The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Philip . . . !’ The running figure of Quilter approached the bank through the streets across the river, an unwieldy flapping object in his arms. He reached the open shore, shouting Jordan’s name again, and then lifted his arms and released the bird. The black swan, still stained by the oil, lifted vigorously, its long neck stretched like the shaft of a spear towards Philip Jordan. Quilter watched as it crossed the river, wings working powerfully, the burning cinders falling around it. As it flew over, disappearing in a wide arc on the glowing tide of air, Philip waved to Quilter, who stood gazing after them as they faded from sight, his pensive face flickering in the firelight like a lost child’s.

  21

  JOURNEY TO THE SEA

  BY DAWN the next morning they had covered some five miles to the south. All night the city had burned behind them, and Ransom pushed the small party along as fast as he could, fearing that Jonas and the fishermen had been driven across the motor-bridge. But the road behind them remained empty, receding into the flaring darkness.

  At intervals they rested, sitting in the back seats of the cars abandoned along the roadway. As the fires of the city flickered in the driving mirrors, Ransom and the others slept intermittently, but Mrs Quilter spent the night scurrying from one car to another, sitting in the darkness and manipulating the controls. Once she pressed a horn, and the dull blare sounded away down the empty road.

  Her new-found passion for automobiles was unabated the following morning. As Ransom and Philip Jordan limped along through the warm dawn light, the old negro borne between them in his litter, she accidentally started one of the cars.

  ‘What would my Quilty think of me now, doctor?’ she asked when Ransom reached her. He tried to protect the gear lever from her rapacious hands as the engine roared and raced under her dancing feet.

  Five minutes later, when Ransom at last persuaded her to move along the seat, they set off in the car. To Ransom’s surprise the engine was in perfect order, the fuel tank half full. Looking out at the vehicles abandoned along the road, Ransom assumed that they had been left there during the tremendous traffic jams the previous week. Stalled in motionless glaciers of metal that reached over the plains as far as the horizon, their occupants must have given up in despair and decided to walk the remaining miles.

  Behind them the city disappeared from sight, but twenty-five miles farther to the south Ransom could still see the smoke staining the sky. On either side of them, beyond the vehicles driven on to the verges, the fields stretched away into the morning haze, their surfaces like buckled plates of rust. Isolated farmhouses, the dust drifting against their boarded windows, stood at the end of rutted lanes. Everywhere the bright bones of dead cattle lay by the empty water troughs.

  For three hours they drove on, twice stopping to exchange cars when the tyres were punctured by the glass and metal on the road. They passed through a succession of deserted farm towns, then sped towards the coastal hills hidden below the horizon.

  None of them spoke during this time. Mrs Quilter and Catherine sat in the back, staring out at the empty vehicles along the road. Between them, insulated by his blindness from the transformation of the landscape, the old negro sat with his head erect, stoically accepting the jolts and swerves of the car. Now and then he would murmur to Philip as the latter leaned back to steady his foster-father. Already Ransom sensed that his own bonds with Philip, formed within the margins of the river, had come to an end with the river’s death and their departure.

  The gradient began to descend as they entered the approaches to the river crossing. The numbers of abandoned cars increased. Ransom drove slowly along the one lane still open. The steel spans of the bridge rose above the stalled cars and trucks, which were carried over the hump like scrap metal on a conveyor.

  A quarter of a mile from the bridge they were forced to stop, wedged between the converging traffic lanes. Ransom walked ahead and climbed on to the parapet. Originally some four hundred yards wide at this point, the river was almost drained. The thin creek wound its way like a tired serpent along the bleached white bed. Rusting lighters lay along the banks, which jutted into the air like lost cliffs facing each other across a desert. Despite the bridge and the embankment on the opposite shore, the existence of the river was now only notional, the drained bed merging into the surface of the land.

