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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
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.txt 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.'
'O.K., Mechippe.' Lying back with an ironic smile, Oifford listened to the
hcad-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 message, Charles
Gifford sat uprlght in the stretcher-chair, gesturing with his glass. The
whisky had momentarily cleared his brain;
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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
enqugh 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 dom-wind
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.txt 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,' Oifford said to Lowry.
'During the summer the delta drains, and begins to look like the half-empty
lagoons that were here fifty 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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