The Complete Short Stories

The Delta at Sunset

Each evening, when the dense powdery dusk lay over the creeks and drained mud-basins of the delta, the snakes would come out on to the beaches. Half-asleep on the wicker stretcher-chair below the awning of his tent, Charles Gifford watched their sinuous forms coiling and uncoiling as they wound their way up the slopes. In the opaque blue light the dusk swept like a fading searchlight over the damp beaches, and the interlocked bodies shone with an almost phosphorescent brilliance.

The nearest creeks were three hundred yards from the camp, but for some reason the appearance of the snakes always coincided with Gifford’s recovery from his evening fever. As this receded, carrying with it the familiar diorama of reptilian phantoms, he would sit up in the stretcher-chair and find the snakes crawling across the beaches, almost as if they had materialized from his dreams. Involuntarily he would search the sand around the tent for any signs of their damp skins.

‘The strange thing is they always come out at the same time,’ Gifford said to the Indian head-boy who had emerged from the mess tent and was now covering him with a blanket. ‘One minute there’s nothing there, and the next thousands of them are swarming all over the mud.’

‘You not cold, sir?’ the Indian asked.

‘Look at them now, before the light goes. It’s really fantastic. There must be a sharply defined threshold — ‘ He tried to lift his pale, bearded face above the hillock formed by the surgical cradle over his foot, and snapped: ‘All right, all right!’

‘Doctor?’ The head-boy, a thirty-year-old Indian named Mechippe, continued to straighten the cradle, his limpid eyes, set in a face of veined and weathered teak, watching Gifford.

‘I said get out of the damned way!’ Leaning weakly on one elbow, Gifford watched the last light fade across the winding causeways of the delta, taking with it a final image of the snakes. Each evening, as the heat mounted with the advancing summer, they came out in greater numbers, as if aware of the lengthening periods of his fever.

‘Sir, I get more blanket for you?’

‘No, for God’s sake.’ Gifford’s thin shoulders shivered in the dusk air, but he ignored the discomfort. He looked down at his inert, corpse-like body below the blanket, examining it with far more detachment than he had felt for the unknown Indians dying in the makeshift WHO field hospital at Taxcol. At least there was a passive repose about the Indians, a sense of the still intact integrity of flesh and spirit, if anything reinforced by the failure of one of the partners. It was this paradigm of fatalism which Gifford would have liked to achieve — even the most wretched native, identifying himself with the irrevocable flux of nature, had bridged a greater span of years than the longest-lived European or American with his obsessive timeconsciousness, cramming so-called significant experiences into his life like a glutton. By contrast, Gifford realized, he himself had merely thrown aside his own body, divorcing it like some no longer useful partner in a functional business marriage. So marked a lack of loyalty depressed him.

He tapped his bony loins. ‘It’s not this, Mechippe, that ties us to mortality, but our confounded egos.’ He smiled slyly at the head-boy. ‘Louise would appreciate that, don’t you think?’

The head-boy was watching a refuse fire being raised behind the mess tent. He looked down sharply at the supine figure on the stretcher-chair, his half-savage eyes glinting like arrow heads in the oily light of the burning brush. ‘Sir? You want—?’

‘Forget it,’ Gifford told him. ‘Bring two whisky sodas. And some more chairs. Where’s Mrs Gifford?’

He glanced up at Mechippe when he failed to reply. Briefly their eyes met, in an instant of absolute clarity. Fifteen years earlier, when Gifford had come to the delta with his first archaeological expedition, Mechippe had been one of the junior camp-followers. Now he was in the late middle age of the Indian, the notches on his cheeks lost in the deep hatchwork of lines and scars, wise in the tent-lore of the visitors.

‘Miss’ Gifford — resting,’ he said cryptically. In an attempt to alter the tempo and direction of their dialogue, he added: ‘I tell Mr Lowry, then bring whiskies and hot towel, Doctor.’

‘Okay, Mechippe.’ Lying back with an ironic smile, Gifford listened to the head-boy’s footsteps move away softly through the sand. The muted sounds of the camp stirred around him — the cooling plash of water in the shower stall, the soft interchanges of the Indians, the whining of a desert dog waiting to approach the refuse dump — and he sank downwards into the thin tired body stretched out in front of him like a collection of bones in a carpet bag, rekindling the fading senses of touch and pressure in his limbs.