  Looking up at the bridge, Ransom realized what had caused the traffic jam at its approaches. The central span, a section some one hundred feet long, had been blown up by a demolition team, and the steel cantilevers rested stiffly on the river bed, the edges of the roadway torn like metal pith. In the entrance to the bridge three army trucks had been shackled together as block vehicles. Their bonnets and driving cabins had been crushed into each other.

  ‘Why blow up the bridge?’ Philip Jordan asked as they made their way down on to the river bed. ‘Don’t they want people to reach the coast?’

  ‘Perhaps not, Philip.’ Ransom held to the poles of the litter as he found his footing in the crust. ‘There’s only so much beach.’

  Several cars had been driven down off the embankment in an attempt to cross the river. They lay half-buried in the drifts of dust, slopes of fine powder covering their seats and dashboards. Mrs Quilter lingered by them, as if hoping that they might suddenly spring to life again, then gathered her silks around her and shuffled off on Catherine Austen’s arm.

  They reached the flat bed of the main chanel and walked past the collapsed mid-section of the bridge. The detonation leads looped back to the south shore. Listening for any sounds of traffic ahead, Ransom tripped, nearly dropping Mr Jordan.

  ‘Dr Ransom, please rest for a moment,’ the old negro apologized. ‘I am sorry to be this burden to you.’

  ‘Not at all. I was thinking of something else.’ Ransom lowered the poles and wiped his face. During their journey to the south he had felt an increasing sense of vacuum, as if he was pointlessly following a vestigial instinct that no longer had any real meaning for him. The four people with him were becoming more and more shadowy, residues of themselves as notional as the empty river. He watched Catherine and Mrs Quilter climb on to a fallen steel girder that spanned the stream, already seeing them only in terms of the sand and dust, the eroding slopes and concealed shadows.

  ‘Doctor.’ Philip touched his arm. ‘Over there.’

  He followed Philip’s raised hand. Two hundred yards away the solitary figure of a man was walking along the drained white channel. He was moving upstream away from them, a few feet from the narrow creek of black water at which, now and then, he cast a vague eye, as if out on a quiet reflective stroll. He wore a suit of faded cotton, almost the colour of the bleached deck around him, but carried no equipment, apparently unaware of the sunlight on his head and shoulders.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ Philip asked. ‘Shall I stop him?’

  ‘No, leave him.’ Without thinking, Ransom walked forward a few paces, as if following the man. He waited, almost expecting to see a dog appear and run around the man’s heels. The absolute isolation of the chalk-white promenade, with its empty perspectives, focused an intense light upon the solitary traveller. For some reason, his strange figure, detached from the pressing anxieties of the drought and exodus, seemed a compass of all the unstated motives that Ransom had been forced to repress during the previous days.

  ‘Doctor, it’s time to go on.’

  ‘Just a moment, Philip.’

  The significance of this figure, disappearing along the heat-glazed bed, still eluded Ransom as he sat with the others on the south embankment. Philip lit a small fire and prepared a meal of boiled rice. Ransom swallowed a few spoonfuls of the tasteless gruel, and then gave his plate to Mr Jordan. Even Catherine Austen, leaning one arm on his shoulder as he gazed out over the broad bed of the river, failed to distract him. With an effort he joined the others as they climbed the embankment, pulling Mr Jordan behind them. />
  The road to the south was clear of cars. The remains of an army post were scattered along the verge. Cooking utensils hung from tripods outside the deserted tents, and a truck lay on its side among the bales of wire and old tyres.

  Mrs Quilter snorted in disgust. ‘Where’s all the cars gone to, doctor’? We’ll be wanting one for my old legs, you know.’

  ‘There may be some soon. You’ll simply have to walk until we find one.’

  Already Ransom was losing interest in her. The poles of the litter pressed into his shoulders. He laboured along the road, thinking of the solitary man on the river bed.

