The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by J. G. Ballard Page B
Authors: J. G. Ballard
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surgery. They filled flour-bags with earth from the kitchen garden, and laid them in a makeshift wall across the drive.
As I could have told them, their oozing defence wall had soon been demolished. They laboured knee-deep in the mud, wallowing like the members of a female wrestling team, and I remembered their strong hands and felt almost proud of this great channel. I had left part of my blood in the river, and although we were enemies a special bond had formed between myself and this strange waterway.
The cot trembled against my back, the castors turning on the stone floor as the house shifted under the pressure of water. Within a few weeks, unless the river abated, it would be swept away, and already Nora Warrender had conceded to Captain Kagwa that she would have to evacuate the breeding station. Hidden tides rolled below the smooth surface of the river, taking their beat from a different pendulum whose swing was as wide as the horizon. A faint shudder moved through the walls, and I saw a broad swell sidle across the river. On its brown back it carried a police patrol launch which it swept sideways on to a narrow sand-bank in midstream. After a change of helmsman the crew pushed themselves free with a flurry of oars and boathooks. On its starboard bow a second patrol boat was trying to cross the channel in a cloud of diesel smoke, drifting towards a clump of drowned oaks fifty yards from the bank, where a party of soldiers were constructing a small jetty.
As if aware of all this military activity, the river had smoothed its surface and withdrawn into itself, into those secret deeps where part of me had drowned. I could feel the water still flowing through my veins and was aware of those changes, in the realms of time and the senses, that the Mallory had imposed. I knew that my obsession with the river had led to the death of the Japanese photographer, and that her body lay in the cemetery behind the deserted Catholic mission, beside the oil-company workers and the former manager of the Toyota garage. Yet in my mind she and I still swam through that bright, gravel-filled stream. I wanted to immerse myself in the great rivers of the world, to be drawn down into their deeps. Already I guessed that it was not the Mallory that I had wanted to kill, but myself, and that this river which I had created was in fact trying to save me …
‘You’re dreaming too much, doctor. See what you’ve been doing with all this water …’
Poupée, the youngest of the African women, who had once been a hostess on the
Diana
, strode across the veranda on flat heels, her handsome hip striking a corner of the cot and jarring my neck. Ignoring me, she stepped on to the terrace, the water streaming around her bare feet. She picked up a willow branch washed on to the flagstones and ambled along in a jaunty way, as if to throw it into the channel, but then lashed viciously at the water below the veranda.
A child’s head emerged into view, hands raised against this fusillade of blows. Poupée flailed at her shoulders, knocking away the paddle. She bent down and seized the side of the coracle and tried to overturn the craft, working herself into a fury at the girl.
All this anger unsettled me, and I tried to climb from the cot. I saw the girl every afternoon, paddling across the river to inspect a new sand-bank raised by a shift in the current, hanging on to the branch of a half-submerged tree as she kept an eye on my convalescence. She spent the morning near the military camp at the airstrip, watching Professor Sanger’s television monitors and scrounging for scraps from the company of bored field engineers brought in by Kagwa to build a pontoon bridge. The attempt had proved another fiasco – the river had doubled in width during the week which the engineers had taken to assemble the bridge. A single surge in the current swept away the metal pontoons and scattered them far across Lake Kotto.
Clearly pleased by this, the girl paddled
As I could have told them, their oozing defence wall had soon been demolished. They laboured knee-deep in the mud, wallowing like the members of a female wrestling team, and I remembered their strong hands and felt almost proud of this great channel. I had left part of my blood in the river, and although we were enemies a special bond had formed between myself and this strange waterway.
The cot trembled against my back, the castors turning on the stone floor as the house shifted under the pressure of water. Within a few weeks, unless the river abated, it would be swept away, and already Nora Warrender had conceded to Captain Kagwa that she would have to evacuate the breeding station. Hidden tides rolled below the smooth surface of the river, taking their beat from a different pendulum whose swing was as wide as the horizon. A faint shudder moved through the walls, and I saw a broad swell sidle across the river. On its brown back it carried a police patrol launch which it swept sideways on to a narrow sand-bank in midstream. After a change of helmsman the crew pushed themselves free with a flurry of oars and boathooks. On its starboard bow a second patrol boat was trying to cross the channel in a cloud of diesel smoke, drifting towards a clump of drowned oaks fifty yards from the bank, where a party of soldiers were constructing a small jetty.
As if aware of all this military activity, the river had smoothed its surface and withdrawn into itself, into those secret deeps where part of me had drowned. I could feel the water still flowing through my veins and was aware of those changes, in the realms of time and the senses, that the Mallory had imposed. I knew that my obsession with the river had led to the death of the Japanese photographer, and that her body lay in the cemetery behind the deserted Catholic mission, beside the oil-company workers and the former manager of the Toyota garage. Yet in my mind she and I still swam through that bright, gravel-filled stream. I wanted to immerse myself in the great rivers of the world, to be drawn down into their deeps. Already I guessed that it was not the Mallory that I had wanted to kill, but myself, and that this river which I had created was in fact trying to save me …
‘You’re dreaming too much, doctor. See what you’ve been doing with all this water …’
Poupée, the youngest of the African women, who had once been a hostess on the
Diana
, strode across the veranda on flat heels, her handsome hip striking a corner of the cot and jarring my neck. Ignoring me, she stepped on to the terrace, the water streaming around her bare feet. She picked up a willow branch washed on to the flagstones and ambled along in a jaunty way, as if to throw it into the channel, but then lashed viciously at the water below the veranda.
A child’s head emerged into view, hands raised against this fusillade of blows. Poupée flailed at her shoulders, knocking away the paddle. She bent down and seized the side of the coracle and tried to overturn the craft, working herself into a fury at the girl.
All this anger unsettled me, and I tried to climb from the cot. I saw the girl every afternoon, paddling across the river to inspect a new sand-bank raised by a shift in the current, hanging on to the branch of a half-submerged tree as she kept an eye on my convalescence. She spent the morning near the military camp at the airstrip, watching Professor Sanger’s television monitors and scrounging for scraps from the company of bored field engineers brought in by Kagwa to build a pontoon bridge. The attempt had proved another fiasco – the river had doubled in width during the week which the engineers had taken to assemble the bridge. A single surge in the current swept away the metal pontoons and scattered them far across Lake Kotto.
Clearly pleased by this, the girl paddled
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