"But why shouldn't he tell you directly? How could it have any bearing on his own situation?"
Sanders paused, glancing down at the sunglasses which Louise still carried in her hand. "Doesn't it with all of us, Louise? There are white shadows as well as black behind us in Port Matarre-why, God alone knows. Still, of one thing I'm sure, there's no actual physical danger from this process, or Ventress would have warned me. If anything, he was encouraging me to go to Mont Royal."
Louise shrugged. "Perhaps it would suit him to have you there."
"Perhaps-" They had passed the main piers of the native harbor, and Sanders stopped and spoke to the half-castes who owned the small group of fishing boats moored along the bank. They shook their heads when he mentioned Mont Royal, or seemed too unreliable to trust.
He rejoined Louise. "No good. They're the wrong kind of boats anyway."
"Is that the ferry over there?" Louise pointed a hundred yards along the bank, where half a dozen people stood at the water's edge near a landing stage. Two men armed with poles were steering in a large skiff.
When Louise and Dr. Sanders approached they saw that the boatmen were bringing in the floating body of a dead man.
The group of onlookers moved back as the body, prodded by the two poles, was beached in the shallows. After a pause, someone stepped forward and pulled it on to the damp mud. For a few moments everyone looked down at it, as the muddy water ran off the drenched clothing and drained from the blanched cheeks and eyes.
"Oooohh-!" With a shudder, Louise turned and backed away, stumbling a few feet up the bank to the landing stage. Leaving her, Dr. Sanders bent down to inspect the body. That of a muscular fair-skinned European of about thirty, it appeared to have suffered no external physical injuries. From the extent to which the dye had run from the leather belt and boots it was plain that the man had been immersed in water for four or five days, and Sanders was surprised to find that rigor mortis had still not occurred. The joints and tissues were malleable, the skin firm and almost warm.
What most attracted his attention, however, like that of the rest of the watching group, was the man's right arm. From the elbow to the finger tips it was enclosed by-or more precisely had effloresced into-a mass of translucent crystals, through which the prismatic outlines of the hand and fingers could be seen in a dozen multi-colored reflections. This huge jeweled gauntlet, like the coronation armor of a Spanish conquistador, was drying in the sun, its crystals beginning to emit a hard vivid light.
Dr. Sanders looked over his shoulder. Someone else had joined the watching group. Looking down at them from the top of the bank, his dark robe held below his hunched shoulders like the wings of a huge carrion bird, was the tall figure of Father Balthus. His eyes were fixed on the dead man's jeweled arm. A small tic in one corner of his mouth was fluttering, as if some blasphemous requiem for the dead man was discharging itself below the surface of the priest's consciousness. Then, with an effort, he turned on one heel and walked off along the river toward the town.
Dr. Sanders stood up as one of the watermen came forward. He stepped through the circle of onlookers and made his way to Louise Peret.
"Is that Anderson? The American? You recognized him."
Louise shook her head. "The cameraman, Matthieu. They went off in the car together." She looked up at Sanders, her face contorted. "His _arm?_ What happened to it?"
Dr. Sanders moved her away from the group of people looking down at the body as the jeweled light discharged itself from the crystalline tissues. Fifty yards away, Father Balthus was striding past the native harbor, the fishermen stepping out of his path. Sanders gazed around, trying to take his bearings. "It's rime to find out. Somewhere we've got to get hold of a boat."
Louise straightened her handbag, searching for her pencil and shorthand pad. "Edward, I think-I must get this story out. I'd like to go to Mont Royal with you, but with a dead man, it's not just guesswork any more."
"Louise!" Dr. Sanders held her arm. Already he sensed that the physical bond between them was slipping-Louise's eyes were turned away from him toward the body on the shore, as if she understood that there was little point in her going with Sanders to Mont Royal, and that his real motives for wanting to sail up-river, his quest for an end to all Suzanne Clair stood for in his mind, concerned him alone. Yet Sanders felt reluctant to let her go. However fragmentary their relationship, it offered at least an alternative to Suzanne.
