As we walked along the main street, the glowing jungle visible two hundred yards away down the intersections on our left, a police car swerved into the street and came to a halt in front of us. Two men stepped out, a tall blondhaired police captain and a Presbyterian minister carrying a small suitcase and a parcel of books. The latter was about thirty-five, with a high’scholar’s forehead and tired eyes. He seemed uncertain which way to go, and waited as the police captain strode briskly around the car.
‘You’ll need your embarkation card, Dr Thomas.’ The captain handed a coloured ticket to the minister, and then fished a set of keys attached to a mahogany peg from his pocket. ‘I took these from the door. You must have left them in the lock.’
The priest hesitated, uncertain whether to take the keys. ‘I left them there deliberately, captain. Someone may want to take refuge in the church.’
‘I doubt it, Doctor. Wouldn’t help them, anyway.’ The captain waved briefly. ‘See you in Miami.’
Acknowledging the salute, the priest stared at the keys in his palm, then slipped them reluctantly into his cassock. As he walked past us towards the wharf his moist eyes searched our faces with a troubled gaze, as if he suspected that a member of his congregation might be hiding in our midst.
The police captain appeared equally fatigued, and began a sharp dialogue with the officer in charge of our parties. His words were lost in the general conversation, but he pointed impatiently beyond the roof-tops with a wide sweep of one arm, as if indicating the approach of a storm. Although of strong physique, there was something weak and selfcentred about his long fleshy face and pale blue eyes, and obviously his one remaining ambition, having emptied the town of its inhabitants, was to clear out at the first opportunity.
I turned to the corporal lounging by a fire hydrant and pointed to the glowing vegetation which seemed to follow us, skirting the perimeter of the town. ‘Why is everyone leaving, corporal? Surely it’s not infectious there’s no danger from close contact?’
The corporal glanced laconically over his shoulder at the crystalline foliage glittering in the meridian sunlight. ‘It’s not infectious. Unless you stay in there too long. When it cut the road both sides of town I guess most people decided it was time to pull out.’
‘Both sides?’ George Schneider echoed. ‘How big is the affected area, corporal? We were told three or four acres.’
The soldier shook his head dourly. ‘More like three or four hundred. Or thousand, even.’ He pointed to the helicopter circling the forest a mile or so away, soaring up and down over the date palms, apparently spraying them with some chemical. ‘Reaches right over there, towards Lake Okeechobee.’
‘But you have it under control,’ George said. ‘You’re cutting it back all right?’
‘Wouldn’t like to say,’ the corporal replied cryptically. He indicated the blond policeman remonstrating with the supervising officer. ‘Captain Shelley tried a flame thrower on it a couple of days ago. Didn’t help any.’
The policeman’s objections over-ruled — he slammed the door of his car and drove off in dudgeon — we set off once more and at the next intersection approached the forest which stood back on either side of the road a quarter of a mile away. The vegetation was sparser, the sawgrass growing in clumps among the sandy soil on the verges, and a mobile laboratory had been set up in a trailer, ‘U. S. Department of Agriculture’ stencilled on its side. A platoon of soldiers was wandering about, taking cuttings from the palmettos and date palms, which they carefully placed like fragments of stained glass on a series of trestle tables. The main body of the forest curved around us, circling the northern perimeter of the town, and we immediately saw that the corporal had been correct in his estimate of the affected area’s extent. Parallel with us one block to the north was the main Maynard-Miami highway, cut off by the glowing forest on both the eastern and western approaches to the town.
Splitting up into twos and threes, we crossed the verge and began to wander among the glac ferns which rose from the brittle ground. The sandy surface seemed curiously hard and annealed, small spurs of fused sand protruding from the newly formed crust.
Examining the specimens collected on the tables, I touched the smooth glass-like material that sheathed the leaves and branches, following the contours of the original like a displaced image in a defective mirror. Everything appeared to have been dipped in a vat of molten glass, which had then set into a skin fractured by slender veins.
A few yards from the trailer two technicians were spinning several encrusted branches in a centrifuge. There was a continuous glimmer and sparkle as splinters of light glanced out of the bowl and vanished into the inspection area, and as far as the perimeter fence, running like a serrated white bandage around the prismatic wound of the forest, people turned to watch.
When the centrifuge stopped we peered into the bowl, where a handful of limp branches, their blanched leaves clinging damply to the metal bottom, lay stripped of their glac sheaths. Below the bowl, however, the liquor receptacle remained dry and empty.
Twenty yards from the forest a second helicopter prepared for take-off, its drooping blades rotating like blunted scythes, the down-draught sending up a shower of light from the disturbed vegetation. With an abrupt lurch it made a laboured ascent, swinging sideways through the air, and then moved away across the forest roof, its churning blades apparently gaining little purchase on the air. There was a confused shout of ‘Fire!’ from the soldiers below, and we could see clearly the vivid discharge of light which radiated from the blades like St Elmo’s fire. Then, with an agonized roar like the bellow of a stricken animal, the aircraft slid backwards through the air and plunged towards the forest canopy a hundred feet below, the two pilots plainly visible at their controls. Sirens sounded from the staff cars parked around the inspection area, and there was a concerted rush towards the forest as the helicopter disappeared from sight.
As we raced along the road we felt its impact with the ground, and a sudden pulse of light drummed through the trees. The road led towards the point of the crash, a few houses looming at intervals at the ends of empty drives.
‘The blades must have crystallized while it was standing near the trees,’ George Schneider shouted as we climbed over the perimeter fence. ‘You could see the crystals melting, like the branches in the centrifuge, but not quickly enough. Let’s hope the pilots are all right.’
Several soldiers ran ahead of us, waving us back, but we ignored them and hurried on through the trees. After fifty yards we were well within the body of the forest, and had entered an enchanted world, the spanish moss investing the great oaks with brilliant jewelled trellises. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything were sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of radiant light poured through the stained-glass canopy overhead, turning the roof of the forest into a continuous three-dimensional kaleidoscope.
The process of crystallization was here far more advanced. The white fences along the road were so heavily encrusted that they formed an unbroken palisade, the frost at least a foot thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, their plain white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic minarets and baroque domes. On a lawn of green glass spurs a child’s toy, perhaps once a red tricycle with yellow wheels, glittered like a Faberg gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns. Lying there, it reminded me of my daughter’s toys scattered on the lawn after my return from the hospital. They had glowed for a last time with the same prismatic light.