Читать книгу The Crystal World - J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester, Robert MacFarlane - Страница 7

ABOVE all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary. After many delays, the small passenger steamer was at last approaching the line of jetties, but although it was ten o’clock the surface of the water was still grey and sluggish, leaching away the sombre tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks.

At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilion of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle.

This pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light, Dr. Sanders had noticed during his long wait at the rail of the passenger-deck. For two hours the steamer had sat out in the centre of the estuary, now and then blowing its whistle at the shore in a half-hearted way. But for the vague sense of uncertainty induced by the darkness over the river, the few passengers would have been driven mad with annoyance. Apart from a French military landing-craft there seemed to be no other vessels of any size berthed along the jetties. As he watched the shore, Sanders was almost certain that the steamer was being deliberately held off, though the reason was hard to see. The steamer was the regular packet-boat from Libreville, with its weekly cargo of mail, brandy and automobile spare parts, not to be postponed for more than a moment by anything less than an outbreak of the plague.

Politically, this isolated corner of the Cameroon Republic was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal, fifty miles up the Matarre River. Despite the presence of the landing-craft – a French military mission supervised the training of the local troops – life in the nondescript port at the river-mouth seemed entirely normal. Watched by a group of children, a jeep was at that moment being unloaded. People wandered along the wharves and through the arcades in the main street, and a few outriggers loaded with jars of crude palm-oil drifted past on the dark water towards the native market to the west of the port.

Nevertheless, the sense of unease persisted. Puzzled by the dim light, Sanders turned his attention to the inshore areas, following the river as it made a slow clockwise turn to the south-east. Here and there a break in the forest canopy marked the progress of a road, but otherwise the jungle stretched in a flat olive-green mantle towards the inland hills. Usually the forest roof would have been bleached to a pale yellow by the sun, but even five miles inland Dr. Sanders could see the dark green arbours towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, sombre and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.

Someone drummed impatiently at the rail, sending a stir down its length, and the half-dozen passengers on either side of Dr. Sanders shuffled and muttered to one another, glancing up at the wheelhouse, where the captain gazed absently at the jetty, apparently unperturbed by the delay.

Sanders turned to Father Balthus, who was standing a few feet away on his left. ‘The light – have you noticed it? Is there an eclipse expected? The sun seems unable to make up its mind.’

The priest was smoking steadily, his long fingers drawing the cigarette half an inch from his mouth after each inhalation. Like Sanders he was gazing, not at the harbour, but at the forest slopes far inland. In the dull light his thin scholar’s face seemed tired and fleshless. During the three-day journey from Libreville he had kept to himself, evidently distracted by some private matter, and only began to talk to his table companion when he learned of Sanders’s post at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital. Sanders gathered that he was returning to his parish at Mont Royal after a sabbatical month, but there seemed something a little too plausible about this explanation, which he repeated several times in the same automatic phrasing, unlike his usual hesitant stutter. However, Sanders was well aware of the dangers of imputing his own ambiguous motives for coming to Port Matarre to those around him.

Even so, at first Dr. Sanders had suspected that Father Balthus might not be a priest at all. The self-immersed eyes and pale neurasthenic hands bore all the signatures of the impostor, perhaps an expelled novice still hoping to find some kind of salvation within a borrowed soutane. However, Father Balthus was entirely genuine, whatever that term meant and whatever its limits. The first officer, the steward and several of the passengers recognized him, complimented him on his return and generally seemed to accept his isolated manner.

‘An eclipse?’ Father Balthus flicked his cigarette stub into the dark water below. The steamer was now over-running its own wake, and the veins of foam sank down through the deeps like threads of luminous spittle. ‘I think not, Doctor. Surely the maximum duration would be eight minutes?’

In the sudden flares of light over the water, reflected off the sharp points of his cheeks and jaw, a harder profile for a moment showed itself. Conscious of Sanders’s critical eye, Father Balthus added as an afterthought, to reassure the doctor: ‘The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral – do you know Bocklin’s painting, “Island of the Dead”, where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea? It’s in the Kunstmuseum in my native Basel—’ He broke off as the steamer’s engines drummed into life. ‘We’re moving. At last.’