"Louise, if we don't leave this morning we'll never get away from here. Once the police find that body they'll put a cordon around the whole of Mont Royal, if not Port Matarre as well." He hesitated, and then added: "That man had been in the water for at least four days, probably carried downstream all the way from Mont Royal, yet he died only half an hour ago."
"What do you mean?"
"Precisely that. He was still _warm_. Do you understand when I say we must leave for Mont Royal now? The story you want will be there, and you'll be the first-"
Sanders broke off, aware that their conversation was being overheard. They were walking along the quay, and to their right, twenty feet away, a motor-boat moved slowly through the water, keeping pace with them. Sanders recognized the red-and-yellow craft brought to Port Matarre on the steamer. Standing at the controls, one hand lightly on the steering helm, was a raffish-looking man with a droll handsome face. He eyed Dr. Sanders with a kind of amiable curiosity, as if balancing the advantages and drawbacks of becoming involved with him.
Dr. Sanders motioned to Louise to stop. The helmsman cut his engine, and the motor-boat drifted in an arc toward the bank. Dr. Sanders walked down to it, leaving Louise on the quay.
"A fine boat you have there," Sanders said to the helmsman.
The tall man made a deprecating gesture, then gave Sanders an easy smile. "I'm glad you appreciate it, Doctor." He pointed to Louise Peret. "I can see you have a good eye."
"Mlle. Peret is a colleague of mine. I'm more interested in boats just now. This one traveled with me on the steamer from Libreville."
"Then you know, Doctor, it's a fine craft, as you say. It could take you to Mont Royal in four or five hours."
"Excellent, indeed." Dr. Sanders glanced at his watch. "What would you charge for such a trip, Captain-?"
" Aragon." The tall man took a partly smoked cheroot from behind his ear and gestured with it at Louise. "For one? Or both of you?"
"Doctor-" Louise called down, still uncertain. "I'm not sure-"
"For the two of us," Dr. Sanders said, turning his back on the young woman. "We'll want to go today, within half an hour if possible. Now how much?"
For a few minutes they argued over the price, then agreed. Aragon started his motor, and shouted: "I'll see you at the next pier, Doctor, in an hour. The tide will have turned, it will carry us half the way."
At noon, their suitcases stowed away in the locker behind the engine, they set off up-river in the speedboat. Dr. Sanders sat beside Aragon in the front seat, while Louise Peret, her dark hair flowing behind her in the slipstream, sat in one of the bucket seats behind. As they swept up the brown tidal river, the arcs of spray rainbowing behind them, Sanders felt the oppressive silence that had pervaded Port Matarre lift for the first time since his arrival. The deserted arcades, of which they had a last glimpse as they headed out into the main channel, and the somber forest seemed to recede into the background, separated from him by the roar and speed of the motor-boat. They passed the police wharf. A corporal lounging there with his squad watched them sweep by on a wake of foam. The powerful motor lifted the craft high out of the water, and Aragon leaned forward, watching the surface for any floating logs.
There were few other craft about. One or two native outriggers moved along by the edge of the banks, half hidden by the overhanging foliage. A mile from Port Matarre they passed the private jetties owned by the cocoa plantations. The empty lighters lay unattended under the idle cranes. Weeds sprang between the tracks of the small-gauge railways and climbed up the gantries of
the storage silos. Everywhere the forest hung motionless in the warm air, and the speed and spray of the motor-boat seemed to Dr. Sanders like an illusionist trick, the flickering shutter of a defective cine-camera.
Half an hour later, when they reached the tidal limits of the river, some ten miles inland, Aragon slowed down so that they could watch the water more closely. Dead trees and large pieces of bark drifted past. Now and then they came across sections of abandoned wharves that had been pulled off their moorings by the current. The river seemed untended and refuse-strewn, carrying the litter of deserted towns and villages.
"This is quite a boat, Captain," Dr. Sanders complimented Aragon, as the latter changed fuel tanks to preserve the balance of the craft.
Aragon nodded, steering the boat past the remains of a floating hut. "Faster than the police launches, Doctor."
"I'm sure it is. What do you use it for? Diamond smuggling?"