  22

  MULTIPLICATION OF THE ARCS

  TWO HOURS LATER, after they had found a car, they reached the foothills of the coastal range. They followed the road upwards, winding past burnt-out orchards and groves of brittle trees like the remnants of a petrified forest. Around them in the hills drifted the smoke of small fires, the white plumes wandering down the valleys. Here and there they saw the low roofs of primitive hovels built on the crests. The wooded slopes below were littered with the shells of cars tipped over the road. They began to descend through a narrow cutting, and emerged on to one side of a wide canyon. At the bottom, in the bed of a dried-up stream, a timber fire burned briskly. Two men worked beside a small still, their bare chests blackened by charcoal, ignoring the passing car.

  The trees receded to give them a view of a distant head-land partly veiled by the long plumes of smoke moving inland. Suddenly the car was filled with the sharp tang of brine. A final bend lay ahead, and in front of them was the grey hazy disc of the sea. On the edge of the bluff, partly blocking their view, two men sat on the roof of a car, gazing down at the coastal shelf below. They glanced at the approaching car, their faces thin and drawn in the sunlight. More cars were parked around the bend, and along the road as it wound downwards to the shore. People sat on the roofs and bonnets, staring out at the sea.

  Ransom stopped the car and switched off the engine. Below them, stretching along the entire extent of the coastal shelf, were tens of thousands of cars and trailers, jammed together like vehicles in an immense parking lot. Tents and wooden shacks were squeezed between them, packed more and more tightly as they neared the beach, where they overran the dunes and sand-flats. A small group of naval craft—grey-hulled patrol boats and coastguard cutters—were moored a quarter of a mile off shore. Long metal piers had been built out into the water towards them, and there was no clear dividing line between the sea and the shore. At intervals along the dunes stood a number of large metal huts, almost the size of aircraft hangars. Around them tall distillation columns streamed into the air, their vapour mingling with the smoke of the fires burning across the whole eight-hundred-yard width of the coastal shelf. The distant sounds of machinery were carried across to the cliff, and for a moment the clanking noise of the pumping gear and the bright galvanized iron roofs along the dunes made the whole area resemble a gigantic beach-side fun fair, the car-parks crammed with millions of would-be participants.

  Catherine Austen took Ransom’s arm. ‘Charles, we’ll never get down there.’

  Ransom opened his door. He had expected the beach to be crowded, but not the vast concourse below, a meaningless replication of identity in which an infinite number of doubles of himself were being generated by a cancerous division of time. He peered down through the smoke, trying to find even a single free space. Here and there, in the garden of a house or behind a derelict filling station, there was room for a few more vehicles, but the approach lanes were closed. One or two cars crawled about the churned-up roadways, like ants blindly moving with no notion of their overall direction, but otherwise the whole shore had settled into an immovable jam. Everywhere people sat on the roofs of cars and trailers, staring out through the smoke towards the sea.

  The only signs of organized activity came from the beach area. Trucks sped along a road between the dunes, and the lines of cars parked behind the metal huts formed neat patterns. Lines of tents shone in the sunlight, grouped around communal kitchens and service units.

  ‘Wait here.’ Ransom stepped from the car and walked along to the two men sitting on the roof of the car near by.

  He nodded to them. ‘We’ve just arrived. How do we get down to the beach?’

  The older of the two, a man of sixty, ignored Ransom. He was staring, not at the congestion below, but at the far horizon, where the sea dissolved in a pale haze. The fixity of his expression reminded Ransom of the obsessed cloud-watchers on their towers in Hamilton.

  ‘We need water,’ Ransom explained. ‘We’ve come a hundred miles today. There’s an elderly cripple in the car.’

  The other man, a trilby pulled down to shade his face, glanced down at Ransom. He seemed to detect the lack of conviction in Ransom’s voice, and gave him a thin smile, almost of encouragement, as if Ransom had successfully passed this first hurdle.

  Ransom walked back to the car. The road wound down the side of the cliff, past the people who had retreated to this last vantage point. It levelled out and approached the nearest of the shanty camps.

