Ballard, J G - The Drought

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Penguin Books

The Drought

J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai of English parents

in 1930 and lived there until he was fifteen. During

the war he was interned by the Japanese in a civilian

prison camp. He was repatriated in 1946, and after

leaving school read medicine at King's College,

Cambridge. His first science fiction story was

published in 1956. From the start he pioneered a new

form of science fiction, and was the originator of the

so-called 'New Wave' that challenged the American

science fiction of the 1950s. He believes that science

fiction is the authentic literature of the Twentieth

Century. His other books published in Penguins are

The Drowned World, The Wind From Nowhere, and

The Term#tal Beach. His other books include Crash

and The Atrocity Exhibition.

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J. G. Ballard

The Drought

Penguin Books

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Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth,

Middlesex, England

Penguin Books Australia It Pdngwood,

Victoria, Australia

First published by Jonathan Cape 1965

Published in Penguin Books 1968

Reprinted 1974

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Hunt Bamatd Printing Ltd, Aylesbury

Set in Linotype Times

This book is sold subject to the condition that

it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without

the publisher's prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the

subsequent purchaser

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Contents

Part One

I The Draining Lake 7

2 Mementoes 12

3 The Fishermen 14

4 The Dying Swan 19

5 The Coming of the Desert

6 The Crying Land 27

7 The Face 32

8 The Fire Sermon

9 The Phoenix 38

10 Miranda 44

11 The Lamia 47

12 -fhe Drowned Aquarium

13 The Nets 55

14 A New River 58

15 The Burning Altar 64

16 The Terminal Zone

17 The Cheetah 71

18 The Yantras 74

19 Mr Jordan 79

20 The Burning City 82

21 Journey to the Sea 85

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Multiplication of the Arcs 89

The Fairground 94

The Bitter Sea 98

Part Two

Dune Limbo 103

The Lagoon 104

The Tidal Waves 108

At the Settlement 117

The Stranded Neptune 122

The Sign of the Crab 125

The White Lion 130

Part Three

32 The Illuminated River

135

33 The Train 139

34 The Mannequins 141

35 The Smoke Fires

145

36 The Mirage 150

37 The Oasis 155

38 The Pavilion 162

The Anctrogyne 166

The Dead Bird 168

A Drowning 171

'Jours de Lenteur' 175

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Part One

I · The Draining Lake

At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the

entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old

woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht

basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank

and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his

feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed

nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mud-bank was

speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom

the dream-faced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun

strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of

the river.

Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding

that the comparison was less than apt. Although Quilter spent

as much time watching the river as Ransom and everyone else,

his motives would be typically perverse. The continued fall

of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought,

gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother

had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge - an eccentric

gift from 0uilter's vrotector. Richard Foster Lomax, the architect

who was Ransom's neighbour - had now taken on a thirty-degree

list. and a further fall of even a few inches in the level

of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the

silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to the city

of Mount Royal five miles away. For a week he had been out

on the lake, sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks

and mud-flats as he waited for the evacuation of the city to end.

After the closure of the hospital at Mount Royal he intended

to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided to spend

a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now and then, between the humps of damp

mud emerging from the

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centre of the lake, he had seen the distant span of the motor-bridge

across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and

trucks flashing like jewelled lances as they set off along the

coast road for the south; but for most of the period he had

been alone. Suspended like the houseboat above the dissolving

glass of the water, time had seemed becalmed.

Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the

bridge had ended. By then the lake, once a stretch of open

water thirty miles in length, had subsided into a series of small

pools and channels, separated by the banks of draining mud. A

few last fishing craft sailed among them, their crews standing

shoulder to slmulder in the bows. The drab-suited men from

the settlement, thin faces dden under their black caps, had

gazed at Ransom's houseboat with the numbed expressions of

a group of lost whaling men too exhausted by some private

tragedy to rope in this stranded catch.

B/contrast, the slow transformation of the lake e:,ahilarated

Ransom. As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into

shallow lagoons and then into a maze of creeks, the wet dunes

of the lake bed seemed to emerge from another dimension. On

the last morning he woke to find the houseboat beached at the

end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies

of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a

dream.

As he approached the entrance to the river, steering the

houseboat among the stranded yachts and fishing boats, the

lakeside town of Hamilton was deserted. Along the fishermen's

quays the boat-houses were empty, and the white forms of the

drying fish hung in the shadows from the lines of hooks. Refuse

fires smouldered in the waterfront gardens, their smoke drifting

past the open windows that swung in the warm air. Nothing

moved in the streets. Ransom had assumed that a few people

would remain behind, waiting until the main exodus to the

coast was over, but Quilter's presence, like his ambiguous

smile, in some way was an obscure omen, one of the many

irrational signs that had revealed the real progress of the

drought during the confusion of the past months.