Aragon turned his head, casting a sharp eye at Sanders. Despite the latter's reserved manner, Aragon seemed already to have made his own judgment of the doctor's character. He shrugged sadly. "So I hoped, Doctor, but too late now."
"Why do you say that?"
Aragon looked up at the dark forest draining all light from the air. "You'll see, Doctor. We'll soon be there."
"When were you last at Mont Royal, Captain?" Sanders asked. He glanced back at Louise. She leaned forward to catch Aragon 's replies, holding her hair against her cheek.
"Not for five weeks. The police took my old boat."
"Do you know what's going on up there? Have they found a new mine?"
Aragon gave a laugh at this, and then steered the boat at a large white bird sitting on a log in their path. With a cry it took off straight over their heads, its huge wings working like ungainly oars. "You could say that, Doctor. But not in the way you mean." He added before Sanders could question him further: "I really saw nothing. I was on the river, it was during the night."
"You saw the dead man in the harbor this morning?"
Aragon paused for half a minute before replying. At last he said: " El Dorado, the man of gold and jewels, in an armor of diamonds. There's an end many would wish for, Doctor."
"Perhaps. He was a friend of Mlle. Peret."
"Of Mlle.-?" With a grimace, Aragon sat forward over the helm.
Shortly after one thirty, when they were almost halfway to Mont Royal, they stopped by a derelict jetty that jutted out into the river from an abandoned plantation. Sitting on the soft beams over the water, they ate their lunch of ham and rolls followed by café royal. Nothing moved across the river or along the banks, and to Sanders it seemed that the entire area had been deserted.
Perhaps because of this, any conversation between them had lapsed. Aragon sat by himself, staring out at the water that swept past. The marked slope of his forehead, and his lean face with its pointed cheekbones, had given him a sharp piratical look along the waterfront at Port Matarre, but here, surrounded on all sides by the oppressive jungle, he seemed less sure of himself, more like some trigger-nerved forest guide. Why he had chosen to take Sanders and Louise to Mont Royal remained obscure, but Sanders guessed that he was drawn back to this focal area by motives as uncertain as his own.
Louise had also withdrawn into herself. As she smoked her cigarette after the meal she avoided Sanders's eyes. Deciding to leave her alone for the time being, Sanders walked away along the pier, picking his way across the broken boards until he reached the bank. The forest had re-entered the plantation, and the giant trees hung silently in lines, one dark cliff behind another.
In the distance he could see the ruined plantation house, creepers entwined through the rafters of the outbuildings. Ferns overgrew the garden of the house, running up to the doors and sprouting through the planks of the porch. Avoiding this mournful wreck, Sanders strolled around the perimeter of the garden, following the faded stones of a pathway. He passed the wire screen of a tennis court, the mesh covered by creepers and moss, and then reached the drained basin of an ornamental fountain.
Sanders sat down on the balustrade, and took out his cigarettes. He was looking across at the plantation house a few minutes later when he sat forward with a start. Watching him from an upstairs window of the house was a tall pale-skinned woman with a white mantilla covering her head and shoulders, the dark creepers clustering at the window around her.
Sanders threw away his cigarette and ran forward through the ferns. He reached the porch and kicked back the dusty frame of the door, then made his way toward the wide staircase. Here and there his shoes sank through the balsa-like boards, but the marble steps were still firm. The house had been stripped of its furniture and he crossed the landing upstairs to the bedroom in which he had seen the woman.
"Louise-!"
With a laugh she turned to face him, the puffy remains of an old lace curtain falling from one hand to the floor. Shaking her hair lightly, she smiled at Sanders.
"Did I frighten you? -I'm sorry."
"Louise-that was a damn silly thing to do-" With an effort Sanders controlled himself, his moment of recognition fading. "How the devil did you get up here?"
Louise sauntered around the room, looking at the patches left behind the pictures that had been removed, as if visiting some spectral gallery. "I walked, of course." She turned to face him, her eyes sharpening. "What's the matter-did I remind you of someone?"
Sanders went over to her. "Perhaps you did. Louise, it's difficult enough, without any practical jokes."