‘Thank God for that. You should have warned me, Balthus.’

Sanders took his cigarette case from his pocket, but the priest had already palmed a fresh cigarette into his cupped hand with the deftness of a conjurer. Balthus pointed with it to the jetty, where a substantial reception committee of gendarmerie and customs officials was waiting for the steamer. ‘Now, what nonsense is this?’

Sanders watched the shore. Whatever Balthus’s private difficulties, the priest’s lack of charity irritated him. Half to himself, Sanders said drily: ‘Perhaps there’s a question of credentials.’

‘Not mine, Doctor.’ Father Balthus turned a sharp downward glance upon Sanders. ‘And I’m certain your own are in order.’

The other passengers were leaving the rail and going below to collect their baggage. With a smile at Balthus, Sanders excused himself and began to make his way down to his cabin. Dismissing the priest from his mind – within half an hour they would have disappeared their separate ways into the forest and whatever awaited them there – Sanders felt in his pocket for his passport, reminding himself not to leave it in his cabin. The desire to travel incognito, with all its advantages, might well reveal itself in some unexpected way.

As Sanders reached the companion-way behind the funnel-house he could see down into the after-deck, where the steerage passengers were pulling together their bundles and cheap suitcases. In the centre of the deck, partly swathed in a canvas awning, was a large red-and-yellow-hulled speed-boat, part of the cargo consignment for Port Matarre.

Taking his ease on the wide bench-seat behind the steering-helm, one arm resting on the raked glass and chromium windshield, was a small, slimly built man of about forty, wearing a white tropical suit that emphasized the rim of dark beard which framed his face. His black hair was brushed down over his bony forehead, and with his small eyes gave him a taut and watchful appearance. This man, Ventress – his name was about all Sanders had managed to learn about him – was the doctor’s cabin-mate. During the journey from Libreville he had roamed about the steamer like an impatient tiger, arguing with the steerage passengers and crew, his moods switching from a kind of ironic humour to sullen disinterest, when he would sit alone in the cabin, gazing out through the port-hole at the small disc of empty sky.

Sanders had made one or two attempts to talk to him, but most of the time Ventress ignored him, keeping to himself whatever reasons he had for coming to Port Matarre. However, the doctor was well inured by now to being avoided by those around him. Shortly before they embarked, a slight contretemps, more embarrassing to his fellow passengers than to himself, had arisen over the choice of a cabin-mate for Sanders. His fame having preceded him (what was fame to the world at large still remained notoriety on the personal level, Sanders reflected, and no doubt the reverse was true), no one could be found to share a cabin with the assistant director of the Fort Isabelle leper hospital.

At this point Ventress had stepped forward. Knocking on Sanders’s door, suitcase in hand, he had nodded at the doctor and asked simply:

‘Is it contagious?’

After a pause to examine this white-suited figure with his bearded skull-like face – something about him reminded Sanders that the world was not without those who, for their own reasons, wished to catch the disease – Sanders said: ‘The disease is contagious, as you ask, yes, but years of exposure and contact are necessary for its transmission. The period of incubation may be twenty or thirty years.’

‘Like death. Good.’ With a gleam of a smile, Ventress stepped into the cabin. He extended a bony hand, and clasped Sanders’s firmly, his strong fingers feeling for the doctor’s grip. ‘What our timorous fellow passengers fail to realize, Doctor, is that outside your colony there is merely another larger one.’

Later, as he looked down at Ventress lounging in the speed-boat on the after-deck, Dr. Sanders pondered on this cryptic introduction. The faltering light still hung over the estuary, but Ventress’s white suit seemed to focus all its intense hidden brilliancy, just as Father Balthus’s clerical garb had reflected the darker tones. The steerage passengers milled around the speed-boat, but Ventress appeared to be uninterested in them, or in the approaching jetty with its waiting throng of customs and police. Instead, he was looking out across the deserted starboard rail into the mouth of the river, and at the distant forest stretching away into the haze. His small eyes were half-closed, as if he were deliberately merging the view in front of him with some inner landscape within his mind.

