Mara and Dann mad-1

by Doris Lessing Little Dorrit

  And while he said all this, it was as if he were arguing with an invisible interlocutor.

  Mara said quietly, "All the same, there is something in the idea you like."

  He flung himself on the big bed and lay face down. He did not reply. She stood at the window and looked out over innumerable roofs, some as beautiful as those in the drowned cities. Some were crumbling, or had even fallen down.

  "I want to walk around the whole place, along the wall," she said. At first he did not move, then got up, sullen now, angry about his thoughts; and they found the old woman cooking, and said they were going to walk around the wall: there must be a walkway of some kind. She said, not looking at them, so great was her disapproval, that there was a path just inside the top of the wall, and it was in good condition most of the way, but they should be careful, and it would take them the rest of the day. She gave them some food to take with them.

  They set off, westwards. The wall was at the height of their waists. In some parts there were piles of sharp wire, now rusting. They knew where Chelops had got its wire fences.

  "If I were ruling here, for a start all this wire would come down," said Dann.

  "I see you are expecting a time of peace, Prince Dann?" But he didn't laugh.

  On one side of the wall could be seen only interminable wet earth and marshes, with paths through them, and sandy stretches, and rushes and reeds. It was a lumpy landscape that was more water than land. Inside the wall were what seemed like hundreds of every kind of building, for where some of the fine ones had fallen, reeds and mud replaced them. So this was where all the records of the great past were. The country was the same to the north, and they stopped to shelter on their little ledge of a path, from a sharp wind, crouching low to eat some bread. This wind had blown all the way from the ice fields and ice cliffs that covered Yerrup. If they could fly, as once people had flown anywhere they wished, to look down over the ice, would the great cities of those great civilisations be visible there? No, ice was not water, and so. They went on, chilled inside their thick wrappings. The eastern vistas were the same: this was where they had come, and so they knew that the marshes stretched for days of walking. All along the wall were the old sun traps. The metal of the arms had eroded, and some had disappeared, leaving the circlets of metal lying about on the wall; or they had fallen and lay on roofs or on the earth.

  The light was going. Felissa and Felix had left a message that they would be served supper in their rooms, so that they could be alone to think about their decision.

  "They don't like our manners," said Mara.

  "When I am ruler," said Dann, and she interrupted with, "Dann, please stop it, even in joke. I'm afraid, don't you see." "What of, Mara?" He was defiant. "I'm afraid of — the other one."

  He stared, then deflated, and sat moodily on his floor cushion and was silent for a while. "You are right," he said. "But I'm going to see Felix and ask to hear more of these plans of theirs. Because there are things they haven't said. For one thing, they must be planning concubines. A baby takes nine months, and then at best a year before another. Not that I'd use you so badly, Mara."

  "I had thought of concubines."

  "And how exactly do they plan to live in the interval before there is another Mara and another Dann? They are obviously very poor." "Another Shahana and another Shahmand."

  "Do you know what? I keep thinking of Kira. I have dreams of her."

  And she said softly, "And I am dreaming of Shabis."

  "Are you, Mara? Well, we could start our own royal family, have you thought of that?"

  "Please stop it, Dann."

  He lay down on the big bed in her room, and then jumped up and went to his own bed in the next room. "I hate them," he said. "Curse them both. They've spoiled you and me."

  Next morning Felissa accompanied them to the start of the Museum Tour. That was what it had been called once, and she could remember the lines of people stretching almost out of sight, waiting to get in to see the marvels of the past.

  In the entrance was a tall metal shape, like a shield, with coils of wire behind it, and under it a button marked Press, in a dozen languages. They pressed, but the machine was dead. Next to this shield, or plaque, was another, and on it in the same languages, which included Mahondi and Charad, the information on the metal sheet, writing which would have come up in lights, had the thing still worked. This writing, on the plaque, in elegant black and yellowish grey, once white, was faded, and in some places illegible. Beside the plaque was a third attempt: a large piece of black slate, and on it, written in coloured earth, the same information as on the other two, but in fewer languages, headed by Mahondi and Charad.

  "Start here for our tour through the ancient civilisations of The Warm Interregnum. Some of the artefacts you will see were brought from the museums of Yerrup while the first wave of the Ice was advancing. All the countries of Yerrup had innumerable museums of old artefacts. A replica of one of their museums will be found at Building 24. The first wave of the Ice crushed and swallowed some cities, but the ones on the edge of the Middle Sea were pushed over into it. There was a period when parts of the Middle Sea were half filled with the remains of the shoreline cities. The Middle Sea was already dry by then. It was this material that was brought here to the shores of North Ifrik to make the cities that copied those that had gone under the Ice. They, in their turn, went the way of all cities, to ruin. And that material was used to make other towns and cities. So some of the cities of Tundra are built of material used by those ancient peoples to make theirs."

  They made their way to Building 24. The first room showed people dressed in skins, hunting, or sitting around fires. "These were the people that preceded the ancient Yerrupeans from whom we descend. Observe the shape of their heads. They lived for 140 thousand years. They retreated before the ice waves of the Old Ice Age, and returned to occupy sheltered valleys in the warmer interludes."