In the moonlight, the white beaches of the delta glistened like banks of luminous chalk, the snakes festering on the slope like the worshippers of a midnight sun.

Half an hour later they drank their whiskies together in the dark tinted air. Revived by Mechippe’s massage, Charles Gifford sat upright in the stretcher-chair, gesturing with his glass. The whisky had momentarily cleared his brain; usually he was reluctant to discuss the snakes in his wife’s presence, let alone Lowry’s, but the marked increase in their numbers seemed important enough to mention. There was also the mildly malicious pleasure — less amusing now than it had been — of seeing Louise shudder at any mention of the snakes.

‘What is so unusual,’ he explained, ‘is the way they emerge on to the banks at the same time. There must be a precise level of luminosity, an exact number of photons, to which they all respond — presumably an innate trigger.’

Dr Richard Lowry, Gifford’s assistant and since his accident the acting leader of the expedition, watched Gifford uncomfortably from the edge of his canvas chair, rotating his glass below his long nose. He had been placed downwind from the loose bandages swaddling Gifford’s foot (little revenges of this kind, however childish, alone sustained Gifford’s interest in the people around him), and carefully averted his face as he asked: ‘But why the sudden increase in numbers? A month ago there was barely a snake in sight?’

‘Dick, please!’ Louise Gifford turned an expression of martyred weariness on Lowry. ‘Must we?’

‘There’s an obvious answer,’ Gifford said to Lowry. ‘During the summer the delta drains, and begins to look like the half-empty lagoons that were here 50 million years ago. The giant amphibians had died out, and the small reptiles were the dominant species. These snakes are probably carrying around what is virtually a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene as sharp as our own memories of New York and London.’ He turned to his wife, the shadows cast by the distant refuse fire hollowing his cheeks. ‘What’s the matter, Louise? Don’t say you can’t remember New York and London?’

‘I don’t know whether I can or not.’ She pushed a lock of fraying blonde hair off her forehead. ‘I wish you wouldn’t think about the snakes all the time.’

‘Well, I’m beginning to understand them. I was always baffled by the way they’d appear at the same time. Besides, there’s nothing else to do. I don’t want to sit here staring at that damned Toltec ruin of yours.’

He gestured towards the low ridge of sandstone, its profile illuminated against the white moonlit clouds, which marked the margins of the alluvial bench half a mile from the camp. Before Gifford’s accident their chairs had faced the ruined terrace city emerging from the thistles which covered the ridge. But Gifford had tired of staring all day at the crumbling galleries and colonnades where his wife and Lowry worked together. He told Mechippe to dismantle the tent and turn it through ninety degrees, so that he could watch the last light of the sunset fading over the western delta. The burning refuse fires they now faced provided at least a few wisps of motion. Gazing for hours across the endless creeks and mud-banks, whose winding outlines became more and more serpentine as the summer drought persisted and the level of the water table fell, he had one evening discovered the snakes.

‘Surely it’s simply a shortage of dissolved oxygen,’ Lowry commented.

He noticed Gifford regarding him with an expression of critical distaste, and added: ‘Jung believes the snake is primarily a symbol of the unconscious, and that its appearance always heralds a crisis in the psyche.’

‘I suppose I accept that,’ Charles Gifford said. With rather forced laughter he added, shaking his foot in the cradle: ‘I have to. Don’t I, Louise?’ Before his wife, who was watching the fires with a distracted expression, could reply he went on: ‘Though in fact I disagree with Jung. For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Paleocene are re-created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing is the snake a symbol of wisdom.’

Richard Lowry frowned doubtfully into his glass. ‘I’m not convinced, sir. It was primitive man who had to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche.’

‘Absolutely right,’ Gifford rejoined. ‘How else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience? The only real landscapes are the internal ones, or the external projections of them, such as this delta.’ He passed his empty glass to his wife. ‘Agree, Louise? Though perhaps you take a Freudian view of the snakes?’

This thin jibe, uttered with the cold humour which had become characteristic of Gifford4 brought their conversation to a halt. Restlessly, Lowry looked at his watch, eager to be away from Gifford and his pathetic boorishness. Gifford, a cold smirk on his lips, waited for Lowry to catch his eye; by a curious paradox his dislike of his assistant was encouraged by the latter’s reluctance to retaliate, rather than by the still ambiguous but crystallizing relationship between Lowry and Louise. Lowry’s meticulous neutrality and good manners seemed to Gifford an attempt to preserve a world on which Gifford had turned his back, that world where there were no snakes on the beaches and where events moved on a single plane of time like the blurred projection of a three-dimensional object by a defective camera obscura.