Sanders had seen little of Ventress during the voyage up-coast, but one evening in the cabin, searching through the wrong suitcase in the dark, he had felt the butt of a heavy-calibre automatic pistol wrapped in the harness of a shoulder holster. The presence of this weapon had immediately resolved some of the enigmas that surrounded Ventress’s small brittle figure.

‘Doctor …’ Ventress called up to him, waving one hand lightly, as if reminding Sanders that he was day-dreaming. ‘A drink, Sanders, before the bar closes?’ Dr. Sanders began to refuse, but Ventress had half-turned his shoulder, veering off on another tack. ‘Look for the sun, Doctor, it’s there. You can’t walk through these forests with your head between your heels.’

‘I shan’t try to. Are you going ashore?’

‘Of course. There’s no hurry here, Doctor. This is a landscape without time.’

Leaving him, Sanders made his way to the cabin. The three suitcases, Ventress’s expensive one in polished crocodile skin, and his own scuffed workaday bags, were already packed and waiting beside the door. Sanders took off his jacket, and then bathed his hands in the wash-basin, drying them lightly in the hope that the soap’s pungent scent might make him seem less of a pariah to the examining officials.

However, Sanders realized only too well that by now, after fifteen years in Africa, ten of them at the Fort Isabelle hospital, any chance he may once have had of altering the outward aspect of himself, his image to the world at large, had long since gone. The work-stained cotton suit slightly too small for his broad shoulders, the striped blue shirt and black tie, the strong head with its grey uncut hair and trace of beard – all these were the involuntary signatures of the physician to the lepers, as unmistakable as Sanders’s own scarred but firm mouth and critical eye.

Opening the passport, Sanders compared the photograph taken eight years earlier with the reflection in the mirror. At a glance, the two men seemed barely recognizable – the first, with his straight, earnest face, his patent moral commitment to the lepers, all too obviously on top of his work at the hospital, looked more like the dedicated younger brother of the other, some remote and rather idiosyncratic country doctor.

Sanders looked down at his faded jacket and calloused hands, knowing how misleading this impression was, and how much better he understood, if not his present motives, at least those of his younger self, and the real reasons that had sent him to Fort Isabelle. Reminded by the birth date in the passport that he had now reached the age of forty, Sanders tried to visualize himself ten years ahead, but already the latent elements that had emerged in his face during the previous years seemed to have lost momentum. Ventress had referred to the Matarre forests as a landscape without time, and perhaps part of its appeal for Sanders was that here at last he might be free from the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past.

The steamer was now barely twenty feet from the jetty, and through the port-hole Dr. Sanders could see the khaki-clad legs of the reception party. From his pocket he took out a well thumbed envelope, and drew from it a letter written in pale-blue ink that had almost penetrated the soft tissue. Both envelope and letter were franked with a censor’s stamp, and panels which Sanders assumed contained the address had been cut out.

As the steamer bumped against the jetty, Sanders read through the letter for the last time on board.

Thursday, January 5th

My dear Edward,

At last we are here. The forest is the most beautiful in Africa, a house of jewels. I can barely find words to describe our wonder each morning as we look out across the slopes, still half-hidden by the mist but glistening like St Sophia, each bough a jewelled semi-dome. Indeed, Max says I am becoming excessively Byzantine – I wear my hair to my waist even at the clinic, and affect a melancholy expression, although in fact for the first time in many years my heart sings! Both of us wish you were here. The clinic is small, with about twenty patients. Fortunately the people of these forest slopes move through life with a kind of dream-like patience, and regard our work for them as more social than therapeutic. They walk through the dark forest with crowns of light on their heads.

Max sends his best wishes to you, as I do. We remember you often.

The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.

My love,

SUZANNE

As the metal heels of the boarding party rang out across the deck over his head, Sanders read again the last line of the letter. But for the unofficial but firm assurances he had been given by the prefecture in Libreville he would not have believed that Suzanne Clair and her husband had come to Port Matarre, so unlike the sombre light of the river and jungle were her descriptions of the forest near the clinic. Their exact whereabouts no one had been able to tell him, nor for that matter why a sudden censorship should have been imposed on mail leaving the province. When Sanders became too persistent he was reminded that the correspondence of people under a criminal charge was liable to censorship, but as far as Suzanne and Max Clair were concerned the suggestion was grotesque.