  "They look rather like the Rock People," Dann said. He was disturbed. Mara felt the same — sad. It was painful, looking at a long extinct people. "Why should we care about them?" Dann protested, but they did, and moved on, holding hands, pleased the other was there.

  The next room took them to the people who succeeded the Neanders. Again, people in skins, living in rough huts or thatched houses, hunting with knives and spears, and also with bows and arrows.

  "I shall make one of those," said Dann. "Why don't we have them?"

  Mara said she wouldn't have minded one of those spears at certain points during their travels.

  "Well, Mara, are we being illuminated? I think not. We'd fit in very well here. Perhaps we could even teach them a thing or two about surviving."

  And now at the entrance to a third room was a sign saying NO ENTRANCE, and the roof had fallen in. Peering past piles of plaster and tiles, they saw the walls were covered with scenes of wild looking people in boats that were longer and finer than any they had seen.

  "So, we'll never know about the Peoples of the Sea," said Dann. For that was the description of this place.

  And the next hall, a large one, The Age of Chivalry, was falling in. People encased in metal shells, with lances and spears of all kinds, with stuffed horses, had slid off them and the horses were bursting open and showing their shredded rag entrails.

  It was now midday. Dann wanted to see the building described as Space Adventures, but Mara said she needed the continuity, she was already confused, and he said he didn't care about continuity. He was sounding angry as well as sad, and Mara too was angry, because of the futility of it all, a senselessness. Where these old people had lived the ice lay as thick as twice the height of the mountain that Daulis had said was where they would find the White Bird Inn. From their bedroom windows they could see it stretching up into the cold sky, and on its summit shone a cap of whiteness, snow and ice.

  "I'm going to start crying, Mara, let's get out of here." And they began wandering about, lost, among this wilderness of buildings, and seeing a tall b
uilding, the tallest, went inside and stood limp with astonishment. They were surrounded by machines of a kind and complexity they could never have imagined, though it could be seen they were from the same time as the sun trap. These were not rooms, but halls, of machines once used for travelling between the stars — but stars was not a word they could any longer use as easily as they did, because all over the walls and ceilings were great maps of the sky, and there they saw the patterns of stars they had known all their lives shown as mere local manifestations, inside greater patterns. They saw that what they lived on, this place called Earth, was one of a little sprinkle of planets travelling around a central bright star, their sun; but this was a very minor star, that great pumping engine of heat that so directly ruled their lives, a little star among so many that the words thousands, or even millions, became irrelevant; and Ifrik, which they had learned to know with their feet, putting one foot in front of another, was merely a shape among several on this little ball. And the moon, whose face they knew as well as their own, was... "Enough," said Mara, "I can't take it in."

  "I don't think I like knowing what an ignorant lot of barbarians we are," said Dann.

  And they put their arms around each other, for comfort. They were looking at a kind of metal box that had all sorts of projections and wires and rods sticking out of it, that had gone to the planet farthest from the sun and had sent back information. But why, and what for, and above all, how? As they left this great building, a wall with writing on it informed them that before this Ice Age had swallowed all the northern parts of the Earth, machines had been sent into space as large as a big town, and in them people were able to live, it was believed indefinitely; and there were those that still believed that these machines existed, travelling about up there. And might even return one day.

  "Like that crashed machine the pilgrims were singing their songs to... no Mara, let's go, I'm so sad I could."

  They returned to their rooms, hoping not to meet their hosts. Again they were served a meal there, with the message that dear Mara and dear Dann should make up their minds, because time was passing.

  That night Dann went off to his room, looking rueful, and embarrassed, and even closed the door between them; but Mara woke in the night to find him holding her, "What is it, Mara, what's wrong?" She had been calling out to him in her sleep. She had dreamed of peoples who emerged from a kind of mist, running and fighting, always fighting, always looking over their shoulders for enemies; and then one wave vanished and another appeared, dressed differently, of a different skin colour, white or brown or black or yellow, and they too ran, and were hunted, and disappeared, one after another; these long ago peoples had appeared and died out and... She wept and he comforted her, and in the morning he said he wanted to find Felix and ask him certain questions.

  "I am sure those two are mad," she said.

  "I suppose that depends on whether their plans succeed or not. If they do, then Felix and Felissa aren't mad."

  And she said to him softly, "Dann, be careful. I am beginning to see that this dream of theirs can be a powerful poison."

  He went to find Felix and she returned to the museums. What intricacies of invention, what cleverness, what seductive ways of living. She liked best some rooms calling themselves "A Day in the Life of." A woman's life in a little island called Britain, in the middle of the eleventh millennium, and then in the twelfth millennium. A family at the end of the twelfth millennium, in an enormous city in North Imrik. A farmer in northern Yerrup at the end of the twelfth millennium. That was the period the makers of these museums liked best because of the crescendo of inventiveness of that time. But the end of the story in every building was war, and the ways of war became crueller and more terrible. In a room in a building that had only machines of war, was a wall that listed the ways it was thought these ancient peoples would have ended their civilisations even if the ice had not arrived. War was one. She could not understand the weapons: they were so difficult and so complicated. And even when the explanations were clear enough to understand she could not believe what she was reading. Projectiles that could carry diseases designed to kill all the people in a country or city? What were these ancient peoples, that they could do such things? "Bombs" that could... She did not understand the explanations.