Lowry’s politeness was also, of course, an attempt to shield himself and Louise from Gifford’s waspish tongue. Like Hamlet taking advantage of his madness to insult and cross-examine anyone at will, Gifford often used the exhausted half-lucid interval after his fever subsided to make his more pointed comments. As he emerged from the penumbral shallows, the looming figures of his wife and assistant still surrounded by the rotating mandalas he saw in his dreams, he would give full rein to his tortured humour. That in this way he was helping his wife and Lowry towards an inevitable climax only encouraged Gifford.

His long farewell to Louise, protracted now for so many years, at last seemed feasible, even if only part of the greater goodbye, the vast leave-taking that Gifford was about to embark upon. The fifteen years of their marriage had been little more than a single frustrated farewell, a search for a means to an end which their own strengths of character had always prevented.

Looking up at Louise’s sun-grazed but still handsome profile, at her fading blonde hair swept back off her angular shoulders, Gifford realized that his dislike of her was in no way personal, but merely part of the cordial distaste he felt for almost the entire human race. And even this deeply ingrained misanthropy was only a reflection of his own undying self-contempt. If there were few people whom he had ever liked, there were, equally, few moments during which he had ever liked himself. His entire life as an archaeologist, from his early adolescence when he had first collected fossil ammonites from a nearby limestone outcropping, was an explicit attempt to return to the past and discover the sources of his self-loathing.

‘Do you think they’ll send an aeroplane?’ Louise asked after breakfast the next morning. ‘There was a noise then…’

‘I doubt it,’ Lowry said. He gazed up at the empty sky. ‘We didn’t ask for one. The landing field at Taxcol is disused. During the summer the harbour drains and everyone moves up-coast.’

‘There’ll be a doctor, surely? Not everyone will have gone?’

‘Yes, there’s a doctor. There’s one permanently attached to the port authority.’

‘A drunken fool,’ Gifford interjected. ‘I refuse to let him touch me with his poxy hands. Forget about the doctor, Louise. Even if someone is prepared to come out here, how do you think he’ll manage it?’

‘But Charles—’

Gifford gestured irritably at the glistening mudbanks. ‘The whole delta is draining like a dirty bath, no one is going to risk a stiff dose of malaria just to put a splint on my ankle. Anyway, that boy Mechippe sent is probably still hanging around here somewhere.’

‘But Mechippe insisted he was reliable.’ Louise looked down helplessly at her husband propped against the back of the stretcher-chair. ‘Dick, I wish you could have gone with him. It’s only fifty miles. You would have been there by now.’

Lowry nodded uneasily. ‘Well, I didn’t think… I’m sure everything will be all right. How is the leg, sir?’

‘Just dandy.’ Gifford had been staring out across the delta. He noticed Lowry peering down at him with a long puckered face. ‘What’s the matter, Richard? Does the smell offend you?’ Suddenly exasperated, he snapped: ‘Do me a favour and take a walk, dear chap.’

‘What—?’ Lowry stared at him uncertainly. ‘Of course, Doctor.’

Gifford watched Lowry’s neatly groomed figure walk away stiffly among the tents. ‘He’s awfully correct, isn’t he? But he doesn’t know how to take an insult yet. I’ll see that he gets plenty of practice.’

Louise slowly shook her head. ‘Do you have to, Charles? Without him we’d be in rather a spot, you know. I don’t think you’re being very fair.’

‘Fair?’ Gifford repeated the word with a grimace. ‘What are you talking about? For God’s sake, Louise.’

‘All right then,’ his wife replied patiently. ‘I don’t think you should blame Richard for what’s happened.’

‘I don’t. Is that what your dear Dick suggests? Now that this thing is beginning to smell he’s trying to throw his guilt back on to me.’

‘He is not—’

Gifford petulantly thumped the wicker elbow rest. ‘He damned well is!’ He gazed up darkly at his wife, his thin twisted mouth framed by the rim of beard. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, you will too by the time this thing is finished.’

‘Charles, please..