Thinking of the small, intelligent microbiologist and his wife, tall and dark-haired, with her high forehead and calm eyes, Dr. Sanders remembered their sudden departure from Fort Isabelle three months earlier. Sanders’s affair with Suzanne had lasted for two years, kept going only by his inability to resolve it in any way. This failure to commit himself fully to her made it plain that she had become the focus of all his uncertainties at Fort Isabelle. For some time he had suspected that his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented, than he imagined. Suzanne’s sombre beauty had become identified in his mind with this dark side of the psyche, and their affair was an attempt to come to terms with himself and his own ambiguous motives.

On second thoughts, Sanders recognized that a far more sinister explanation for their departure from the hospital was at hand. When Suzanne’s letter arrived with its strange and ecstatic vision of the forest – in maculoanaesthetic leprosy there was an involvement of nervous tissue – he had decided to follow them. Forgoing his inquiries about the censored letter, in order not to warn Suzanne of his arrival, he took a month’s leave from the hospital and set off for Port Matarre.

From Suzanne’s description of the forest slopes he guessed the clinic to be somewhere near Mont Royal, possibly attached to one of the French-owned mining settlements, with their over-zealous security men. However, the activity on the jetty outside – there were half a dozen soldiers moving about near a parked staff car – indicated that something more was afoot.

As he began to fold Suzanne’s letter, smoothing the petal-like tissue, the cabin door opened sharply, jarring his elbow. With an apology Ventress stepped in, nodding to Sanders.

‘I beg your pardon, Doctor. My bag.’ He added: ‘The customs people are here.’

Annoyed to be caught reading the letter again by Ventress, Sanders stuffed envelope and letter into his pocket. For once Ventress appeared not to notice this. His hand rested on the handle of his suitcase, one ear cocked to listen to the sounds from the deck above. No doubt he was wondering what to do with the pistol. A thorough baggage search was the last thing any of them had expected.

Deciding to leave Ventress alone so that he could slip the weapon through the port-hole, Sanders picked up his two suitcases.

‘Well, goodbye, Doctor.’ Ventress was smiling, his face even more skull-like behind the beard. He held the door open. ‘It’s been very interesting, a great pleasure to share a cabin with you.’

Dr. Sanders nodded. ‘And perhaps something of a challenge too, M. Ventress? I hope all your victories come as easily.’

‘Touché, Doctor!’ Ventress saluted him, then waved as Sanders made his way down the corridor. ‘But I gladly leave you with the last laugh – the old man with the scythe, eh?’

Without looking back, Sanders climbed the companion-way to the saloon, aware of Ventress watching him from the door of the cabin. The other passengers were sitting in the chairs by the bar, Father Balthus among them, as a prolonged harangue took place between the first officer, two customs officials and a police sergeant. They were consulting the passenger list, scrutinizing everyone in turn as if searching for some missing passenger.

As Sanders lowered his two bags to the floor he caught the phrase: ‘No journalists allowed …’ and then one of the customs men beckoned him over.

‘Dr. Sanders?’ he asked, putting a particular emphasis into the name as if he half hoped it might be an alias. ‘From Libreville University …?’ He lowered his voice. ‘The Physics Department …? May I see your papers?’

Sanders pulled out his passport. A few feet to his left Father Balthus was watching him with a sharp eye. ‘My name is Sanders, of the Fort Isabelle leproserie.’

After apologizing for their mistake, the customs men glanced at each other and then cleared Sanders, chalking up his suitcases without bothering to open them. A few moments later he walked down the gangway. On the jetty the native soldiers lounged around the staff car. The rear seat remained vacant, presumably for the missing physicist from Libreville University.

As he handed his suitcases to a porter with ‘Hotel Europe’ stencilled across his peaked cap, Dr. Sanders noticed that a far more thorough inspection was being made of the baggage of those leaving Port Matarre. A group of thirty to forty steerage passengers was herded together at the far end of the jetty, and the police and customs men were searching them one by one. Most of the natives carried bed-rolls with them, and the police were unwinding these and squeezing the padding.