  There was a recklessness about the ways they used their soil and their water.

  "These were peoples who had no interest in the results of their actions. They killed out the animals. They poisoned the fish in the sea. They cut down forests, so that country after country, once forested, became desert or arid. They spoiled everything they touched. There was probably something wrong with their brains. There are many historians who believe that these ancients richly deserved the punishment of the Ice."

  And in another room: "The machines they invented were ever more subtle and complex, using techniques that no one has matched since. These machines it is now believed destroyed their minds, or altered their thinking so they became crazed. While this process was going on they were hardly aware of what was happening, though a few did know and tried to warn the others."

  Shabis had told her that the people alive now were the same as those so clever, but so stupid, ancient peoples, and in Mara's mind was a little picture of what she had found in the Tower: Dann near death, one man with his throat cut and another nearly dead. Dann had killed that man, but he did not remember it. And there was another picture: of Kulik, with that teeth-bared, ugly grin, and his murderous heart.

  When she got back to her room one day, she found Felissa looking with distaste at her old brown snake, or shadow, garment.

  "We don't have this in our collections," she said. "Will you give us this one?"

  "But Felissa, your museums are collapsing, they are falling into ruins."

  "Oh my dear, yes, but that is why we need you and Dann so badly. We could soon get everything back to how it was."

  "Felissa, I have to say this: I do truly believe that you and Felix are living inside some kind of impossible dream."

  "Oh no, dearest Mara, you are wrong. Felix and Dann are talking, and I'm so glad." She stroked Mara's arms, and then her face, and murmured, in her intimate, caressing way, "Dear, dear Mara." And then, brisk and busy, "Dear Princess, you are such a lovely girl, I would so like to see you in."

  Spread over Mara's bed were gowns and robes that she had noticed hanging in the cupboard but, thinking they were Felissa's, had not touched them. She had walked through a hall full of clothes, from ancient times, but by then could not take in any more news from the past.

  These clothes had been taken from the museum.

  "Please, please, put this one on," entreated Felissa, and held up a sky-blue garment of shiny material that had a full skirt, and — this was something Mara had not seen or imagined — was tight about the hips and waist, and had bare shoulders and a bare back. "This was a dress they called a ball gown," said Felissa, "they danced in it."

  "How is it these things haven't fallen apart from age?"

  "Oh, these aren't the originals, of course not. They brought the originals here to Ifrik, when the ice began, to the museums they were making then, and as they faded and decayed they were always copied and replaced. Probably these are nothing like as wonderful as the originals, because we are not as wonderful as those old peoples."

  "But we are as warlike," said Mara.

  And now a quick, shrewd glance, far from the intimate, caressing style of her social self.

  "Yes, warlike. I'm sorry to say that is true. But that is what dear Prince Shahmand — Dann — is discussing with my husband."

  She held out the dress. Mara pulled off her robe and got the thing on somehow, but her waist was too thick for it and it gaped. She stood in front of a big glass that Felissa wheeled in from her own room and saw her-self — and fell on the bed laughing.

  "But you look beautiful, Mara," Felissa fussed.

  Mara took it off.

  Now, to her amazement, Felissa removed her garments tha
t were composed of so many veils and draperies of grey and white, and stood revealed in long pink drawers, and a kind of harness for her breasts. "Yes, these are from the museum too. But they are beginning to rot and we do not have the means to replace them so I thought I might as well have the benefit."

  She took from the cupboard a pink gown, all laces and frills, and put it on. She paraded up and down, glancing at herself in the looking-glass, and then at Mara, smiling. Mara saw she did this often: these clothes were not really here for Mara, Felissa wanted Mara to admire her.

  And she was a pretty old thing, or perhaps not so old, quite slim still, but her limbs were hardly. And Mara could not prevent herself looking at her own smooth, fine, silky limbs.

  Mara sat there while the modes and fashions of hundreds of years paraded in front of her. She had not heard of fashions, until now, and found the idea of it amazing and even absurd. From time to time Felissa cooed, "Oh, do try this on, Mara, it would suit you." But that was not the point of this little scene.

  Mara sat on, smiling, and thought that nothing more ridiculous had ever happened to her than to watch an elderly brown-skinned woman parading about in clothes made for thousands-of-years-ago women — white women, who clearly had a very different shape, for not one of Felissa's experiments closed at the waist. Mara imagined these clothes on Leta, and found that hard too. That great bundle of fair, shining hair — yes, that would suit some of these dresses.

  And so passed that afternoon. That night, when Dann came to their rooms, he went straight into his and shut the door. He did this as if casually, but it was a bad moment, and his conscious glance at her showed it. She wanted to know about his discussions with Felix, so she knocked, and there was no answer. She knocked louder. He came to open the door, and she knew who it was who stood there frowning.

  "I don't like this place and I want to go," she said.

  "Just a little bit longer."

  "What does he want you to do?"