moments of a universal emptiness and fear.
The fantasy of the fourth day dawned – the fourth day of creation – since they had all set out from Mariella. From his godlike perch he discerned the image of the musing boat in which they had come. They had found a cave the previous nightfall and they had stretched their limbs until morning.
It was a close fit lying there – too close for ease and normal sleep – and everyone stirred when Vigilance moved. They could not help turning their dull eye upon the vessel they had managed to anchor at their ghostly side in the stream and it was as if they sought a long lost friend and soul. Everyone stirred and woke, all except Cameron. He was dead with a stab wound in his back. In their enormous fatigue the night and day before they had kept him at their side as they would an idol and companion.
They hurriedly abandoned him in the cliff, turning the room in which they had slept into his grave alone, and were soon travelling fast in the river when Jennings deliberately shut off the engine and the boat swung in the stream, lodging its bow in a fresh hollow of stone.
“Ah got an idea,” he announced. He spoke with hopeless obstinacy. His face was no longer the same as before: it had changed into a dream, the dream of an unnatural unshaven dead man’s beard and growth. The cheeks were hollow as the caves in the wall and the blackness of his skin had grown lighter and greyer into an older drier mask and presence lying within. The lust and soul of rebellion had been killed abruptly in a manner that left him suddenly empty. He felt now only the loss of an opposition and true adversary within himself. His eyes had lost all rude fire and in their blindness and loneliness they spun deeper than nature’s darkness and light. It was the strangest abstract face Vigilance had ever seen – the abstraction of a shell afloat over a propeller and a machine with the consistency of a duty rather than of a desire and a spirit. Indeed it reminded him of a coconut shell he had once observed beached against the river; someone had brought it a long way from its natural grave on the seacoast and deposited it here dry and desiccated and foreign in the midst of the river’s stone and vegetation. He had held the husk in his hand and it had given a dry brittle harp’s cry of relief, mummified and mystical and Egyptian, melting at the same time into an inner dust that crumbled to an ancient door of life.
It was the oldest soulless expression of self-surrender he had ever seen – the dutiful mask of resurrection and the engineer of death.
“Ah got an idea,” said Jennings again. His voice was meaningless. “Let we look for the hole where the wild tapir pass through the cliff. Was when? Yesterday? Or day before yesterday? Let we pass through the same door to the land … This is dead man river … We can’t stay here any more….”
DaSilva shook his head. “Ah dream you done dead already Jennings,” he tried to crack a joke. “And the hole close up for good for you a million year ago. You is a prehistoric animal.” His chest brayed foolishly. “Where Cameron?” he asked.
No one replied.
“Where Cameron?” he asked again. A sickly smile that reflected everyone’s condemnation wrinkled his lips. “Ah dream Cameron dead too,” he confessed, “and yet he swim and float next to me trying to hug and kiss me. Is he pull me down. Is a sight to feel a drowning man clinging to you,” he pleaded and confessed. “I had to stab at he to mek he loose me. And still he hold on. Don’t mind how ugly you find it …” he shuddered and hiccoughed in a sentimental bloated fashion of goodwill … “is still the dream of love floating everywhere … I forgive he … even if he mek me dream bad that a bewitched whore killed us both … grabbed hold us in the water … pulled us down …” He spoke with the blind innocence of a clown floundering in the blank of memory in the shattering of his
The fantasy of the fourth day dawned – the fourth day of creation – since they had all set out from Mariella. From his godlike perch he discerned the image of the musing boat in which they had come. They had found a cave the previous nightfall and they had stretched their limbs until morning.
It was a close fit lying there – too close for ease and normal sleep – and everyone stirred when Vigilance moved. They could not help turning their dull eye upon the vessel they had managed to anchor at their ghostly side in the stream and it was as if they sought a long lost friend and soul. Everyone stirred and woke, all except Cameron. He was dead with a stab wound in his back. In their enormous fatigue the night and day before they had kept him at their side as they would an idol and companion.
They hurriedly abandoned him in the cliff, turning the room in which they had slept into his grave alone, and were soon travelling fast in the river when Jennings deliberately shut off the engine and the boat swung in the stream, lodging its bow in a fresh hollow of stone.
“Ah got an idea,” he announced. He spoke with hopeless obstinacy. His face was no longer the same as before: it had changed into a dream, the dream of an unnatural unshaven dead man’s beard and growth. The cheeks were hollow as the caves in the wall and the blackness of his skin had grown lighter and greyer into an older drier mask and presence lying within. The lust and soul of rebellion had been killed abruptly in a manner that left him suddenly empty. He felt now only the loss of an opposition and true adversary within himself. His eyes had lost all rude fire and in their blindness and loneliness they spun deeper than nature’s darkness and light. It was the strangest abstract face Vigilance had ever seen – the abstraction of a shell afloat over a propeller and a machine with the consistency of a duty rather than of a desire and a spirit. Indeed it reminded him of a coconut shell he had once observed beached against the river; someone had brought it a long way from its natural grave on the seacoast and deposited it here dry and desiccated and foreign in the midst of the river’s stone and vegetation. He had held the husk in his hand and it had given a dry brittle harp’s cry of relief, mummified and mystical and Egyptian, melting at the same time into an inner dust that crumbled to an ancient door of life.
It was the oldest soulless expression of self-surrender he had ever seen – the dutiful mask of resurrection and the engineer of death.
“Ah got an idea,” said Jennings again. His voice was meaningless. “Let we look for the hole where the wild tapir pass through the cliff. Was when? Yesterday? Or day before yesterday? Let we pass through the same door to the land … This is dead man river … We can’t stay here any more….”
DaSilva shook his head. “Ah dream you done dead already Jennings,” he tried to crack a joke. “And the hole close up for good for you a million year ago. You is a prehistoric animal.” His chest brayed foolishly. “Where Cameron?” he asked.
No one replied.
“Where Cameron?” he asked again. A sickly smile that reflected everyone’s condemnation wrinkled his lips. “Ah dream Cameron dead too,” he confessed, “and yet he swim and float next to me trying to hug and kiss me. Is he pull me down. Is a sight to feel a drowning man clinging to you,” he pleaded and confessed. “I had to stab at he to mek he loose me. And still he hold on. Don’t mind how ugly you find it …” he shuddered and hiccoughed in a sentimental bloated fashion of goodwill … “is still the dream of love floating everywhere … I forgive he … even if he mek me dream bad that a bewitched whore killed us both … grabbed hold us in the water … pulled us down …” He spoke with the blind innocence of a clown floundering in the blank of memory in the shattering of his
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