By contrast with this activity, the town was nearly deserted. The arcades on either side of the main street were empty, and the windows of the Hotel Europe hung listlessly in the dark air, the narrow shutters like coffin lids. Here, in the centre of the town, the faded white façades made the sombre light of the jungle seem even more pervasive. Looking back at the river, as it turned like an immense snake into the forest, Sanders felt that it had sucked away all but a bare residue of life.

As he followed the porter up the steps into the hotel he saw the black-robed figure of Father Balthus farther down the arcade. The priest was walking swiftly, his small travelling bag held in one hand. He turned between two columns, then crossed the road and disappeared among the shadows in the arcade facing the hotel. At intervals Sanders saw him again, his dark figure lit by the sunlight, the white columns of the arcade framing him like the shutter of a defective stroboscopic device. Then, for no apparent reason, he crossed the street again, the skirt of his black robe whipping the dust around his heels. His high face passed Sanders without turning, like the pale, half-remembered profile of someone glimpsed in a nightmare.

Sanders pointed after him. ‘Where’s he off to?’ he asked the porter. ‘The priest – he was on the steamer with me.’

‘To the seminary. The Jesuits are still there.’

‘Still? – what do you mean?’

Sanders moved towards the swing doors, but at that moment a dark-haired young Frenchwoman stepped out. As her face was reflected in the moving panes, Sanders had a sudden glimpse of Suzanne Clair. Although the young woman was in her early twenties, at least ten years younger than Suzanne, she had the same wide hips and sauntering stride, the same observant grey eyes. As she passed Sanders she murmured ‘Pardon …’ Then, returning his stare with a faint smile, she set off in the direction of an army lorry that was reversing down a side road. Sanders watched her go. Her trim white suit and metropolitan chic seemed out of place in the dingy light of Port Matarre.

‘What’s going on here?’ Sanders said. ‘Have they found a new diamond field?’

The explanation seemed to make sense of the censorship and the customs search, but something about the porter’s studied shrug made him doubt it. Besides, the references in Suzanne’s letter to diamonds and sapphires would have been construed by the censor as an open invitation to join in the harvest.

The clerk at the reception desk was equally evasive. To Sander’s annoyance the clerk insisted on showing him the weekly tariff, despite his assurances that he would be setting off for Mont Royal the following day.

‘Doctor, you understand there is no boat, the service has been suspended. It will be cheaper for you if I charge you by the weekly tariff. But as you wish.’

‘All right.’ Sanders signed the register. As a precaution he gave as his address the University at Libreville. He had lectured several times at the medical school, and mail would be forwarded from there to Fort Isabelle. The deception might be useful at a later date.

‘What about the railway?’ he asked the clerk. ‘Or the bus service? There must be some transport to Mont Royal.’

‘There’s no railway.’ The clerk snapped his fingers. ‘Diamonds, you know, Doctor, not difficult to transport. Perhaps you can make inquiries about the bus.’

Sanders studied the man’s thin, olive-skinned face. His liquid eyes roved around the doctor’s suitcases and then out through the arcade to the forest canopy over-topping the roofs across the street. He seemed to be waiting for something to appear.

Sanders put away his pen. ‘Tell me, why is it so dark in Port Matarre? It’s not overcast, and yet one can hardly see the sun.’

The clerk shook his head. When he spoke he seemed to be talking more to himself than to Sanders. ‘It’s not dark, Doctor, it’s the leaves. They’re taking minerals from the ground, it makes everything look dark all the time.’

This notion seemed to contain an element of truth. From the windows of his room overlooking the arcades Sanders gazed out at the forest. The huge trees surrounded the port as if trying to crowd it back into the river. In the street the shadows were of the usual density, following at the heels of the few people who ventured out through the arcades, but the forest was without contrast of any kind. The leaves exposed to the sunlight were as dark as those below, almost as if the entire forest were draining all light from the sun in the same way that the river had emptied the town of its life and movement. The blackness of the canopy, the olive hues of the flat leaves, gave the forest a sombre heaviness emphasized by the motes of light that flickered within its aerial galleries.

