J. G. Ballard The Burning World

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A few hundred yards from the shore, the hulks of two or three ships were
buried to their upper decks in the salt, their gray superstructures reflected
in the brine-pools. Small shacks of waste metal sheltered against their sides
and beneath the overhangs of the sterns. Outside their lean-to doors, smoke
drifted from the chimneys of crude stills.
Beside each of these dwellings, sometimes protected by a palisade of stakes,
was a small pond of brine. The banks had been laboriously beaten into a hard
margin, but the water seeping everywhere continually dissolved them.
Despite the to-and-fro movements of the inhabitants of the salt wastes, no
traces of their footsteps marked the surface, blurred within a few minutes by
the leaking water.
Only toward the sea, far across the dunes and creeks, was there any activity.
Shortly after dawn, as the tide extended slowly across the margins of the
coastal flats, the narrow creeks and channels began to fill with water.
The long salt-dunes darkened with the moisture seeping through them, and
sheets of open water spread outwards among the channels, carrying with them a
few fish and nautiloids. Reaching toward the firmer shore, the cold water
infiltrated among the saddles and culverts like the advance front of an
invading army, its approach almost unnoticed. A cold wind blew overhead and
dissolved in the dawn mists, lifting a few uneager gulls across the banks.
Almost a mile from the shore, the tide began to spill through a large breach
in one of the salt bars. The water sluiced outwards into a lagoon some three
hundred yards in diameter, inundating the shallow dunes in the center.
As it filled this artificial basin, it smoothed itself into a mirror of the
cloudless sky.
The margins of the lagoon had been raised a few feet above the level of the
surrounding saltflats, and the wet crystals formed a continuous bank almost
half a mile in length. As the water poured into the breach it carried
away the nearer sections of the mouth, and then, as the tide began to slacken,
swilled quietly away along the banks.
Overhead the gulls dived, picking at the hundreds of fish swimming below the
surface. In equilibrium, the water ceased to move, and for a moment the great
lagoon, and the long arms of brine seeping away northwards through the gray
light, were like immense sheets of polished ice.
At this moment, a shout crossed the air. A dozen men rose from behind the bank
surrounding the lagoon and with long paddles of whalebone began to shovel the
wet salt into the breach. Sliding up to their waists in the gray slush, they
worked furiOusly as the wet crystals drained backwards toward the sea. Their
arms and chests were strung with strips of rag and rubbber. They drove each
other on with sharp cries and shouts, their backs bent as they ladled the salt
up into the breach, trying to contain the water in the lagoon before the tide
turned.
Watching them from the edge of the bank was a tall, thinfaced man wearing a
sealskin cape over his left shoulder, his right hand on the shaft of his
double-bladed paddle. His dark face, from which all flesh had been drained
away, seemed to be made up of a series of flintlike points, the sharp
cheekbones and jaw almost piercing the hard skin. He gazed across the captured
water, his eyes counting the fish that gleamed and darted. Over his shoulder
he watched the tide recede, dissolving the banks as it moved along them. The
men in the breach began to shout to him as the wet salt poured across them,
sliding and falling as they struggled to hold back the bank. The man in the
cape ignored them, jerking the sealskin with his shoulder, his eyes on the
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falling table of water beyond the banks and the shining deck of the trapped
sea within the lagoon.
At the last moment, when the water seemed about to burst from the lagoon at a
dozen points, he raised his paddle and swung it vigorously at the opposite
bank toward the shore. A cry like a gull's scream tore from his throat. As he
raced off along the bank, leaving the exhausted men in the breach to drag
themselves from the salt, a dozen men emerged from behind the northern bank.
Their paddles whirling, they cut an opening in the wall twenty yards wide,
then waded out to their chests in the water and drove it through the breach.
Carried by its own weight, the water poured in a torrent into the surrounding
creeks, drawing the rest of the lagoon behind it. By the time the man in the
cape had reached this new breach, half the lagoon had drained, rushing out in
a deep channel. Like a demented canal, it poured onwards toward the shore,
washing away the smaller dunes in its path. It swerved to the northeast, the
foam boiling around the bend, then entered a narrow channel cut between two
dunes. Veering to the left, it set off again for the shore, the man in the
cape racing along beside it. Now and then he stopped to scan the course ahead,
where the artificial channel had been strengthened with banks of drier salt,
then turned and shouted to his men. They followed along the banks, their
paddles driving the water on as it raced past.
Abruptly, a section of the channel collapsed and water spilled away into the
adjacent creeks. Shouting as he ran, the leader raced through the shallows,
his two-bladed paddle hurling the water back into the main channel.
His men floundered after him, repairing the breach and driving the water back
up the slope.
Leaving them, the leader ran on ahead, where the others were paddling the main
body of water across the damp dunes. Although still carried along by its own
momentum, the channel had widened into a gliding oval lake, the hundreds of
fish tumbling over one another in the spinning currents. Every twenty yards,
as the lake poured along, a dozen fish would be left stranded behind, and two
older men bringing up the rear tossed them back into the receding wake.
Guiding it with their blades, the men took up their positions around the bows
of the lake. At their prow, only a few feet from the front wave, the man in
the cape piloted them across the varying contours. The lake coursed
smoothly in and out of the channels, cruising over the shallow pools in its
path. Half a mile from the shore it tilled along, still almost intact.
"Captain!" There was a shout from the two look-outs in the tail.
"Captain Jordan!"
Whirling in the damp salt, the leader raised his paddle and drove the oarsmen
back along the shores of the lake. Two hundred yards away, a group of five or
six men, heads lowered as they worked their short paddles, had broken down the
bank on the western side of the lake and were driving the water outwards
across the dunes.
Converging around both banks, the trappers raced toward them, their paddles
flashing at the water. The pirates ignored them and worked away at the water,
propelling it through the breach. Already a large pool some fifty yards wide
had formed among the dunes. As the main body of the lake moved away, they ran
down across the bank and began to paddle the pool away among the shallows to
the west.
Feet splashed after them through the brine, and the air was filled with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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