"Charles, wait!" As Ransom reached the entrance to the pavilion, Lomax hurried after him. "Don't leave yet, you're the only one I can trust!" Lomax plucked at his sleeve. His voice sank to a plaintive whisper. "They'll kill me, Charles, or turn me into a beast. Look what he's done to Miranda."

Ransom shook his head. "I don't agree, Richard," he said. "I think she's beautiful."

Lomax gazed after him, appalled. Ransom set off across the sand. Watching him in the distance from a dune above the swimming pool, the last smoke of the signal fire rising beside him, was the stilted figure of Quilter, the swan's head wavering against the evening sky.

For the next week Ransom remained with Quilter and Miranda, watching the disintegration of Richard Lomax. Ransom decided that as soon as possible he would continue his journey across the drained lake, but at night he could hear the sounds of the lions baying among the white dunes. The tall figure of Jonas would move along the lakeside road through the darkness, calling in his deep voice to the lions, which grumbled back at him. Their survival, confirming the fisher-captain's obsession with a lost river or lake, convinced Ransom that as soon as he had recovered he should carry on his search.

During the day he sat in the shade of the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. In the morning he went off toward the city with Whitman and Quilter to forage for food. At intervals among the dunes, deep shafts had been sunk into the basements. They would slide down them and crawl among the old freezer plant, mining out a few cans from the annealed sand. Most of them had perished, and the rancid contents were flung to the dogs or left among the rubble, where the few birds pecked at them. Ransom was not surprised to find that Quilter's food stores consisted of barely a -day's supplies, nor that Quilter was becoming progressively less interested in replenishing them. He seemed to accept that the coming end of the water in the reservoir would commit him finally to the desert, and that the drained river would now take him on its own terms.

Quilter built a small hutch for his mother in the entrance hall of the house, and she retired here in the evenings after spending the day with Miranda and the children.

Ransom slept in one of the wrecked cars near the pool. Whitman lived in the next vehicle, but after Ransom's arrival he moved off with his dogs and took up residence inside a drained fountain fifty yards from Lomax's pavilion. Keeping to himself, he resented Ransom's approaches.

Quilter, however, spent much of his time wandering around the edges of the pool, apparently trying to form some sort of relationship with Ransom, though unable to find a point of contact. Sometimes he would sit down in the dust a few feet from Ransom, letting the children climb over his shoulders, pulling at his furs and swan's cap.

At intervals this placid domestic scene would be interrupted by the appearance of Richard Lomax.

His performances, as Ransom regarded them, usually took the same form. Shortly before noon there was a sudden commotion from the pavilion, and the sounds of gongs ringing from the gilded spires. Quilter listened to this impassively, drawing obscure patterns in the dust with a finger for his children to puzzle and laugh over. Then there was a sudden shout and crackle as Lomax let off a firework. It fizzed away across the dunes, the bright trail dissolving crisply in the warm air. At last Lomax himself emerged, fully accoutered and pomaded, mincing out in his preposterous gray silk suit. Frowning angrily, he waved his arms, shouting insults at Quilter, and pointing repeatedly toward the reservoir. As Quilter leaned back on one elbow, Whitman crept up on Lomax with his dogs.

Lomax's tirade then mounted to a frenzied babble, his face working itself into a grotesque mask. Watching this tottering desert androgyne, Ransom felt that Lomax was reverting to some primitive level where the differentiation into male and female no longer occurred. Lomax was now a neuter, as sterile physically as he had become mentally.

At last, when the children became frightened, Quilter signaled to Whitman and a dog was let off at Lomax. In a flash of white fur the beast hurled itself at the architect, who turned and fled, slamming the jeweled doors into the dog's face as it flung itself at the decorated grilles.

For the rest of the day there was silence, until the performance the following morning. Although such displays of firecrackers and grimacing had presumably been effective during the previous years in dispersing other desert nomads who stumbled upon the oasis, Quilter seemed immune. Brooding quietly most of the time, and aware of the coming crisis in their lives, he sat among the dunes by the pool, playing with his children and with the birds who ventured up to his hands to collect the pieces of rancid meat. He fondled them all with a strange pity, as if he knew that this temporary period of calm would soon give way and was trying to free them from the need for water and food. Once or twice, as Quilter played with the birds, Ransom heard a sharp strangled croak, and saw the crushed plumage twisting slowly in Quilter's hands. Ransom watched the children as they waddled about under their swollen heads, playing with the dead birds, halfexpecting Quilter to snap their necks in a sudden access of violence.