Preoccupied, Sanders almost failed to hear the knock on his door. He opened it to find Ventress standing in the corridor. His white-suited figure and sharp skull seemed to personify the bone-like colours of the deserted town.

‘What is it?’

Ventress stepped forward. He held an envelope in his hand. ‘I found this in the cabin after you had gone, Doctor. I thought I should return it to you.’

Dr. Sanders took the envelope, feeling in his pocket for Suzanne’s letter. In his hurry he had evidently let it slip to the floor. He pushed the letter into the envelope, beckoning Ventress into the room. Thank you, I didn’t realize …’

Ventress glanced around the room. Since disembarking from the steamer he had changed noticeably. The laconic and off-hand manner had given way to a marked restlessness. His compact figure, held together as if all the muscles were opposing each other, contained an intense nervous energy that Sanders found almost uncomfortable. His eyes roved about, searching the shabby alcoves for some hidden perspective.

‘May I take something in return, Doctor?’ Before Sanders could answer, Ventress had stepped over to the larger of the two suitcases on the slatted stand beside the wardrobe. With a brief nod, he released the catches and raised the lid. From beneath the folded dressing-gown he withdrew his automatic pistol wrapped in its shoulder-holster harness. Before Sanders could protest he had slipped it away inside his jacket.

‘What the devil—?’ Sanders crossed the room. He pulled the lid of the suitcase into place. ‘You’ve got a bloody nerve …!’

Ventress gave him a weak smile, then started to walk past Sanders to the door. Annoyed, Sanders caught his arm and pulled the man almost off his feet. Ventress’s face shut like a trap. With an agile swerve he feinted sideways on his small feet and wrenched himself away from Sanders.

As Sanders came forward again Ventress seemed to debate whether to use his pistol, and then raised a hand to pacify the doctor. ‘Sanders, I apologize, of course. But there was no other way. Try to understand me, it was those idiots on board I was taking advantage of—’

‘Rubbish! You were taking advantage of me!’

Ventress shook his head vigorously. ‘You’re wrong, Sanders. I assure you, I have no prejudice against your particular calling … far from it. Believe me, Doctor, I understand you, your whole—’

‘All right!’ Sanders pulled back the door. ‘Now get out!’

Ventress, however, stood his ground. He seemed to be trying to bring himself to say something, as if aware that he had exposed some private weakness of Sanders’s and was doing his best to repair it. Then he gave a small shrug and left the room, bored by the doctor’s irritation.

After he had gone Sanders sat down in the arm-chair with his back to the window. Ventress’s ruse had annoyed him, not merely because of the assumption that the customs men would avoid contaminating themselves by touching his baggage. The smuggling of the pistol unknown to himself seemed to symbolize, in sexual terms as well, all his hidden motives for coming to Port Matarre in quest of Suzanne Clair. That Ventress, with his skeletal face and white suit, should have exposed his awareness of these still concealed motives was all the more irritating.

He ate an early lunch in the hotel restaurant. The tables were almost deserted, and the only other guest was the dark-haired young Frenchwoman who sat by herself, writing into a dictation pad beside her salad. Now and then she glanced at Sanders, who was struck once again by her marked resemblance to Suzanne Clair. Perhaps because of her raven hair, or the unusual light in Port Matarre, her smooth face seemed paler in tone than Sanders remembered Suzanne’s, as if the two women were cousins separated by some darker blood on Suzanne’s side. As he looked at the girl he could almost see Suzanne beside her, reflected within some half-screened mirror in his mind.

When she left the table she nodded to Sanders, picked up her pad and went out into the street, pausing in the lobby on the way.

After lunch, Sanders began his search for some form of transport to take him to Mont Royal. As the desk-clerk had stated, there was no railway to the mining town. A bus service ran twice daily, but for some reason had been discontinued. At the depot, near the barracks on the eastern outskirts of the town, Dr. Sanders found the booking-office closed. The time-tables peeled off the notice-boards in the sunlight, and a few natives slept on the benches in the shade. After ten minutes a ticket-collector wandered in with a broom, sucking on a piece of sugar-cane. He shrugged when Sanders asked him when the service would be resumed.

