The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by J. G. Ballard Page A

below the terrace, but it was clear that they did not regard me as a wounded pasha being lovingly restored to health. Three pairs of strong hands changed my sheets and dressings with the same briskness they used when pounding cassava in the kitchen yard. But for Mrs Warrender, I was sure that Fanny and Louise and Poupée would have wheeled the cot on to the terrace and tipped their unwelcome guest into the nearest whirlpool. However, I was content to watch these handsome women bathing in the river, and put up with their ill-humour, only puzzled why Nora Warrender had accepted me at the breeding station.
    I had been rescued from the tumbling logs by two of Kagwa’s soldiers, and pulled half-drowned on to the river bank. The following day the body of Miss Matsuoka was washed ashore on the beach below the tobacco warehouse, although it was a week later that I learned of her death. With a fractured vertebra in my neck, a bruised liver and spleen, I had been left in my trailer at the clinic, but rapidly slipped into shock before being moved to a disused cell at the police barracks. For three days Kagwa had gazed at me with expressions that ranged from boredom to concern, as the reflection of Sanger’s video played on the ceiling above his head. At last he decided to send me by truck to the provincial capital, a journey over sabotaged bridges and cratered roads that would have ruptured my spleen and killed me within hours.
    Then, as I was being lifted over the tail-gate of one of the trucks, I was rescued by Nora Warrender. She and her three women trundled me back to the breeding station on the same wooden cart which I had forbidden them to use as a water-carrier. From then on a diet of cassava, the sight of soft arms and hard hands, and the sounds and smell of the river set me on the mend.
    Above all, it was the river, which had once tried to take my life, that now revived me. In the weeks that I spent on the veranda I watched it flow past the grounds of the breeding station. It was now an immense brown current two hundred yards wide, filling the entire valley beside the airstrip, which the waters had swept away since the fiasco of my attempt to smother them. Ten feet deep at its centre, the river emerged from a wide rent in the forest two miles to the north of Port-la-Nouvelle. Through the canyon of red earth which the current had cut between the trees, I could see its upper reaches winding across the open savanna as it emerged from the Chad and Sudan borderlands. At night I watched its silver back through the darkness, crossing the horizon like the traffic stream of a continental highway.
    The speed of the river’s growth had overwhelmed Lake Kotto, which was now an expanse of deep brown water thirty miles in length, teeming with the fish and small snakes that had emerged from the meanders of the Kotto River at its southern end, and furnished with its own micro-climate. Already the first clouds had formed above the lake, and there were hints of rain. An entire landscape was being remade. During my first week the women had walked the full length of the estate in order to fill their water pails from the slippery bank, but the river had soon shortened their journey. The strong brown tide, seething through the debris of toppled trees lying in midstream, quickly overran the brick wall beside the gates, then swept up the drive and demolished the fence of the kitchen garden. Within the second week, the water had crossed the weed-grown lawn to the steps of the terrace, as if to seek me out and remind me how much it had grown since my attempt to destroy it.
    The stone veranda was now a jetty across which waves would often break, depositing dead rats, empty aftershave bottles and drenched copies of
Paris-Match
. The tide swirled around the house and in twenty-four hours swept away the brick cages of the breeding station. Led by Mrs Warrender, the women had moved the few remaining macaques and marmosets into the smaller cages in the