‘Who cares, anyway?’ Gifford lay back weakly for a moment, and then, as he recovered, a curious feeling of lightheaded and almost euphoric calm coming over him, began again: ‘Dr Richard Lowry. How he loves his doctorate. I wouldn’t have had the nerve at his age. A third-rate PhD for work that I did for him, and he styles himself "Doctor".’

‘So do you.’

‘Don’t be a fool. I can remember when at least two Chairs were offered to me.’

‘But you couldn’t degrade yourself by accepting them,’ his wife commented, a trace of irony in her voice.

‘No, I could not,’ Gifford attested vehemently. ‘Do you know what Cambridge is like, Louise? It’s packed with Richard Lowiys! Besides, I had a far better idea. I married a rich wife. She was charming, beautiful, and in a slightly ambiguous way respected my moody brilliance, but above all she was rich.’

‘How pleasant for you.’

‘People who marry for money earn it. I really earned mine.’

‘Thank you, Charles.’

Gifford chuckled to himself. ‘One thing, Louise, you do know how to take an insult. It’s a matter of breeding. I’m surprised you aren’t more choosy over Lowry.’

‘Choosy?’ Louise laughed awkwardly. ‘I hadn’t realized that I’d chosen him. I think Richard is very obliging and helpful — as you knew when you made him your assistant, by the way.’

Gifford began to compose his reply, when a sudden chill enveloped his chest and shoulders. He pulled weakly at the blanket, an immense feeling of fatigue and inertia overtaking him. He looked up glassily at his wife, their bickering conversation forgotten. The sunlight had vanished, and a profound darkness lay over the face of the delta, illuminated for a brief interval by the seething outlines of thousands of snakes. Trying to capture the image in his eyes, he struggled forward against the incubus pressing upon his chest, and then slid backwards into a pit of nausea and giddiness.

‘Louise… Quickly his wife’s hands were on his own, her shoulder supporting his head. He vomited emptily, struggling with his contracting musculature like a snake trying to shed its skin. Dimly he heard his wife shout for someone and the cradle topple to the ground, dragging the bedclothes with it.

‘Louise,’ he whispered, ‘one of these nights… I want you to take me down to the snakes.’

Now and then, during the afternoon, when the pain in his foot became acute, he would wake to find Louise sitting beside him. All the while he moved through ceaseless dreams, sinking from one plane of reverie to the next, the great mandalas guiding him downwards, enthroning him upon their luminous dials.

During the next few days the conversations with his wife were less frequent. As his condition deteriorated, Gifford felt able to do little more than stare out across the mud-flats, almost unaware of the movement and arguments around him. His wife and Mechippe formed a tenuous bridge with reality, but the true centre of his attention was the nexus of beaches on to which the snakes emerged in the evenings. This was a zone of complete timelessness, where at last he sensed the simultaneity of all time, the coexistence of all events in his past life.

The snakes now made their appearance half an hour earlier. Once he caught a glimpse of their motionless albino forms exposed on the slopes in the hot noon air. Their chalk-white skins and raised heads, in a reclining posture very like his own, made them seem immeasurably ancient, like the white sphinxes in the funeral corridors to the pharaonic tombs at Karnak.

Although his strength had ebbed markedly, the infection on his foot had spread only a few inches above the ankle, and Louise Gifford realized that her husband’s deterioration was a symptom of a profound psychological malaise, the mal de passage induced by the potently atmospheric landscape and its evocation of the lagoon-world of the Paleocene. She suggested to Gifford during one of his lucid intervals that they move the camp half a mile across the plain into the shadow of the ridge, near the Toltec terrace city where she and Lowry carried out their archaeological work.

But Gifford had refused, reluctant to leave the snakes on the beach. For some reason he disliked the terrace city. This was not because it was there that he had inflicted on himself the wound which now threatened his life. That this was simply an unfortunate accident devoid of any special symbolism he accepted without qualification. But the enigmatic presence of the terrace city, with its crumbling galleries and internal courts encrusted by the giant thistles and wire moss, seemed a huge man-made artefact which militated against the super-real naturalism of the delta. However, the terrace city, like the delta, was moving backwards in time, the baroque tracery of the serpent deities along the friezes dissolving and being replaced by the intertwined tendrils of the moss-plants, the pseudo-organic forms made by man in the image of nature reverting to their original. Kept at a distance behind him, as a huge backdrop, the ancient Toltec ruin seemed to brood in the dust like a decaying mastodon, a dying mountain whose dark dream of the earth enveloped Gifford with its luminous presence.

