The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  They stopped in the shade below the bridge, and looked out at the endless expanse of the dry bed framed within its pillars. In the afternoon light the thousands of shadows cast by the metal refuse covered the surface with calligraphic patterns.

  ‘We’ll camp here tonight,’ Philip Jordan said. ‘We’ll make an early start; by this time tomorrow we’ll be well on the way.’

  As always each evening, it took them at least two hours to prepare their camp. They pushed the cart into the shelter of one of the pillars, then drove the spears into the sand and draped the tent from the frame. Catherine and Ransom dug a deep trench around the tent, piling the warm sand into a windbreak. Philip walked up to the bank and searched the dunes for metal stakes. At night a freezing wind blew across the desert, and the few blankets they had brought with them were barely adequate to keep them warm.

  By dusk they had built a semicircular embankment three feet high around the tent and cart, held together by the pieces of metal. Inside this small burrow they sat together, cooking their meal at the fire of tinder and driftwood. The smoke wreathed upwards through the girders, drifting away into the cold night air.

  While the two women prepared their meal Ransom and Philip Jordan climbed up on to the bridge. The splitting hulks of the passenger coaches sat between the cantilevers, the stars shining through the rents in their roofs. Philip began to tear armfuls of the dry wood from the sides of the coaches. Rotted suitcases and haversacks lay in the dust by the tracks. Ransom walked forward along the line to the locomotive. He climbed into the cabin and searched for a water tap among the rusted controls. Leaning his elbows on the sill of the driver’s window, he looked out along the track as it crossed the bridge and wound away over the desert.

  At night, as he slept, he was woken by Philip Jordan. ‘Doctor! Listen!’

  He felt the young man’s hand on his shoulder. The glowing embers of the fire were reflected in Philip’s eyes as he stared across the river. ‘What is it?’

  Far away to the north-west, where the dried husks of the desert merged into the foothills of the night, an animal howled wearily. Its lost cries echoed among the steel pillars of the bridge, reverberating across the white river that lay beside them, as if trying to resurrect this long-dormant skeleton of the dead land.

  34

  THE MANNEQUINS

  AT DAWN the next morning they dismantled the camp and loaded their equipment into the cart. The disturbed night, and the earlier appearance of the sun each morning, delayed their departure. Philip Jordan paced around the cart as he waited for Mrs Quilter, tapping his spear restlessly against the spokes of the wheel. In the sunlight his beaked face gave him the appearance of a nervous desert nomad, scion of a dwindling aristocratic tribe.

  ‘Did you hear the sounds?’ he asked Catherine when she appeared. ‘What was it—a lion or a panther?’

  Catherine shook her head. She had loosened her hair, and the long tresses lifted about her head in the cool air. Unlike Philip, the sounds of the night seemed to have calmed her. ‘Neither. A dog of some sort. Perhaps a wolf. It was far away.’

  ‘Not more than five miles.’ Philip climbed on to the remains of the camp and peered across the river-bed. ‘We’ll be on it by noon. Keep your eyes open.’ He glanced sharply at Catherine, and then looked down at Ransom, who was squatting by the fire, warming his hands over the embers. ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Of course, Philip. But I shouldn’t worry. After ten years they’ll be more frightened of us than we are of them.’

  ‘That’s wishful thinking, doctor.’ To Catherine, he added tersely as he strode down the embankment: ‘On the cliff we saw a lion.’

  When Mrs Quilter was ready he tried to persuade her to take her seat on the cart. Although she had slept badly and was already becoming over-tired by the journey, Mrs Quilter insisted on walking for the first hour. She moved along at a snail’s pace, her tiny booted feet advancing over the cracked sand like timorous mice.

  Philip strode beside her, barely controlling his impatience, steering the cart with one hand. Now and then Catherine would take Mrs Quilter’s arm, but she insisted on making her own way, mumbling and shaking her head.

  Ransom took advantage of her slow pace to stroll away across the surface of the river. He picked among the wind-blown debris that had spilled down the bank, windmill blades and the detached doors of cars. The cold morning air refreshed him, and he was glad that Mrs Quilter was slowing the party’s progress. The few minutes alone allowed him to collect the stray thoughts that had preoccupied him more and more during their advance up the river.

  As he pondered on the real reasons for their journey, he had begun to sense its true inner compass. At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life, but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking. None the less 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 flames moved from one coach to the next, the bright embers falling between the tracks on to 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. ‘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. I suppose an ember was blown up on to the track during the night.’

  They watched the fire burn itself out among the coaches on the approach lines to the bridge. Philip Jordan paced about, then turned to Mrs Quilter and motioned her towards 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 a further ten miles. 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 a wharf straggled past the hulks of three barges. The river widened into a small harbour. Ransom climbed a wooden quay and walked past the leaning cranes through the outer streets of a small town. The façades 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 axe-blows. The burnt-out remains of a bus depot lay in a heap of plate glass and dulled chromium.

  A 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 centre 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
around him were idealized images of themselves, the essences of their own geometry, the smooth curvatures like the eddies flowing outwards from 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 plate glass to an elliptical window. Peering through it into the dim light, he saw a dozen faces gazing out at him 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 building 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 pavements, trying to remember if all the foot-prints 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 towards 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 of smoke into the sky.

