Certainly their senile father, the Reverend Johnstone, could now be discounted as an influence. Sitting like a stranded Neptune in the bowels of this saltlocked wreck, far out of sight of the sea, he drooled and wavered on his throne of blankets, clutching at his daughters' arms. He had been injured in the bombardment, and the right side of his face was pink and hairless. The gray beard tufting from his left cheek gave him the appearance of a demented Lear, grasping at the power he had given to his daughters. His head bobbed about, and Ransom guessed that for two or three years he had been almost blind. The confined world of the settlement was limited by his own narrowing vision, sinking into a rigid matriarchy dominated by his two daughters.

If any escape lay for Ransom, only the third daughter could provide it. As he reached the deserted boatdeck of the freighter, Ransom felt that the climb had carried him in all senses above the drab world of the settlement.

"Charles!" Vanessa Johnstone was lying in her bunk in the cold cabin, gazing at the gulls on the rail through the open door. Her black hair lay in a single coil on her white breast. Her plain face was as smooth and unmarked as when she sat by the window of her attic bedroom in Larchmont. Ransom closed the door and seated himself on the bunk beside her, tentatively taking her hands. She seized them tightly, greeting him with her slow smile. "Charles, you're here-"

"I came to see Hendry, Vanessa." She embraced his shoulders with her cold hands. Her blood always seemed chilled, but it ran with the quicksilver of time, its clear streams darting like the fish he had chased at dawn. The cold air in the cabin and her white skin, like the washed shells gleaming on the beaches in the bright winter sun, made his mind run again.

"Hendry-why?"

"I…" Ransom hesitated, frightened of at last committing himself to Vanessa. If she opened his way to the settlement he would be cast with her forever. "I want to bring Judith here and join the settlement. Hendry wasn't very keen."

"But, Charles-" Vanessa shook her head. "You can't come here. It's out of all question."

"Why?" Ransom took her wrists. "You both assume that. It's a matter of survival now. The sea is so far out-"

"The sea! Forget the sea!" Vanessa regarded Ransom with her somber eyes. "If you come here, Charles, it will be the end for you. All day you'll be raking the salt from the boilers."

Ransom turned away, and for a few moments gazed through the porthole. In a tired voice he asked: "What else is there, Vanessa?"

He waited as she lay back against the white pillow, the cold air in the cabin turning the black spirals of her hair. "Do you know, Vanessa?"

Her eyes were on the gulls high above the ship, picking at the body of the swordfish hanging from the mast below the whalebone cross.

High above the dunes, in the tower of the lightship, Ransom watched Philip Jordan walking among the salt tips on the shore. Silhouetted against the white slopes, his tall figure seemed stooped and preoccupied, as he picked his way slowly along the stony path. He passed behind one of the tips, and then climbed the sandslopes that reached down from the ravines between the hills, a cloth bag swinging from his hand.

Sheltered from the wind by the fractured panels of the glass cupola, Ransom for a moment enjoyed the play of sunlight on the sand dunes and on the eroded faces of the cliff. The coastal hills now marked the edges of the desert that stretched in a continuous table across the continent, a wasteland of dust and ruined cities, but there was always more color and variety here than in the drab world of the saltflats. In the morning the seams of quartz would melt with light, pouring like liquid streams down the faces of the cliffs, the sand in the ravines turning into frozen fountains. In the afternoon the colors would mellow again, the shadows searching out the hundreds of caves and aerial grottos, until the evening light, shining from beyond the cliffs to the west, illuminated the whole coastline like an enormous ruby lantern, glowing through the casements of the cave-mouths as if lit by some subterranean fire.

When Philip Jordan had gone Ransom climbed down the stairway and stepped out onto the deck of the lightship. Beyond the rail a single melancholy herring circled the tank-Grady had come to demand his due while Ransom was at the settlement-and the prospect of the dismal meal to be made of the small fish caused Ransom to turn abruptly from the shack. Judith was asleep, exhausted by her altercation with Grady. Below him the deck shelved toward the saltdunes sliding across the beach. Crossing the rail, Ransom walked off toward the shore, avoiding the shallow pools of brine disturbed by the wind.

The salt slopes became firmer. He climbed up toward the salt tips, rising against the hills like white pyramids. The remains of a large still jutted through the surface of the slope, the corroded valve-gear decorating the rusty shaft. He stepped across the brown shell of a metal hut, his feet sinking through the lace-like iron, then climbed past a pile of derelict motorcar bodies half-buried in the salt. When he reached the tips he searched the ground for Philip Jordan's footprints, but the dry salt was covered with dozens of tracks left by the sledges pulled by the quarry workers.