"It wasn't meant as a joke." She took his arm, her ironic smile gone. "Edward, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have-"
"Never mind." Sanders held her face to his shoulder, recovering himself in the physical contact with Louise. "For God's sake, Louise. All this will be over once we reach Mont Royal -before I had no choice."
"Of course-" She drew him away from the window. " Aragon -he can see us here."
The lace curtain lay on the floor at their feet, the mantilla Sanders had seen from the drained fountain in the garden. As Louise began to kneel down on it, holding his hands, he shook his head, then kicked it away into the corner.
Later, when they returned to the motor-boat, Aragon met them halfway down the pier. "We should leave, Doctor," he said, "the boat is exposed here-sometimes they patrol the river."
"Of course. How many soldiers are there in the Mont Royal area?" Sanders asked.
"Four or five hundred. Perhaps more."
"A battalion? That's a lot of men, Captain." He offered Aragon a cigarette from his case as Louise walked on ahead. "That incident in the native harbor last night-did you see it?"
"No, I heard this morning-those market boats are always catching fire."
"Perhaps. There was an attack on a man I know-a European called Ventress." He looked up at Aragon. "There was a large motor-cruiser with a cannon on the deck-you may have seen it on the river?"
Aragon 's face gave nothing away. He shrugged vaguely. "It could belong to one of the mining companies. I haven't met this Ventress." Before Sanders could move on he added: "Remember, Doctor, there are many interests in Mont Royal that wish to stop people from going into the forest-or leaving it."
"I can see that. By the way, that drowned man in the harbor this morning-when you saw him, was he lying on a raft, by any chance?"
Aragon inhaled slowly on the cigarette, watching Sanders with some respect. "That's a good guess, Doctor."
"And as for this armor of light, was he covered with the crystals from head to foot?"
Aragon gave him a grimace of a smile, revealing a gold eye-tooth. He tapped it with his forefinger. "'Covered'-is that the right word? My tooth is the whole gold, Doctor."
"I take the point." Sanders gazed down at the brown water sweeping past the polished timbers of the jetty. Louise waved to him from her place in the boat, but he was too preoccupied to reply. "You see, Captain, I'm wondering whether this man, Matthieu he was called, was dead in the absolute sense when you saw him. If, say, in the choppy o
pen water of the harbor he had been knocked from the raft, but still held on in some way with one hand-that would explain a lot. It might have very important consequences. You see what I mean?"
Aragon smoked his cigarette, watching the crocodiles that lay in the shallows below the opposite bank. Then he threw the half-smoked cigarette into the water. "I think we should set off for Mont Royal now. The army here is not very intelligent."
"They have other things to think about, but you may well be right. Mile. Peret thinks there is a physicist on the way. If so, he should be able to prevent any more tragic accidents."
Just before they started off Aragon turned to Dr. Sanders and said: "I was wondering, Doctor, why you were so eager to go to Mont Royal."
The remark seemed by way of apology for earlier suspicions, but Sanders found himself laughing defensively. With a shrug he said: "Two of my closest friends are in the affected zone, as well as Louise's American colleague. Naturally we're worried about them. The automatic temptation of the army will be to seal off the entire area and see what happens. They were loading barbed wire and fencing in the barracks at Port Matarre yesterday. For anyone trapped within the cordon it could be like being frozen solid inside a glacier."
5 The crystallized forest
Five miles from Mont Royal the river narrowed to little more than a hundred yards in width. Aragon reduced the speed of their craft to a few knots, steering between the islands of rubbish that drifted by, and avoiding the creepers that hung far out over the water from the high jungle walls on either side. Sitting forward, Dr. Sanders searched the forest, but the great trees were still dark and motionless.
They emerged into a more open stretch, where part of the undergrowth along the right-hand bank had been cut back to provide a small clearing. As Dr. Sanders pointed to a collection of derelict outbuildings, there was a tremendous blare of noise from the forest canopy above them, as if a huge engine had been mounted in the top-most branches, and a moment later a helicopter soared past above the trees.
The Crystal World Page 5