  Then, during the mid-afternoon, when the town was five miles behind them, they looked back and saw dark billows rising from its streets. The flames raced across the roof-tops, 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, his scarred lip lifting above the broken tooth. His eagerness to blame Ransom for the fires revealed a refusal to face up to the realities of the desert, its sudden violence and imploding vacuums. Or had he, perhaps, rightly identified Ransom with just this quality of unpredictability? Catherine and Mrs Quilter stared down at Ransom as the smoke crossed the sky.’

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t,’ Ransom said. ‘Why should I?’

  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. 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 beach 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 which 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 along 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.

  35

  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 spectres 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 colour 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 north-west, howling to itself at their approach. Always it was several miles away from them, its cries echoing across the desert, reflected off the isolated walls that loomed in the grey light.

  By day, when they set out again, they would see the fires burning behind them. The dark plumes rose from the desert floor, marking the progress of the river bed from the south. Sometimes six or seven fires would burn simultaneously in a long line, their billows leaning against the sky.

  More than half their supplies of water were now exhausted, and the failure to find any trace of a spring or underground channel had put an end to the original purpose of the expedition. However, none of them mentioned the need to turn back for the coast, or made a serious attempt to dig for water in the sand. Backs bent against the cart, they plodded on towards the rising skyline of the city.

  The reduction in their daily water ration made them uneager to talk to each other. Most of the time Mrs Quilter sat tied to the back-rest atop the cart, swaying and muttering to herself. Philip Jordan, his dust-streaked face more and more lizard-like in the heat, scanned the verges of the river, taking his spear and running on ahead whenever the others rested. Pushing away at the cart, Catherine Austen kept to herself. Only the cries of the animals at night drew any response from her.

  On the night before they reached the city Ransom woke to the distant howling and saw her a hundred yards from the camp. She was walking on the dunes beyond the river’s edge, the dark night wind whipping her long hair off her shoulders.

  The next morning, as they knelt by the fire sipping at one of the two remaining canteens, he asked her: ‘Catherine, we’re almost there. What are you looking for?’

  She picked up a handful of the dust and clenched it in her fist, then let the white crystals dissolve between her fingers.

  Surrounded on all sides by the encroaching desert, the city had drawn in upon itself, the ridges of brick and stone running off into the sand-hills. As they neared the harbour, the burnt-out roofs rose above the warehouses by the dockyards. Ransom looked up at the wharfs and riverside streets, waiting for any signs of movement, but the roads were deserted, canyon floors filled with sand. The buildings receded in dusty tiers, transforming Mount Royal into a prehistoric terrace city, a dead metropolis that turned its forbidding stare on them as they passed.

  Beyond the outskirts of the city, the lakeside town had vanished. Dunes sloped among the ruined walls, pieces of charred timber sticking from their smooth flanks. Philip Jordan and Ransom climbed on to the bank and looked out at the causeways of rubble that stretched away like the unused foundation stones of a city still waiting to be built. Here and there the remains of a shanty leaned against a wall, or a group of buildings stood alone like a deserted fort. Half a mile away they could see the curve of the motor-bridge, and beyond it an indistinct series of earthworks that marked the remains of Hamilton.

  Ransom stared out at the lake. Where there had once been open water, a sea of white dunes reached towards the horizon, their rolling crests touched by the sunlight. Ransom waited for them to move, expecting the waves to sweep across the shore. The symmetry of the dunes, their drained slopes like polished chalk, illuminated the entire landscape.

  Shaking his head at the desolation, Philip Jordan muttered, ‘There’s no water here, Ransom. Those fires were an accident. Quilter, everyone, they’re dead.’

  Ransom looked back at the dark plumes lifting into the sky behind them. The nearest was only half a mile away, burning somewhere in the harbour. Below them Catherine Austen leaned against the side of the cart. Under her awning Mrs Quilter rocked like a child from
side to side. Philip began to walk down to them when the harsh sounds of barking crossed the air from an isolated building a hundred yards along the bank.

  Philip crouched down behind a section of metal fencing, but Ransom beckoned to him. ‘Philip, come on! Those dogs are given water by someone.’

  They made their way across the fence, darting from the cover of one ruined house to another. The humps of car roofs and the blackened stumps of watch-towers broke through the surface. The noise of the dogs came from the far side of the building. At either end a stairway led to the shopping level on the second floor. Ransom and Philip moved carefully up the steps to the open balcony. Drifts of dust, mingled with old cans and pieces of broken furniture, had been blown against the metal balustrade overlooking the piazza. Holding their spears they crawled across to the railing. For a moment Philip hesitated, as if frightened whom he might see below, but Ransom pulled his arm.

  In the centre of the piazza, some fifty yards to their left, half a dozen dogs were attacking a group of plastic mannequins taken from one of the stores and set out on the pavement. The lean white forms leapt and snarled. They tore at the faces of the mannequins and stripped off the rags of clothing draped across their waists and shoulders. One after the other the mannequins were knocked over, their arms and legs wrenched off by the snapping mouths.

  A whip-like crack came from the far end of the building. The pack turned and raced off, two of them dragging a headless mannequin. Rounding the corner of the building, they disappeared among the ruined streets, the sharp cracks of the whip driving them on.

  Ransom pointed to a detached head rocking in the gutter. In the savaged faces he saw again the waxy images of the figures behind the store window in the riverside town. ‘A warning to travellers, Philip? Or practice for the dogs?’