‘Do you feel well enough to move on?’ Louise asked Gifford when they had received no word of Mechippe’s messenger after a further week. She gazed down at him critically as he lay in the shade under the awning, his thin body almost invisible among the folds of the blankets and the monstrous tent over his leg, only the arrogant face with its stiffening beard reminding her of his identity. ‘Perhaps if we met the search party halfway..

Gifford shook his head, his eyes moving off across the bleached plain to the almost drained channels of the delta. ‘Which search party? There isn’t a boat with a shallow enough draught between here and Taxcol.’

‘Perhaps they’ll send a helicopter. They could see us from the air.’

‘Helicopter? You’ve got a bee in your bonnet, Louise. We’ll stay here for another week or so.’

‘But your leg,’ his wife insisted. ‘A doctor should—’

‘How can I move? Jerked about on a stretcher, I’d be dead within five minutes.’ He looked up wearily at his wife’s pale sunburnt face, waiting for her to go away.

She hovered over him uncertainly. Fifty yards away, Richard Lowry sat in the open air outside his tent, watching her quietly. Involuntarily, before she could prevent herself, her hand moved to straighten her hair.

‘Is Lowry there?’ Gifford asked.

‘Richard? Yes.’ Louise hesitated. ‘We’ll be back for lunch. I’ll change your dressing then.’

As she stepped from his field of vision Gifford lifted his chin slightly to examine the beaches obscured by the morning haze. The baked mud slopes glistened like hot concrete, and only a thin trickle of black fluid leaked slowly along the troughs. Here and there small islands fifty yards in diameter, shaped like perfect hemispheres, rose off the floors of the channels, imparting a curious geometric formality to the landscape. The whole area remained completely motionless, but Gifford lay patiently in his stretcher-chair, waiting for the snakes to come out on to the beaches.

When he noticed Mechippe serving lunch to him he realized that Lowry and Louise had not returned from the site.

‘Take it away.’ He pushed aside the bowl of condensed soup. ‘Bring me whisky soda. Double.’ He glanced sharply at the Indian. ‘Where’s Mrs Gifford?’

Mechippe steered the soup bowl back on to his tray. ‘Miss’ Gifford coming soon, sir. Sun very hot, she wait till afternoon.’

Gifford lay back for a moment, thinking of Louise and Richard Lowry, the image of them together touching the barest residue of emotion. Then he tried to wave away the haze with his hand.

‘What’s that—?’

‘Sir?’

‘Damn it, I thought I saw one.’ He shook his head slowly as the white form he had fleetingly glimpsed vanished among the opalescent slopes. ‘Too early, though. Where’s that whisky?’

‘Coming, sir.’

Panting slightly after the exertion of sitting up, Gifford looked around restlessly at the clutter of tents. Diagonally behind him, emerging from the lengthening focus of his eyes, loomed the long ridges of the Toltec city. Somewhere among its spiral galleries and corridors were Louise and Richard Lowry. Looking down from one of the high terraces across the alluvial bench, the distant camp would seem like a few bleached husks, guarded by a dead man propped up in a chair.

‘Darling, I’m awfully sorry. We tried to get back but I twisted my heel — ‘ Louise Gifford laughed lightly at this ‘rather as you did, now that I come to think of it. Perhaps I’ll be joining you here in a day or two. I’m so glad Mechippe looked after you and changed the dressing. How do you feel? You look a lot better.’

Gifford nodded drowsily. The afternoon fever had subsided but he felt drained and exhausted, his awareness of his wife’s chattering presence only stimulated by the whisky he had been drinking slowly all day. ‘It’s been a day at the zoo,’ he said, adding, with tired humour: ‘At the reptile enclosure.’

‘You and your snakes. Charles, you are a scream.’ Louise paced around the stretcher-chair, downwind of the cradle, then withdrew to the lee-side. She waved to Richard Lowry, who was carrying some specimen trays into his tent. ‘Dick, I suggest we shower and then join Charles for drinks.’

‘Great idea,’ Lowry called back. ‘How is he?’

