The Crystal World. Robert MacFarlane
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would have been bleached to a pale yellow by the sun, but even five miles inland Dr. Sanders could see the dark green arbours towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, sombre and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.
Someone drummed impatiently at the rail, sending a stir down its length, and the half-dozen passengers on either side of Dr. Sanders shuffled and muttered to one another, glancing up at the wheelhouse, where the captain gazed absently at the jetty, apparently unperturbed by the delay.
Sanders turned to Father Balthus, who was standing a few feet away on his left. ‘The light – have you noticed it? Is there an eclipse expected? The sun seems unable to make up its mind.’
The priest was smoking steadily, his long fingers drawing the cigarette half an inch from his mouth after each inhalation. Like Sanders he was gazing, not at the harbour, but at the forest slopes far inland. In the dull light his thin scholar’s face seemed tired and fleshless. During the three-day journey from Libreville he had kept to himself, evidently distracted by some private matter, and only began to talk to his table companion when he learned of Sanders’s post at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital. Sanders gathered that he was returning to his parish at Mont Royal after a sabbatical month, but there seemed something a little too plausible about this explanation, which he repeated several times in the same automatic phrasing, unlike his usual hesitant stutter. However, Sanders was well aware of the dangers of imputing his own ambiguous motives for coming to Port Matarre to those around him.
Even so, at first Dr. Sanders had suspected that Father Balthus might not be a priest at all. The self-immersed eyes and pale neurasthenic hands bore all the signatures of the impostor, perhaps an expelled novice still hoping to find some kind of salvation within a borrowed soutane. However, Father Balthus was entirely genuine, whatever that term meant and whatever its limits. The first officer, the steward and several of the passengers recognized him, complimented him on his return and generally seemed to accept his isolated manner.
‘An eclipse?’ Father Balthus flicked his cigarette stub into the dark water below. The steamer was now over-running its own wake, and the veins of foam sank down through the deeps like threads of luminous spittle. ‘I think not, Doctor. Surely the maximum duration would be eight minutes?’
In the sudden flares of light over the water, reflected off the sharp points of his cheeks and jaw, a harder profile for a moment showed itself. Conscious of Sanders’s critical eye, Father Balthus added as an afterthought, to reassure the doctor: ‘The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral – do you know Bocklin’s painting, “Island of the Dead”, where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea? It’s in the Kunstmuseum in my native Basel—’ He broke off as the steamer’s engines drummed into life. ‘We’re moving. At last.’
‘Thank God for that. You should have warned me, Balthus.’
Sanders took his cigarette case from his pocket, but the priest had already palmed a fresh cigarette into his cupped hand with the deftness of a conjurer. Balthus pointed with it to the jetty, where a substantial reception committee of gendarmerie and customs officials was waiting for the steamer. ‘Now, what nonsense is this?’
Sanders watched the shore. Whatever Balthus’s private difficulties, the priest’s lack of charity irritated him. Half to himself, Sanders said drily: ‘Perhaps there’s a question of credentials.’
‘Not mine, Doctor.’ Father Balthus turned a sharp downward glance upon Sanders. ‘And I’m certain your own are in order.’
The other passengers were leaving the rail and going below to collect their baggage. With a smile at Balthus, Sanders excused himself and began to make his way down to his cabin. Dismissing the priest from his mind – within half an hour they would have disappeared their separate ways into the forest and whatever awaited them there – Sanders felt in his pocket for his passport, reminding himself not to leave it in his cabin. The desire to travel incognito, with all its advantages, might well reveal itself in some unexpected way.
As Sanders reached the companion-way behind the funnel-house he could see down into the after-deck, where the steerage passengers were pulling together their bundles and cheap suitcases. In the centre of the deck, partly swathed in a canvas awning, was a large red-and-yellow-hulled speed-boat, part of the cargo consignment for Port Matarre.
Taking his ease on the wide bench-seat behind the steering-helm, one arm resting on the raked glass and chromium windshield, was a small, slimly built man of about forty, wearing a white tropical suit that emphasized the rim of dark beard which framed his face. His black hair was brushed down over his bony forehead, and with his small eyes gave him a taut and watchful appearance. This man, Ventress – his name was about all Sanders had managed to learn about him – was the doctor’s cabin-mate. During the journey from Libreville he had roamed about the steamer like an impatient tiger, arguing with the steerage passengers and crew, his moods switching from a kind of ironic humour to sullen disinterest, when he would sit alone in the cabin, gazing out through the port-hole at the small disc of empty sky.
Sanders had made one or two attempts to talk to him, but most of the time Ventress ignored him, keeping to himself whatever reasons he had for coming to Port Matarre. However, the doctor was well inured by now to being avoided by those around him. Shortly before they embarked, a slight contretemps, more embarrassing to his fellow passengers than to himself, had arisen over the choice of a cabin-mate for Sanders. His fame having preceded him (what was fame to the world at large still remained notoriety on the personal level, Sanders reflected, and no doubt the reverse was true), no one could be found to share a cabin with the assistant director of the Fort Isabelle leper hospital.
At this point Ventress had stepped forward. Knocking on Sanders’s door, suitcase in hand, he had nodded at the doctor and asked simply:
‘Is it contagious?’
After a pause to examine this white-suited figure with his bearded skull-like face – something about him reminded Sanders that the world was not without those who, for their own reasons, wished to catch the disease – Sanders said: ‘The disease is contagious, as you ask, yes, but years of exposure and contact are necessary for its transmission. The period of incubation may be twenty or thirty years.’
‘Like death. Good.’ With a gleam of a smile, Ventress stepped into the cabin. He extended a bony hand, and clasped Sanders’s firmly, his strong fingers feeling for the doctor’s grip. ‘What our timorous fellow passengers fail to realize, Doctor, is that outside your colony there is merely another larger one.’
Later, as he looked down at Ventress lounging in the speed-boat on the after-deck, Dr. Sanders pondered on this cryptic introduction. The faltering light still hung over the estuary, but Ventress’s white suit seemed to focus all its intense hidden brilliancy, just as Father Balthus’s clerical garb had reflected the darker tones. The steerage passengers milled around the speed-boat, but Ventress appeared to be uninterested in them, or in the approaching jetty with its waiting throng of customs and police. Instead, he was looking out across the deserted starboard rail into the mouth of the river, and at the distant forest stretching away into the haze. His small eyes were half-closed, as if he were deliberately merging the view in front of him with some inner landscape within his mind.
Sanders had seen little of Ventress during the voyage up-coast, but one evening in the cabin, searching through the wrong suitcase in the dark, he had felt the butt of a heavy-calibre automatic pistol wrapped in the harness of a shoulder holster. The presence of this weapon had immediately resolved some of the enigmas that surrounded Ventress’s small brittle figure.
‘Doctor …’ Ventress called up to him, waving one hand lightly, as if reminding Sanders that he was day-dreaming. ‘A drink, Sanders, before the bar closes?’ Dr. Sanders began to refuse, but Ventress had half-turned his shoulder, veering off on another tack. ‘Look for the sun, Doctor, it’s there. You can’t walk through these forests with your head between your heels.’
‘I shan’t try to. Are you going ashore?’
‘Of course. There’s no hurry here,