were intact and pumped up, but the fourth wheel had been removed and the axle jacked on to a set of wooden blocks. Unable to see into the glowing leatherwork and mahogany interior, he wondered if the old negro’s body reposed in a coffin in the back. Perhaps Philip, casting his mind back to the most impressive memories of his childhood, had carried with him all these years a grotesque image of the ornate hearses he had seen rolling around Mount Royal on their way to the cemeteries.

  He peered through the rear window. The wooden bier was empty, the chromium tapers clean and polished.

  ‘Philip, where is he? Old Mr Jordan?’

  Philip gestured off-handedly. ‘Miles from here. He’s buried in a cave above the sea. This is what I wanted to show you, doctor. What do you think of it?’

  Collecting himself, Ransom said: ‘But they told me, everyone thought—all this time you’ve been coming here, Philip? To this . . . car?’

  Philip unlocked the driver’s door. ‘I found it five years ago. You understand I couldn’t drive, there wasn’t any point then, but it gave me an idea. I started looking after it, a year ago I found a couple of new tyres . . .’ He spoke quickly, eager to bring Ransom up to date, as if the discovery and renovation of the hearse were the only event of importance to have taken place in the previous ten years.

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ Ransom asked. He opened the driver’s door. ‘Can I get in?’

  ‘Of course.’ Philip wound down the window when Ransom was seated. ‘As a matter of fact, doctor, I want you to start it for me.’

  The ignition keys were in the dashboard. Ransom switched on. He looked around to see Philip watching him in the half-light, his dark face, like an intelligent savage’s, filled with a strange child-like hope. Wondering how far he was still a dispensable tool, Ransom said: ‘I’ll be glad to, Philip. I understand how you feel about the car. It’s been a long ten years, the car takes one back . . .’

  Philip smiled, showing a broken tooth and the white scar below his left eye. ‘But please carry on. The tank is full of fuel, there’s oil in the engine, and the radiator is full.’

  Nodding, Ransom pressed the starter. As he expected, nothing happened. He pressed the starter several times, then released the hand-brake and moved the gear lever through its sequence. Philip Jordan shook his head, only a faint look of disappointment on his face.

  Ransom handed the keys to him. He stepped from the car. ‘It won’t go, Philip, you understand that, don’t you? The battery is flat, and all the electrical wiring will have corroded. You’ll never start it, not in a hundred years. I’m sorry, it’s a beautiful car.’

  With a shout, Philip Jordan slammed his foot at the half-open door, kicking it into the frame. The muscles of his neck and cheeks were knotted like ropes, as if all the frustration of the past years were tearing his face apart. With a wrench he ripped the windscreen wiper from its pinion, then drummed his fists on the bonnet, denting the polished metal.

  ‘It’s got to go, doctor, if I have to push it myself all the way!’ He threw Ransom aside, then bent down and put his shoulder to the frame. With animal energy he drove the car forward on its wheels. There was a clatter as the blocks toppled to the floor, and the back axle and bumper dropped on to the concrete. The car sagged downwards, its body panels groaning. Philip raced around it, pulling at the doors and fenders with his strong hands.

  Ransom stepped out into the sunlight and waited there. Ten minutes later Philip came out, head bowed, his right hand bleeding across his wrist.

  Rans
om took his arm. ‘We don’t need the car, Philip. Mount Royal is only a hundred miles away, we can walk it comfortably in two or three weeks. The river will take us straight there.’

  PART THREE

  32

  THE ILLUMINATED RIVER

  LIKE A BLEACHED white bone, the flat deck of the river stretched away to the north. At its margins, where the remains of the stone embankment formed a ragged wind-break, the dunes had gathered together in high drifts, and these defined the winding course of the drained bed. Beyond the dunes was the desert floor, littered with fragments of dried mud like shards of pottery. At intervals the stump of a tree marked the distance of a concealed ridge from the river, or a metal windmill, its rusty vanes held like a cipher above the empty wastes, stood guard over a dried-up creek. In the coastal hills, the upper slopes of the valley had flowered with a few clumps of hardy gorse sustained by the drifts of spray, but ten miles from the sea the desert was arid, the surface crumbling beneath the foot into a fine white powder. The metal refuse scattered about the dunes provided the only floral decoration—twisted bedsteads rose like clumps of desert thorns, water pumps and farm machinery formed angular sculptures, the dust spuming from their vanes in the light breeze.