‘Perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, sir. Who can tell? The bridge is down.’

‘Where’s this?’

‘Where? Myanga, ten kilometres from Mont Royal. Steep ravine, the bridge just slid away. Risky there, sir.’

Sanders pointed to the compound of the military barracks, where half a dozen trucks were being loaded with supplies. Bales of barbed wire were stacked on the ground to one side, next to some sections of metal fencing. ‘They seem busy enough. How are they going to get through?’

‘They, sir, are repairing the bridge.’

‘With barbed wire?’ Sanders shook his head, tired of this evasiveness. ‘What exactly is going on up there? At Mont Royal?’

The ticket-collector sucked his sugar-cane. ‘Going on?’ he repeated dreamily. ‘Nothing’s going on, sir.’

Sanders strolled away, pausing by the barrack gates until the sentry gestured him on. Across the road the dark tiers of the forest canopy rose high into the air like an immense wave ready to fall across the empty town. Well over a hundred feet above his head, the great boughs hung like half-furled wings, the trunks leaning towards him. Sanders was tempted to cross the road and approach the forest, but there was something minatory and oppressive about its silence. He turned and made his way back to the hotel.

An hour later, after several fruitless inquiries, he called at the police prefecture near the harbour. The activity by the steamer had subsided, and most of the passengers were aboard. The speed-boat was being swung out on a davit over the jetty.

Coming straight to the point, Dr. Sanders showed Suzanne’s letter to the African charge-captain. ‘Perhaps you could explain, Captain, why it was necessary to delete their address? These are close friends of mine and I wish to spend a fortnight’s holiday with them. Now I find that there’s no means of getting to Mont Royal, and an atmosphere of mystery surrounds the whole place.’

The captain nodded, pondering over the letter on his desk. Occasionally he prodded the tissue with a steel ruler, as if he were examining the pressed petals of some rare and perhaps poisonous blossom. ‘I understand, Doctor. It’s difficult for you.’

‘But why is the censorship in force at all?’ Sanders pressed. ‘Is there some sort of political disturbance? Has a rebel group captured the mines? I’m naturally concerned for the well-being of Dr. and Madame Clair.’

The captain shook his head. ‘I assure you, Doctor, there is no political trouble at Mont Royal – in fact, there is hardly anyone there at all. Most of the workers have left.’

‘Why? I’ve noticed that here. The town’s empty.’

The captain stood up and went over to the window. He pointed to the dark fringe of the jungle crowding over the roof-tops of the native quarter beyond the warehouses. ‘The forest, Doctor, do you see? It frightens them, it’s so black and heavy all the time.’ He went back to his desk and fiddled with the ruler. Sanders waited for him to make up his mind what to say. ‘In confidence, I can explain that there is a new kind of plant disease beginning in the forest near Mont Royal—’

‘What do you mean?’ Sanders cut in. ‘A virus disease, like tobacco mosaic?’

‘Yes, that’s it …’ The captain nodded encouragingly, although he seemed to have little idea what he was talking about. However, he kept a quiet eye on the rim of jungle in the window. ‘Anyway, it’s not poisonous, but we have to take precautions. Some experts will look at the forest, send samples to Libreville, you understand, it takes time …’ He handed back Suzanne’s letter. ‘I will find out your friends’ address, you come back in another day. All right?’

‘Will I be able to go to Mont Royal?’ Sanders asked. ‘The army hasn’t closed off the area?’

‘No …’ the captain insisted. ‘You are quite free.’ He gestured with his hands, enclosing little parcels of air. ‘Just small areas, you see. It’s not dangerous, your friends are all right. We don’t want people rushing there, trying to make trouble.’

At the door, Sanders asked: ‘How long has this been going on?’ He pointed to the window. ‘The forest is very dark here.’

The captain scratched his forehead. For a moment he looked tired and withdrawn. ‘About one year. Longer, perhaps. At first no one bothered …’