Beyond the salt tips stretched what had once been the coastal shelf. The original dunes had been buried under the salt washed up from the beach during the storms, and by the drifts of sand and dust blown down from the hills. The gray sandy soil, in which a few clumps of grass gained a precarious purchase, was strewn with half-buried pieces of ironwork and metal litter. Somewhere beneath Ransom's feet were the wrecks of thousands of cars and trucks. Isolated hoods and windscreens poked through the sand, and sections of barbed wire fencing rose into the air for a few yards. Here and there the roof-timbers of one of the beachside villas sheltered the remains of an old hearth.

Some four hundred yards to his right was the mouth of the drained river, along which he had first reached the shore ten years earlier. Partly hidden by the quarry workings, the banks had been buried under the thousands of tons of sand and loose rock slipping down into the empty bed from the adjacent hills. Ransom skirted the edges of the quarry, making his way carefully through the wasteland of old chassis and smashed fenders thrown to one side.

The entrance to the quarry sloped to his left, the ramp leading down to the original beach. In the sandy face of the quarry were the half-excavated shells of a dozen cars and trailers, their fractured windows and grilles like veins of fossil quartz, embedded in the gritty face like the intact bodies of armored saurians. Here, at the quarry, the men from the settlement were digging out the old car shells, picking through them for tires, seats, and old rags of clothing.

Beyond the quarry the dunes gave way to a small hollow, from which protruded the faded gilt roof of an old fairground booth. The striped wooden awning hung over the silent horses of the merry-go-round, frozen like magical unicorns on their spiral shafts. Next to it was another of the booths, a line of washing strung from its decorated eaves. Ransom followed one of the pathways cut through the dunes into this little dell. Here Mrs. Quilter lived out of sight of the sea and shore, visited by the quarry-workers and womenfolk of the settlement, for whom she practised her mild necromancy and fortune-telling. Although frowned upon by the Reverend Jobnstone and his captains, these visits across the dunes served a useful purpose, introducing into their sterile lives,. Ransom believed, those random elements, that awareness of chance and time, without which they would soon have lost all sense of identity.

As he entered the dell, Mrs. Quilter was sitting in the doorway of her booth, darning an old shawl. At the sound of footsteps she put away her needle and closed the lower half of the painted door, then kicked it open again when she identified Ransom. In the ten years among the dunes she had barely aged. If anything her beaked face was softer, giving her the expression of a quaint and amiable owl. Her small round body was swathed in layers of colored fabrics stitched together from the oddments salvaged by the quarry workers- squares of tartan blanket, black velvet, and faded corduroy, ruffed with strips of embroidered damask.

Beside her, outside the door, was a large jar of fish-oil. A dozen herrings, part of her recent take, dried in the sun. On the slopes around her, lines of shells and conches had been laid out in the sand to form a series of pentacles and crescents.

Dusting the sand off the shells as Ransom approached was Catherine Austen. She looked up, greeting him with a nod. Despite the warm sunlight in the hollow, she had turned up the leather collar of her fleece-lined jacket, hiding her lined face. Her self-immersed eyes reminded Ransom of the first hard years she had spent with the old woman, eking out their existence among the shells of the old motorcars. The success of their present relationship-their fading red hair made them seem like mother and daughter-was based on their absolute dependence on each other and the rigorous exclusion of everyone else.

On the sloping sand Catherine had set out the signs of the zodiac, the dotted lines outlining the crab, ram, and scorpion.

"That looks professional," Ransom commented. "What's my horoscope for the day?"

"When were you born? Which month?"

"Cathy!" Mrs. Quilter waved her little fist at Ransom from her booth. "That'll be a herring, doctor. Don't give him charity, dear."

Catherine nodded at the old woman, then turned to Ransom with a faint smile. Her strong, darkly tanned face was hardened by the spray and wind. "Which month? Don't tell me you've forgotten?"

"June," Ransom said. "Aquarius, I assume."

"Cancer," Catherine corrected. "The sign of the crab, doctor, the sign of deserts. I wish I'd known."

"Fair enough," Ransom said. They walked past the merrygo-round. He raised his hand to one of the horses and touched its eyes. "Deserts? Yes, I'll take the rest as read."

"But which desert, doctor? There's a question for you."

Ransom shrugged. "Does it matter? It seems we have a knack of turning everything we touch into sand and dust. We've even sown the sea with its own salt."

"That's a despairing view, doctor. I hope you give your patients a better prognosis."