A long crevice with an overhanging sill ran diagonally across the cataract, and led him into a series of galleries like the aerial terraces of a cathedral. Beyond these the icefalls spilled away onto a white beach that seemed to mark the southern limits of the affected zone. The vents of the buried channels lay among the icefalls, and a clear stream of moonlit water ran between the blocks and opened into a shallow river, at least ten feet below the original course. Sanders walked along the frozen beach, looking at the vitrified forest on either side. Already the trees were duller, the crystal sheaths lying in patches against the sides of the trunk like half-melted ice.

Fifty yards along the ice beach, which narrowed as the water swept past it, Sanders saw a man's dark figure standing beneath one of the overhanging trees. With a tired wave, Sanders began to run toward him.

"Wait!" he called, afraid that the man might sidestep into the forest. "Over here-"

Ten yards from him Sanders slowed to a walk. The man had not moved from beneath the tree. Head down, he was carrying a large piece of driftwood across his shoulders-a soldier, Sanders decided, foraging for firewood.

As Sanders drew up to him, the man stepped forward, in a gesture that was at once defensive and aggressive. The light from the icefalls illuminated his ravaged body.

"Radek-good God!" Appalled, Sanders stumbled back, almost tripping over a half-exposed root in the ice. "Radek-?"

The man hesitated, like a wounded animal uncertain whether to surrender or attack. Across his shoulders he still carried the wooden yoke which Sanders had fastened there. The left side of his body gave a painful heave, as if he were trying to throw off this incubus, but he was unable to raise his hands to the buckle behind his head. The right side of his body seemed to hang loosely, suspended from the wooden cross-tree like a long-dead corpse. A huge wound had been torn across the shoulder, the flesh bared to the elbow and sternum. The raw face, from which a single eye gazed at Sanders, still ran with blood that fell to the white ice below.

Recognizing the belt with which he had fastened the wooden spar to Radek's shoulders, Dr. Sanders moved forward, gesturing to the man as if to pacify him. He remembered Ventress's warning, and the pieces of crystal that he had torn away from the body when he dragged Radek from the helicopter. Then, too, he remembered Aragon tapping his eye-tooth and saying "Covered-? My tooth is the whole gold, Doctor."

"Radek, let me help-" Sanders edged forward as Radek hesitated. "Believe me, I wanted to save you-"

Still trying to shift the wooden spar from his shoulders, Radek gazed down at Sanders. Unformed thoughts seemed to cross his face, and then the one blinking eye came into focus.

"Radek-" Sanders raised a hand to restrain him, unsure whether Radek would charge him or bolt like a wounded beast into the forest.

With a shambling step, Radek drew nearer. A gruntlike noise came from his throat. He moved again, almost toppled by the swinging spar.

"Take me-" he began. There was another lurching stride. He held out a bloody arm like a scepter. "Take me _back!_"

He struggled on, the heavy spar swinging his shoulders from left to right, one foot flapping on to the ice, his face lit by the jeweled light from the forest. Sanders watched him as he jerked forward, the arm held out as if to clasp Sanders's shoulder. Already, however, he seemed to have forgotten Sanders, his attention fixed on the light from the icefalls.

Sanders moved out of his way, ready to let him go by. With a sudden sidestep Radek swung the wooden beam and drove Sanders in front of him. "_Take me-!_"

"Radek-!" Winded by the blow, Sanders stumbled ahead, like an onlooker driven towards some bloody Golgotha by its intended victim. One lurching stride after another, his pace quickening as the prismatic light of the forest mingled again with his blood, Radek pressed on, the beam across his shoulders cutting off Sanders's escape.

Sanders ran towards the icefalls. Twenty yards from the first of the blocks, where the clear streams of the subterranean channels ran across his feet, as dark and cool as his memories of the world beyond, he turned and raced down into the shallows. Radek let out his stricken cry for the last time, and Sanders plunged to his shoulders into the river and swam away across the silver water.

10 The mask

Some hours later, as he walked dripping through the edges of the illuminated forest, Sanders came to a wide road deserted in the moonlight. In the distance he saw the outlines of a white hotel. With its long façade and tumbled columns it looked like a floodlit ruin. To the left of the road, the forest slopes moved upwards to the blue hills above Mont Royal.

This time, as he approached the man standing beside a Land-Rover in the empty forecourt of the hotel, his wave was answered by a ready shout. A second figure patrolling the ruined hotel ran across the drive. A searchlight on the roof of the car was played on to the road in front of Dr. Sanders. The two natives, wearing the uniform of the local hospital service, came forward to meet him. In the light from the forest their liquid eyes watched Dr. Sanders as they helped him into the car, their dark fingers feeling at the drenched fabric of his suit.

Dr. Sanders sat back, too tired to identify himself to the men. One of them climbed into the driving-seat and switched on the car's radio transmitter. As he spoke into the microphone his eyes stared at the crystals still dissolving on Dr. Sanders's shoes and wristwatch. The white light sparkled faintly in the dark cabin. The last of the crystals on the dial of the wristwatch gave out their light and faded, and with a sudden movement the hands began to turn.

The road marked the final boundary of the affected zone, and to Dr. Sanders the darkness around him seemed absolute, the black air inert and empty. After the endless glimmer of the vitrified forest the trees along the road, the ruined hotel and even the two men with him appeared to be shadowy images of themselves, replicas of illuminated originals in some distant land at the source of the petrffied river. Despite his relief at escaping from the forest, this feeling of flatness and unreality, of being in the slack shallows of a spent world, filled Sanders with a sense of failure and disappointment.

A car approached along the road. The driver signalled with the searchlight on the Land-Rover and the car turned and came to a halt beside them. A tall man wearing an army battledress over his civilian clothes jumped out. He peered through the window at Sanders, and then nodded at the native driver.

"Dr. Sanders-?" he asked. "Are you all right?"

" Aragon!" Sanders opened his door and started to get out, but Aragon motioned him back. "Captain-I'd almost forgotten. Is Louise with you? Mademoiselle Peret?"

Aragon shook his head. "She's with the other visitors at the camp, Doctor. We thought you might come out this way, I've been watching the road." Aragon moved aside, so that the light from his car's headlamps showed more of Sanders's face. He looked into Sanders's eyes, as if trying to assess the inner impact of the forest. "You're lucky to be here, Doctor. Many of the soldiers are feared lost in the forest-they think Captain Radek is dead. The affected area is spreading out in all directions. It's many times the previous size."

The driver in Aragon 's car cut his engine. As the headlamps faded Sanders sat forward. "Louise-she's safe-Captain? I'd like to see her."

"Tomorrow, Doctor. She will come to your friends' clinic. You must see them first, she understands that. Dr. Clair and his wife are at the clinic now. They will look after you."

He went back to his car. It turned and made off at speed down the dark road.