He broke off as the mulatto barked something at him and went out onto the veranda. They could hear Thorensen approaching with two or three men, their boots crushing the brittle foliage along the bank.
As Sanders moved toward the door Kagwa touched his arm. A warning smile held the doctor's attention. "Remember, Doctor, walk one way through the forest, but look two ways-" Then, rifle in hand, he limped off on his white leg.
Thorensen greeted Sanders on the veranda. He clumped up the steps, zipping up his leather jacket in the tomb-like coldness of the summer house.
"Still here, Doctor? I've got a couple of guides for you." He pointed to the two Africans who stood at the bottom of the steps. Members of the crew of his motorcruiser, they wore jeans and blue denim shirts. One had a white peaked cap pulled down across his forehead. Both carried carbines and were scanning the forest with marked interest. "My boat is moored near here," Thorensen explained, "I'd send you back by river if the engine hadn't seized up. Anyway, they'll get you to Mont Royal in no time."
With this he strode off into the kitchen, and a moment later Sanders heard him enter the bedroom.
Surrounded by the glistening figures of the four Africans, etched in hoar frost against the darkness, Sanders waited for Thorensen to reappear. Then he turned and followed his guides, leaving Thorensen and Serena Ventress barricaded together in the sepulchre of the summer house. As they entered the forest he looked back at the veranda, where the young African, Kagwa, was still watching him. His dark body, almost exactly bisected by the white bandages, reminded Sanders of Louise Peret and her references to the day of the equinox. Thinking over his brief conversation with Kagwa, he began to realize Thorensen's motives for trying to keep Serena Venrress within the affected zone. Fearing that she might die, he preferred this half-animate immolation within the crystal vaults to her physical death in the world outside. Perhaps he had seen insects and birds pinioned alive inside their prisms, and misguidedly decided that this offered the one means of escape for his dying bride.
Following a path that skirted the inlet, they set off toward the inspection site, which Sanders estimated to be some three-quarters of a mile down-river. With luck an army unit would be stationed at the nearest margins of the affected zone, and the soldiers would be able to retrace his steps and rescue the mine-owner and Serena Ventress.
The two guides moved along at a rapid pace, barely pausing to choose their direction, one in front of Sanders and the other, wearing the peaked cap, ten yards behind. After fifteen minutes, when they had covered very nearly a mile and yet were still within the main body of the forest, Sanders realized that the sailors' real task was not to guide him to safety at all. In turning him out into the forest Thorensen was no doubt using him, in Ventress's phrase, as a decoy, confident that the architect would try to reach Sanders for news of his abducted wife.
When, for the second time, they entered a small glade between two groups of forest oaks Sanders stopped and walked back to the sailor in the peaked cap. He started to remonstrate with him, but the man shook his head and beckoned Sanders on with his carbine.
Five minutes later Sanders found that he was alone. The pathway ahead was deserted. He made his way back to the glade, where the shadows shone emptily on the forest floor. The guides had disappeared into the undergrowth.
Sanders glanced over his shoulder at the dark grottoes around the glade, listening for any footsteps, but the sheaths of the trees sang and crackled as the forest cooled in the darkness. Above, through the lattices that stretched across the glade, he could see the fractured bowl of the moon. Around him, in the vitreous walls, the reflected stars glittered like fire-flies.
He pressed on along the path. His clothes had begun to glow in the dark, the frost that covered his suit spangled by the starlight. Spurs of crystal grew from the dial of his wrist-watch, imprisoning the hands within a medallion of moonstone.
A hundred yards behind him the roar of a shotgun drummed through the trees. A carbine fired twice in reply, and a confused medley of running feet, shouts and gunfire reached Sanders as he crouched behind a trunk. Abruptly everything fell quiet again. Sanders waited, searching the darkness around him. A few fragmentary, half-formed noises came down the pathway. There was a brief shout, cut off by a second blast from the shotgun. As if far away, an African's voice cried plaintively.
Sanders made his way back through the trees. Five yards from the path, in a hollow among the roots of an oak, he found the dying figure of one of his guides. The man half-sat against the trunk, knocked back across the roots by the force of the gunbiast. He watched Sanders approach with vague eyes, one hand touching the blood that ran from his shattered chest. Ten feet away lay his peaked cap, the imprint of a small foot stamped into its crown.
Sanders knelt down beside him. The African looked away. His wet eyes were staring through an interval in the trees at the distant river. Its petrified surface stretched like white ice to the jeweled forest on the opposite shore.
A siren sounded from the direction of the summer house. Realizing that Thorensen and his men would make short work of him, Sanders stood up. The African was dying quietly at his feet. Leaving him, Sanders crossed the path and set off toward the river.
When he reached the bank he could see the motorcruiser moored in a pooi of clear water a quarter of a mile away, at the mouth of a small creek that wound off past a ruined jetty. A searchlight shone from the bridge, playing on the white surface that swept past the open water down the channel of the river.
Crouching down, Sanders ducked in and out of the grass growing from the edges of the bank. His running shadow, illuminated by the sweeping searchlight, flickered ahead of him among the vitrified trees, the dark image speckled by the jeweled light.
Half a mile down-river the channel had widened into a broad glacier. Across the surface Sanders could see the distant roof-tops of Mont Royal. Like a causeway of frozen gas, it flowed on through the darkness, riven by deep faults. At its bottom ran the icy water of the original channel. Sanders peered over the edges of the fissures, hoping for some sign of Captain Radek's body stranded on the beaches of ice below.
Forced to leave the river, when the surface broke up into a succession of giant cataracts, he approached the outskirts of Mont Royal. The frosted outline of the picket fence and the debris of military equipment marked the site of the former inspection area. The laboratory trailer, and the tables and equipment near by, had been enveloped by the intense frost. The branches in the centrifuge had blossomed again into brilliant jeweled sprays. Sanders picked up a discarded helmet, now a glass porcupine, and drove it through a window of the trailer.
In the darkness the white-roofed houses of the mining town gleamed like the funerary temples of a necropolis. Their cornices were ornamented with countless spires and gargoyles, linked together across the roads by the expanding tracery. A frozen wind moved through the deserted streets, waist-high forests of fossil spurs, the abandoned cars embedded within them like armored saurians on an ancient ocean floor.
Everywhere the process of transformation was accelerating. Sanders's feet were encased in huge crystal slippers. These spurs enabled him to walk along the sharp edges of the roadway, but soon the opposing needles would fuse together and lock him to the ground.
The eastern entrance to the town was sealed by the forest and the erupting roadway. Sanders limped back to the river, hoping to climb the series of cataracts and make his way back to the base camp to the south. As he scaled the first of the crystal blocks he could hear the underground streams beneath the moraine sluicing away into the open river.