More and more Quilter treated Whitman and Ransom in the same way, switching them out of his path with a long fur-topped staff. For the time being, Ransom accepted these blows, as a bond between -himself and the further possibilities of his life into which Quilter was leading him. Only with Miranda did Quilter retain his equable temper. The two of them would sit together in the concrete pool, as the water evaporated in the reservoir and the dunes outside drew nearer, like a last Adam and Eve waiting for the end of time.

Ransom saw nothing of Philip Jordan and Catherine. One morning when they climbed the dunes by the reservoir a familiar dark-faced figure was filling a canteen by the water. Quilter barely noticed him as he strode stiffly across the wet sand on his stilts, and by the time Whitman had released the dogs the youth had vanished.

Catherine Austen never appeared, but at night they heard the lions coming nearer, crying from the dunes by the lakeside.

"Quilter, you depraved beast! Come here, my Caliban, show yourself to your master!"

Sitting among the metal litter by the pool, Ransom ignored the shouts from Lomax's pavilion and continued to play with the eldest of Quilter's children. The five-year-old boy was his favorite companion. A large birthscar disfigured his right cheek and illuminated his face like a star, and his liquid eyes hovered below his swollen forehead like shy dragonflies. Each time Ransom held out his hands he peered brightly into Ransom's eyes, and with unerring insight touched the hand containing the stone. At times, he would reverse his choice, picking the empty hand as if out of sympathy.

"Caliban! For the last time…!"

Ransom looked up at the distant figure of Lomax, who had advanced twenty yards from his pavilion, the sunlight shimmering off his silk suit He postured among the low dunes, his small powdered face puckered like an obscene shriveled fig. In one hand he waved a small silvertopped cane like a wand.

"Quilter…!" Lomax's voice rose to a shriek. Quilter had gone off somewhere, and he could only see Ransom sitting among the fallen columns of the loggia, like a mendicant attached to the fringes of a tribal court.

Ransom nodded encouragingly to the child, and said: "Go on. Which one?" The child watched him with his drifting smile, eyes wide and bright as if about to divulge some delightful secret He shook his head, arms held firmly behind his back. Reluctantly Ransom opened his empty hands, and the child eyed him with a pleased nod.

"Pretty good," Ransom commented. He pointed at the shouting figure of Lomax. "It looks as if your father is frying the same technique. I'm afraid Mr. Lomax isn't as clever as you." He pulled a tin from his pocket and took off the lid. Inside were two pieces of dried meat. First wiping his fingers, he gave one to the child. Holding it tightly, he toddled away among the ruins.

Ransom leaned back against the column. He was debating when to leave the oasis and take his chances with the lions when a stinging blow struck his left arm above the elbow.

He looked up into the grimacing, powdered mask of Richard Lomax, silvertopped cane in one hand.

"Ransom…!" he hissed. "Get out…!" His suit was puffed up, the lapels flaring like the gills of an angry fish. "Stealing my water! Get _out!_"

"Richard, for God's sake-" Ransom stood up. There was a soft clatter among the stones, and the child reappeared. In his hands he carried a small white gull, apparently dead, its wings neatly furled.

Lomax gazed down at the child, a demented Prospero examining the offspring of his violated daughter. He looked around at the dusty garbage-strewn oasis, as if stunned by the horror of this island infested by nightmares. He raised his cane to strike the child. It stepped back, eyes suddenly still, and opened its hands. With a squawk the bird rose into the air and flashed past Lomax's face.

There was a shout across the dunes. The stilted figure of Quilter came striding over the rubble a hundred yards away, furs lifting in the hot sunlight. Beside him with the dogs was Whitman, pushing along the broken figure of Jonas, the dogs tearing at the rags of his trousers.

Ignoring Ransom, Lomax spun on his white shoes and raced off across the sand. The dogs broke leash and ran after him, Quilter at their heels, the stilts carrying him in sixfoot strides. Whitman fumbled with the leash, and the bending figure of Jonas straightened up and swung a fist at the back of his neck, felling him to the ground. Whitman scrambled to his feet, and Jonas unfurled a net from his waist and with a twist of his hands rolled Whitman into the dust again. Retrieving the net, he leapt away on his long legs.

Halfway to the pavilion, Lomax turned to face the dogs. From his pockets he pulled out handfuls of firecrackers, and hurled them down at their feet. The thunderfiashes burst and flared, and the dogs broke off as Quilter charged through them.

He reached one hand toward Lomax. There was a gleam of silver in the air and a long blade appeared from the shaft of Lomax's cane. He darted forwards on one foot and pierced Quilter's shoulder. Before Quilter could recover, he danced off behind the safety of the doors.