‘Much better.’ To Gifford she said: ‘You don’t mind, Charles? It will do you good to talk a little.’

Gifford gestured vaguely with his head. When his wife had gone to her tent he focused his eyes carefully on the beaches. There, in the evening light, the snakes festered and writhed, their long forms gliding in and out of each other, the whole darkening horizon locked together by their serpentine embrace. There were now literally tens of thousands of them, reaching beyond the margins of the beach across the open ground towards the camp. During the afternoon, at the height of his fever, he had tried to call to them, but his voice had been too weak.

Later, over their cocktails, Richard Lowry asked: ‘How do you feel, sir?’ When Gifford made no reply he said: ‘I’m glad to hear the leg is better.’

‘You know, Dick, I think it’s psychological,’ Louise remarked. ‘As soon as you and I are out of the way Charles improves.’ Her eyes caught Richard Lowry’s and held them.

Lowry played with his glass, a faintly self-assured smile on his bland face. ‘What about the messenger? Is there any news?’

‘Have you heard anything, Charles? Perhaps someone will fly over in a couple of days.’

During this exchange of pleasantries, and those which followed on the subsequent days, Charles Gifford remained silent and withdrawn, sinking more deeply into the interior landscape emerging from the beaches of the delta. His wife and Richard Lowry sat with him in the evenings when they returned from the terrace city, but he was barely aware of their presence. By now they seemed to move in a peripheral world, players in a marginal melodrama. Now and then he would think about them, but the effort seemed to lack point. His wife’s involvement with Lowry left him unperturbed; if anything, he felt grateful to Lowry for freeing him from Louise.

Once, two or three days later, when Lowry came to sit by him in the evening, Gifford roused himself and said dryly: ‘I hear you found treasure in the terrace city.’ But before Lowry could produce a reply he relapsed again into his vigil.

One night shortly afterwards, when he was woken in the early hours of the morning by a sudden spasm of pain in his foot, he saw his wife and Lowry walking through the powdery blue darkness by the latter’s tent. For a fleeting moment their embracing figures were like the snakes coiled together on the beaches.

‘Mechippe!’

‘Doctor?’

‘Mechippe!’

‘I am here, sir.’

‘Tonight, Mechippe,’ Gifford told him, ‘you sleep in my tent. Understand? I want you near me. Use my bed, if you want. Will you hear if I call?’

‘Of course, sir. I hear you.’ The head-boy’s polished ebony face regarded Gifford circumspectly. He now tended Gifford with a care that indicated that the latter, however much a novice, had at last entered the world of absolute values, composed of the delta and the snakes, the brooding presence of the Toltec ruin and his dying leg.

After midnight, Gifford lay quietly in the stretcher-chair, watching the full moon rise over the luminous beaches. Like a Medusa’s crown, thousands of the snakes had climbed the crests of the beaches and were spreading thickly across the margins of the plain, their white backs exposed to the moonlight.

‘Mechippe.’

The head-boy had been squatting silently in the shadows. ‘Dr Gifford?’

Gifford spoke in a low but clear voice. ‘Crutches. Over there.’ As the head-boy passed the two carved sticks Gifford tossed aside the blankets. Carefully he withdrew his leg from the cradle, then sat up and lifted it on to the ground. He leaned forward into the crutches and found his balance. The bandaged foot, like a white club, stuck out in front of him. ‘Now. In the field-desk, right-hand drawer, there’s my gun. Bring it to me.’

For once the head-boy hesitated. ‘Gun, sir?’

‘Smith & Wesson. It should be loaded, but there’s a box of cartridges.’

Again the head-boy hesitated, his eyes roving to the two tents spaced in a line away from them, their entrances hooded by the dust canopies. The whole camp lay in silence, the light stirring of the wind muted by the still warm sand and the dark talcum-like air. ‘Gun,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir.’

Easing himself slowly to his feet, Gifford paused uncertainly. His head swam with the exertion, but the huge anchor of his left foot held him to the ground. Taking the pistol, he gestured with it towards the delta.

‘We’re going to see the snakes, Mechippe. You help me. All right?’

Mechippe’s eyes flashed in the moonlight. ‘The snakes, sir?’

‘Yes. You take me halfway there. Then you can come back. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’

Mechippe nodded slowly, his eyes looking out over the delta. ‘I help you, doctor.’

