recording spooi somewhere, the grating of a revolving rig estimating a creeper's phototropism.
Idly Kerans examined the compass, swinging the bearing gently in its air-bath and then aligning the pointer and scale. He tried to decide why he had taken it from the armoury. Normally it was installed in one of the motor launches, and its disappearance would soon be reported, probably involve him in the petty humiliation of admitting its theft.
Caging the compass, he swung it around towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness became focussed on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept 'South', with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outwards from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CAUSEWAYS OF THE SUN
The next day, for reasons Kerans was to understand fully only much later, Lieutenant Hardman disappeared.
After a night of deep, dreamless sleep Kerans rose early and had breakfasted by seven o'clock. He then spent an hour on the balcony, sitting back in one of the beach chairs in a pair of white latex shorts, the sunlight expanding across the dark water bathing his lean ebony body. Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber. The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth's magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence.
Pausing by the desk to run his fingers over the brass compass gleaming in the darkness of the suite, Kerans went into the bedroom and changed into his khaki drill uniform, a minimal concession to Riggs' preparations for departure. The Italian sportswear was now hardly de rigeur, and it would only rouse the Colonel's suspicions if he were seen sauntering about in a pastel-coloured ensemble with a Ritz hallmark
Although he accepted the possibility that he would remain behind, Kerans found himself reluctant to take any systematic precautions. Apart from his fuel and food supplies, for which he had been dependent during the previous six months on Colonel Riggs' largesse, he had also needed an endless succession of minor spares and replacements, from a new watchface to a complete rewiring of the lighting system in the suite. Once the base and its workshop had left he would soon find himself saddled with an accumulating series of petty annoyances, and with no accommodating technical sergeant to remove them.
For the convenience of the stores staff, and to save himself unnecessary journeys to and from the base, Kerans had stockpiled a month's forward supplies of canned food in the suite. Most of this consisted of condensed milk and luncheon meat, virtually inedible unless supplemented by the delicacies stored away in Beatrice's deep freeze. It was this capacious locker, with its reserves of pate du fois grois and filet mignon, which Kerans counted upon to keep them going, but at the most there was a bare three months' stock. After that they would have to live off the land, switch their menu to wood soup and steak iguana.
Fuel raised more serious problems. The reserve tanks of diesel oil at the Ritz held little more than 500 gallons, sufficient to operate the cooling system for at most a couple of months. By closing down the bedroom and dressing room and moving into the lounge, and by raising the ambient temperature to ninety degrees, he would with luck double its life, but once the supplies were exhausted the chances of supplementing them were negligible. Every reserve tank and cache in the gutted buildings around the lagoons had long since been siphoned dry by the waves of refugees moving northward during the past thirty years in their power boats and cabin
Idly Kerans examined the compass, swinging the bearing gently in its air-bath and then aligning the pointer and scale. He tried to decide why he had taken it from the armoury. Normally it was installed in one of the motor launches, and its disappearance would soon be reported, probably involve him in the petty humiliation of admitting its theft.
Caging the compass, he swung it around towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness became focussed on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept 'South', with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outwards from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CAUSEWAYS OF THE SUN
The next day, for reasons Kerans was to understand fully only much later, Lieutenant Hardman disappeared.
After a night of deep, dreamless sleep Kerans rose early and had breakfasted by seven o'clock. He then spent an hour on the balcony, sitting back in one of the beach chairs in a pair of white latex shorts, the sunlight expanding across the dark water bathing his lean ebony body. Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber. The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth's magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence.
Pausing by the desk to run his fingers over the brass compass gleaming in the darkness of the suite, Kerans went into the bedroom and changed into his khaki drill uniform, a minimal concession to Riggs' preparations for departure. The Italian sportswear was now hardly de rigeur, and it would only rouse the Colonel's suspicions if he were seen sauntering about in a pastel-coloured ensemble with a Ritz hallmark
Although he accepted the possibility that he would remain behind, Kerans found himself reluctant to take any systematic precautions. Apart from his fuel and food supplies, for which he had been dependent during the previous six months on Colonel Riggs' largesse, he had also needed an endless succession of minor spares and replacements, from a new watchface to a complete rewiring of the lighting system in the suite. Once the base and its workshop had left he would soon find himself saddled with an accumulating series of petty annoyances, and with no accommodating technical sergeant to remove them.
For the convenience of the stores staff, and to save himself unnecessary journeys to and from the base, Kerans had stockpiled a month's forward supplies of canned food in the suite. Most of this consisted of condensed milk and luncheon meat, virtually inedible unless supplemented by the delicacies stored away in Beatrice's deep freeze. It was this capacious locker, with its reserves of pate du fois grois and filet mignon, which Kerans counted upon to keep them going, but at the most there was a bare three months' stock. After that they would have to live off the land, switch their menu to wood soup and steak iguana.
Fuel raised more serious problems. The reserve tanks of diesel oil at the Ritz held little more than 500 gallons, sufficient to operate the cooling system for at most a couple of months. By closing down the bedroom and dressing room and moving into the lounge, and by raising the ambient temperature to ninety degrees, he would with luck double its life, but once the supplies were exhausted the chances of supplementing them were negligible. Every reserve tank and cache in the gutted buildings around the lagoons had long since been siphoned dry by the waves of refugees moving northward during the past thirty years in their power boats and cabin
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