  Immediately all sense of the sea was lost, the distant dunes hidden by the roofs of trucks and trailers, and by the drifting smoke of garbage fires. Thousands of people squatted among the cars or sat on their doorsteps. Small groups of men moved about silently. The road divided, one section running parallel with the beach along the foot of the hills, the other heading diagonally towards the sea. Ransom stopped at the junction and searched for any signs of police or an army control post. On their right, smashed to pieces at the roadside, were the remains of a large sign, the metal scaffolding stripped of its wooden panels.

  Choosing the beachward road, Ransom entered the shanty town. Twenty yards ahead was a crude barricade. As they stopped, four or five men appeared from the doorways of the trailers. They waved at Ransom, gesturing him back. One of them carried a metal fencing post. He walked up to the car and banged it against the grille.

  Ransom held his ground. Ahead the road disappeared within fifty yards into the jungle of shacks and cars. The ground was churned into huge ruts.

  A dirty hand spread across the windshield. A man’s unshaven face poked through the window like a muzzle. ‘Come on, mister! back the hell out of here!’

  Ransom started to argue, but then gave up and reversed back to the road junction. They set off along the coast road below the cliffs. The motor camps stretched ahead of them to the right, the backs of trailers jutting out over the empty pavement. On the left, where the cliffs had been cut back at intervals to provide small lay-bys, single families squatted under makeshift awnings, out of sight of sea and sky, gazing at the camps separating them from the beach.

  Half a mile ahead they climbed a small rise, and could see the endless extent of the camps, reaching far into the haze beyond the cape ten miles away. Ransom stopped at a deserted filling station, and peered down a narrow lane that ran into the trailer camp. Small children squatted with their mothers, watching the menfolk stand and argue. The smoke of garbage fires drifted across the blank sky, and the air was touched by the sweet smells of unburied sewage.

  A few dust-streaked cars cruised past in the opposite direction, faces pressed to the windows as their occupants searched for some foothold off the road.

  Ransom pointed to the licence plates. ‘Some of these people must have been driving along the coast for days.’ He opened the door. ‘There’s no point in going on any farther. I’ll get out and have another look around.’

  Leaving Philip Jordan to guard the car, Ransom walked down the road, glancing between the lines of vehicles. People were lying about in the shade, or had walled in the narrow alleys with squares of canvas. Farther in, a crowd of people had surrounded a large chromium-sided trailer and were rocking it from side to side, drumming on the doors and windows with spades and pick-axe handles.

  An old cig
arette kiosk leaned against a concrete telegraph pole by the side of the road. Ransom managed to lift one foot on to the counter, and pulled himself up on to the roof. Far into the distance the silver flanks of the metal hangars along the shore glistened in the sunlight like an unattainable El Dorado. The sounds of pumping equipment drummed across to him, overlaid by the murmur and babble of the people in the camps.

  Below Ransom, in a small niche off the edge of the pavement, a middle-aged man in shirt sleeves was working a primus stove below the awning of his trailer. This miniature vehicle was little larger than a sedan chair. Sitting inside the doorway was his wife, a sedate roundfaced woman in a floral dress. The primus flared in the heat, warming a metal teapot.

  Ransom climbed down and approached the man. He had the intelligent, sensitive eyes of a watch-maker. As Ransom came up he poured the tea into two cups on a tray.

  ‘Herbert,’his wife called.

  ‘It’s all right, dear.’

  Ransom bent down beside him, nodding to the woman. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ the man said. ‘But I’ve no water to spare.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ve just arrived with some friends,’ Ransom said. ‘We intended to reach the beach, but it looks as if we’re too late.’

  The man nodded, stirring the tea. ‘You probably are,’ he agreed. ‘Still, I wouldn’t worry, we’re not much better off.’ He added: ‘We’ve been here two days.’

  ‘We were on the road three,’ his wife interjected. ‘Tell him about that, Herbert.’

  ‘He’s been on the road too, dear.’

  ‘What chance is there of getting on to the shore?’ Ransom asked. ‘We’re going to need some water soon. Aren’t there any police around?’