Labouring slowly across the sand, Gifford steadied himself on the head-boy’s arm. After a few steps he found his left leg too heavy to lift, and dragged the dead load through the soft sand.

‘Christ, it’s a long way.’ They had covered twenty yards. By some optical freak the nearest snakes now seemed to be half a mile away, barely visible between the slight rises. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

They plodded on a further ten yards. The open mouth of Lowry’s tent was on their left, the white bell of the mosquito net looming in the shadows like a sepulchre. Almost exhausted, Gifford tottered unsteadily, trying to focus his eyes through the tinted air.

There was a sudden flash and roar as the revolver discharged itself, cannoning out of his hand. He felt Mechippe’s fingers stiffen on his arm, and heard someone emerge from Lowry’s tent, a woman’s startled cry of fear. A second figure, this time a man’s, appeared and with a backward glance at Gifford darted away like a startled animal among the tents, racing head down towards the terrace city.

Annoyed by these interruptions, Gifford searched blindly for the revolver, struggling with the crutches. But the darkness condensed around him, and the sand came upwards to strike his face.

The next morning, as the tents were dismantled and packed away, Gifford felt too tired to look out across the delta. The snakes never appeared until the early afternoon, and the disappointment of failing to reach them the previous night had drained his energy.

When only his own tent remained of the camp, and the naked shower scaffoldings protruded from the ground like pieces of abstract sculpture marking a futuristic cairn, Louise came over to him.

‘It’s time for them to pack your tent.’ Her tone was matter-of-fact but guarded. ‘The boys are building a stretcher for you. You should be comfortable.’

Gifford gestured her away. ‘I can’t go. Leave Mechippe with me and take the others.’

‘Charles, be practical for once.’ Louise stood before him, her face composed. ‘We can’t stay here indefinitely, and you need treatment. It’s obvious now that Mechippe’s boy never reached Taxcol. Our supplies won’t last for ever.’

‘They don’t have to last for ever.’ Gifford’s eyes, almost closed, surveyed the distant horizon like a pair of defective binoculars. ‘Leave me one month’s.’

‘Charles—’

‘For heaven’s sake, Louise…’Wearily he let his head loll on the pillow. He noticed Richard Lowry supervising the stowage of the stores, the Indian boys moving around him like willing children. ‘Why all the hurry? Can’t you stay another week?’

‘We can’t, Charles.’ She looked her husband straight in the face. ‘Richard feels he must go. You understand. For your sake.’

‘My sake?’ Gifford shook his head. ‘I don’t give a damn about Lowry. Last night I was going out to look at the snakes.’

‘Well…’ Louise smoothed her bush shirt. ‘This trip has been such a fiasco, Charles, there are many things that frighten me. I’ll tell them to dismantle the tent when you’re ready.’

‘Louise.’ With a last effort Gifford sat up. In a quiet voice, in order not to embarrass his wife by letting Richard Lowry hear him, he said: ‘I went out to look at the snakes. You do understand that?’

‘But Charles!’ With a sudden burst of exasperation his wife snapped: ‘Don’t you realize, there are no snakes! Ask Mechippe, ask Richard Lowry or any of the boys! The entire river is as dry as a bone!’

Gifford turned to look at the white beaches of the delta. ‘You and Lowry go. I’m sorry, Louise, but I couldn’t stand the trip.’

‘You must!’ She gestured at the distant hills, at the terrace city and the delta. ‘There’s something wrong with this place, Charles, somehow it’s convinced you that…’

Followed by a group of boys, Richard Lowry walked slowly towards them, signalling with his hands to Louise. She hesitated, then on an impulse waved him back and sat down beside Gifford. ‘Charles, listen. I’ll stay with you for another week as you ask, so that you can come to terms with these hallucinations, if you promise me that you’ll leave then. Richard can go ahead on his own, he’ll meet us in Taxcol with a doctor.’ She lowered her voice, ‘Charles, I’m sorry about Richard. I realize now…’

She leaned forward to see her husband’s face. He lay in his seat in front of the solitary tent, the circle of boys watching him patiently from a distance. Ten miles away a solitary cloud drifted over one of the mesas, like a plume of smoke above a dormant but still active volcano.

‘Charles.’ She waited for her husband to speak, hoping that he would reprove and so perhaps even forgive her. But Charles Gifford was thinking only of the snakes on the beaches.