A hundred yards to his right, beyond the concrete pillars of

the motor-bridge, the wooden piles of the fuel depot were visible

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above the cracked mud. The floating pier had .touched bottom,

and the fishing boats usually moored against it had moved off

into the centre of the channel. Normally, in late summer, the river would have been three hundred

feet wide, but it was now

barely half this - a shallow creek winding its slow way along the

flat gutter of the banks.

Next to the fuel depot was the yacht basin, with the Quilters'

barge moored against its bows. After signing the vessel over to

them at the depot, Lomax had added a single gallon of chesel

oil in a quixotic gesture of generosity, barely enough fuel for

the couple to navigate the fifty yards to the basin. Refused

entry, they had taken up their mooring outside. Here Mrs

Quilter sat all day on the hatchway, her faded red hair blown

around her black shaM, muttering at the people going down to

the water's edge with their buckets.

Ransom could see her now, beaked nose flashing to left and

right like an irritable parrot's as she flicked at her dark face

with a Chinese fan, indifferent to the heat and the river's

stench. She had been sitting in the same place when he set off

in the houseboat, her ribald shoutg egging on the weekend

mariners laying a line of cement-filled bags across the entrance

to the yacht basin. Even at flood barely enough water entered

the harbour to irrigate its narrow docks, and this had now

leaked back into the river, settling the smartly decked craft into

their own mud. Deserted by their owners, the yachts were presided

over by Mrs Quilter's witch-like presence.

Despite her grotesque appearance and insane run, Ransom

admired this old woman of the barges. Often during the winter he crossed the rotting gangway into

the gloomy interior of the

barge, where she lay on a feather mattress tied to the chart

table, wheezing to herself. The single cabin, filled with dusty

lanterns, was a maze of filthy recesses veiled by old lace shams.

After filling her tea-pot from the flask of gin in his valise, Ransom

would be rowed back across the river in her son's leaking

coracle, Quilter's great eyes below the hydrocephalic forehead

staring at him through the rain like wild moons.

Rain I - at the recollection of what the term had once meant,

Ransom looked up at the sky. Unmasked by clouds or vapour,

the sun hung over his head like an ever-ttendant genie. The

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fields and roads adjo.ining the river were covered with the same

unvarying light, a glazed yellow canopy that embalmed everything

in its heat.

Below the jetty Ransom had staked a line of coloured poles

into the water, but the rapid fall in the level needed little calculation.

In the previous three months the river had dropped

some twenty feet, shrinking to less than a quarter of its original

volume. As it sank, it seemed to pull everything towards it. The

banks were now opposing cliffs, topped by the inverted tents

suspended from the chimneys of the riverside houses. Originally

designed as rain-traps - though no rain had ever fallen into

them - the canvas envelopes had been transformed into a line

of aerial garbage scoops, the bowls of dust and leaves raised

like offerings to the sun.

Ransom crossed the deck and stepped down into the steering well. He waved to Quilter, who was

watch.ing him with a drifting

smile. Behind him, along the deserted wharfs, the bodies of

the drying fish turned slowly in the air.

'Tell your mother to move the barge,' Ransom called across

the interval of slack water. 'The river is still falling.'

Quilter ignored this. He pointed to the blurred forms moving

slowly below the surface.

'Clouds,' he said.

'What ?'

'Clouds,' Quilter repeated. 'Full of water, doctor?

Ransom stepped through the hatchway into the cabin of the

houseboat, smiling to himself at Quilter's bizarre burnout.

Despite his deformed skull and Caliban-like appearance, there

was nothing stupid about Quilter. The dreamy, ironic smile, at

times almost affectionate in its lingering glance, as if understanding

Ransom's most intimate secrets, the seamed skull with

.its russet hair and the inverted planes of the face, in which the

cheekbones were set back two or three inches, leaving deep

hollows below the eyes - all these and a streak of unpredictable

naivety made Quilter a daunting figure. Most people wisely left

him alone, possibly because his invariable method of dealing

with them was to pick unerringly on their weaknesses and work

away at these like an inquisitor.

It was this instinct for failure, Ransom decided with wry

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file:///F|/rah/J.%20G.%20Ballard/Ballard,%20J%20G%20-%20The%20Drought.tx\tPenguinBooksTheDroughtJ.G.BallardwasborninShanghaiofEnglishparentsin1930andlivedthereuntilhewasfifteen.DuringthewarhewasinternedbytheJapaneseinacivilianprisoncamp.Hewasrepatriatedin1946,andafterleavingschoolreadmedicineatKing'...

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Ballard, J G - The Drought

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