He waited as Whitman approached, head bowed as he panted between his teeth, the bayonet held in his hand like a chisel. Quilter was looking down at the drained basin of the reservoir, already whitening in the sun, and at the arms of darker sand running away across the dunes.
Whitman feinted with the bayonet, put off when Ransom offered no resistance. ‘Quilt—?’ he called.
Quilter turned and walked back to the house. He glanced at Whitman and waved him away, his swan’s hat carried in his hand by the neck. ‘Leave him,’ he said. For the first time since Ransom had known him his face was completely calm.
42
‘JOURS DE LENTEUR’
THE BIRDS HAD GONE. Everywhere light and shade crept on slowly. No longer cooled by the evaporating water, the dunes around the oasis reflected the heat like banks of ash. Ransom rested in the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. His complete surrender to Quilter had left him with a feeling almost of euphoria. The timeless world in which Quilter lived now formed his own universe, and only the shadow of the broken roof above, adjusting its length and perimeter, reminded him of the progress of the sun.
The next day, when Mrs Quilter died, Ransom helped to bury her. Miranda was too tired to come with them, but Whitman and Ransom carried the old woman on a plank over their heads. They followed Quilter towards the burial ground near the city, waiting as he searched the rubble above the car park, sinking his staff through the sand to ‘the roofs of the cars below. Most of the vehicles were already occupied, but at last they found an empty limousine and buried Mrs Quilter in the back seat. When they had filled in the sand over the roof, the children scattered pieces of paper drawings over it.
SOON AFTERWARDS, Philip Jordan went off to search for his father. He came to the oasis to say goodbye to Ransom. Kneeling beside him, he pressed the canteen of water to his lips.
‘There’s a river here somewhere, doctor. Quilter says my father’s already seen it. When I find him we’ll go off and look for it together. Perhaps we’ll see you there one day, doctor.’
When he stood up Ransom saw Catherine Austen waving to him from a dune in the distance, hands on hips. Her leather boots were covered with the chalk-like sand of the desert. As Philip rejoined her she lifted her whip and the white-flanked lions loped off by her side.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN a sand-storm blew up, Ransom went down to the lake and watched the drifts whirling across the dunes. Far out towards the centre of the lake he could see the hull of the river steamer once commanded by Captain Tulloch. Standing at the helm as the waves of white sand broke across the bows, the fine spray lifting over the funnel, was the tall figure of Jonas. Shielding his face from the wind, Philip Jordan stood beside him at the rail.
The storm had subsided the next morning, and Ransom made his farewells to Quilter and Miranda. Leaving the house, he waved to the children who had followed him to the gate, and then walked down the avenue to his former home. Nothing remained except the stumps of the chimneys, but he rested here for an hour before continuing on his way.
He crossed the rubble and went down to the river, then began to walk along the widening mouth towards the lake. Smoothed by the wind, the white dunes covered the bed like motionless waves. He stepped among them, following the hollows that carried him out of sight of the shore. The sand was smooth and unmarked, gleaming with the bones of untold numbers of fish.
The height of the dunes steadily increased, and an hour later the crests were almost twenty feet above his head.
Although it was not yet noon, the sun seemed to be receding into the sky, and the air was becoming colder. To his surprise he noticed that he no longer cast any shadow on to the sand, as if he had at last completed his journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years. The light failed, and the air grew darker. The dust was dull and opaque, the crystals in its surface dead and clouded. An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole of the exterior world were losing its existence.
It was some time later that he failed to notice it had started to rain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When J.G. Ballard passed in April 2009, the reading world lost one if its most prophetic writers. Over the last century, no other modern fiction writer examined the deleterious effects of technology on culture more unerringly than Ballard, and his surreal, yet richly atmospheric prose has had an indelible effect on Western literature.
Born in Shanghai on November 15, 1930, James Graham Ballard wrote such legendary novels as The Drowned World and Cocaine Nights, but he is most well-known for Crash (1973) and his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), both of which were made into movies and became box office hits. The author of eighteen novels and twenty short story collections, including The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, which was published to great acclaim in 2009, Ballard has been praised as “the most original English writer of the last century” (Martin Amis, The Guardian) and “the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity” (Jason Cowley, The Observer). That his body of work has remained so fresh and shocking makes him a truly unique literary giant, one whose singular imagination will continue to captivate readers for generations to come.
Further praise for
The Drought
“The world, without rain, is drying up. Rivers are a trickle and we see the shriveling of species far from its sources and headed lemming-like for the sea. Time has burst its dams and seeps inside the race-structure with bizarre results. A strange and rather wonderful book full of haunting landscapes, phantasmagoria and disaster that clangs on the mind. An impressive novel at any level. Its obscurities and surrealist flourishes only heighten the dreamlike atmosphere.”
—Guardian (UK)
“The experience Mr. Ballard offers is mystical. . . . It is weird; it is grotesque; it is magnificently Gothic.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“By arranging a world drought to kill off the majority of people, [Ballard] brings his characters to a state of timeless, arid obsession with what is left of water and of their own selves. . . . [A] sensitive, baroque study in decadence.”
—Daily Telegraph
“Ballard paints staggering imaginary landscapes. A very impressive book by a deeply serious writer, the originality and power of whose vision can be felt.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“His fantasies are explored with a maniac’s logic and an artist’s sensibility . . . apocalyptic.”
—New Statesman
Copyright © 1965 by J. G. Ballard. Copyright renewed 1994 by J. G. Ballard.
First published as a Liveright paperback 2012
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
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Book design by Chris Welch
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ballard, J. G., 1930–2009.
The drought / J.G. Ballard. — Liveright pbk.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-87140-401-5 (pbk.)
1. Disasters—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A46D7 2012
823’.914—dc23
2011050939
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