  Revived by the spring sunlight, the small party moved at a steady pace along the drained bed. In the three days since setting out they had covered twenty miles, walking unhurriedly over the lanes of firmer sand that wound along the bed. In part their rate of progress was dictated by Mrs Quilter, who insisted on walking a few miles each morning. During the afternoon she agreed to sit on the cart, half asleep under the awning, while Ransom and Catherine Austen took turns at pushing it with Philip Jordan. With its large wooden wheels and light frame the cart was easy to move. Inside its locker were the few essentials of their expedition—a tent and blankets, a case of smoked herring and edible kelp, and half a dozen large cans of water, enough, Ransom estimated, for three weeks. Unless they found water during the journey to Mount Royal they would have to give up and turn back before reaching the city, but they all tacitly accepted that they would not be returning to the coast.

  The appearance of the lion convinced Ransom that there was water within twenty or thirty miles of the coast, probably released from a spring or underground river. Without this, the lion would not have survived, and its hasty retreat up the river indicated that the drained bed had been its route to the coast. They came across no spoors of the creature, but each morning their own footprints around the camp were soon smoothed over by the wind. None the less Ransom and Jordan kept a sharp watch for the animal, their hands never far from the spears fastened to the sides of the cart.

  Ransom gathered from Mrs Quilter that the three of them had been preparing for the journey for the past year. At no time had there been any formal plan or route, but merely a shared sense of the need to retrace their steps towards 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 his father, Jonas, or for the 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 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 favour.

  ‘It was a grand car, doctor,’ she told him 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, wary of this swing in her loyalties. ‘Mrs Quilter, the battery was flat. It had been there for ten years.’

  Mrs Quilter brushed this aside. ‘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 upgrading of Ransom’s status had not yet extended to Catherine Austen. She pushed away steadily at her 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, and remembered 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 already he could feel her reviving again, drawn to the empty savannahs and the quickening pulse of the desert cats.

  They moved forward 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. In the centre 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 mollusc shells.

  Once or twice Ransom glanced over his shoulder towards 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 salt flats, the winter nights crouched among the draining brine pools, and the running battles with the men of the settlement. He had left Judith without warning, but Philip Jordan told him she would be accepted at the settlement. Ironically, Philip also told Ransom that there had been no agreed decision to exclude him from the settlement. However, Hendry had been acting on a common instinct, the shared feeling that Ransom by his very sense of failure would remind each of them of everything they themselves had lost.

  The river turned to the north-east. They passed the remains of a line of wharfs. Stranded lighters, almost buried under the sand, lay beside them, their grey hulks blanched and empty. A group of ruined warehouses stood on the bank, single walls rising into the air with their upper windows intact. A road ran towards the hills across the alluvial plain, its direction marked by a line of telegraph poles.

  At this point the river had been dredged and widened. They passed more launches and river-craft, half-submerged under the sand-hills. 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 unvarying 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 graceful craft with a tall white funnel, which had run aground in the centre of the channel. The deck was level with the surrounding sand. Ransom walked to the rail and stepped over it, then
strolled across to the open doors of the saloon below the bridge. The dust lay over the floor and tables, its slopes cloaking the seats and corner upholstery.

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

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Ransom called up. ‘Hot springs should send up clouds of steam.’

  Philip shook his head. ‘Nothing, doctor.’

  Ransom walked forward to the bows 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 eyeing 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 towards the last trickle of fluid, and their collapsed skeletons lay in the sand. The dented skulls lolled on their sides, each one like Quilter’s, the grains of quartz glittering in the empty orbits.

  33

  THE TRAIN

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