At this time, however, he discovered that he was no longer alone in the forest. Whenever the overhead canopy of trees gave way to the open sky, along the bed of the stream or in the small clearings, he passed the halfcrystallized bodies of men and women fused against the trunks of the trees, looking up at the refracted sun. Most of them were elderly couples seated together with their bodies fusing into one another as they merged with the trees and the jeweled undergrowth. The only young man he passed was a soldier in field uniform, sitting on a fallen trunk by the edge of the stream. His helmet had blossomed into an immense carapace of crystals, a solar umbrella that enclosed his face and shoulders.
Below the soldier the surface of the stream was traversed by a deep fault. At its bottom a narrow channel of water still flowed, washing the submerged legs of three soldiers who had set out to ford the stream at this point and were now embalmed in its crystal walls. Now and then their legs stirred in a slow liquid way, as if the men, roped together around their waists, were forever marching through this glacier of crystals, their faces lost in the blur of light around them.
There was a distant movement through the forest, and the sound of voices. Sanders hurried on, clasping the heavy cross to his chest. Fifty yards away, in a clearing between two groves of trees, a troupe of people dressed like harlequins were moving through the forest, dancing and shouting to one another. Sanders caught up with them and stopped at the edge of the clearing, trying to count the scores of dark-skinned men and women of all ages, some of them with small children, who were taking part in this graceful saraband. They were wandering in a loose procession, small groups breaking away to dance around single trees or bushes. There were well over a hundred of them, passing through the forest with no evident route in mind. Their arms and faces were transformed by the crystal growth, and already their drab loincloths and robes were beginning to frost and jeweL
As Sanders stood by his cross a small party came over to him in a series of leaps and jumps, then gamboled around him like newly admitted entrants to paradise serenading an attendant archangel. An old man with a deformed light-filled face passed Sanders, gesturing at his fingerless hands as the jeweled light poured from his stunted joints. Sanders remembered the lepers seated beneath the trees near the mission hospital. During the previous days the whole tribe had entered the forest. They danced away from him on their crippled legs, holding their children by the hands, grotesque rainbows dazzling their faces.
As the lepers moved off, Sanders followed behind them, dragging the cross in both hands. Through the trees he saw the train of the procession, but they seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared, as if eager to familiarize themselves with every tree and grove in their new-found paradise. However, for no reason the entire troupe then turned and came round again, as if delighted to take a last look at Sanders and his cross. As they went by Sanders caught a glimpse of a tall dark-robed woman at their head, calling to the others in a clear voice. Her pale arms and face already shone with the crystal light of the forest. She turned to look back, and Sanders shouted over the bobbing heads: "Suzanne! Suzanne, here-!"
But the woman and the remainder of the troupe had scattered again among the trees. Hobbling along, Sanders found the last remnants of their meager baggage lying on the ground-rag shoes and broken baskets, begging bowls with their few grains of rice already half fused to the vitrified ground.
Once Sanders came across the half-crystallized body of a small child who had fallen behind and been unable to keep up with the others. Lying down to rest, it had become fused to the ground. Sanders listened to the voices fading away among the trees, the child's parents somewhere among them. Then he lowered the cross over the child and waited as the crystals deliquesced from its arms and legs. Freed again, the child's deformed hands clasped the air. With a Start it clambered to its feet and ran off through the trees, the dissolving light pouring from its head and shoulders.
Sanders was still following the procession, lost far away in the distance, when he reached the summer house where Thorensen and Serena Ventress had first taken refuge. It was now dusk, and the jewels of the cross shone faintly in the failing light. Already the cross had lost much of its power, and most of the smaller diamonds and rubies had faded to blunted nodes of carbon and corundum. Only the large emeralds still burned strongly against the white hulk of Thorensen's cruiser trapped in its fault in front of the summer house.
Sanders walked along the bank, past the crystal remains of the mulatto in his crocodile skin. The two had become merged, the man himself, half-white and halfblack, fusing with the dark jeweled beast. Their own outlines were still visible as they effloresced through each other's tissues. The face of the mulatto shone through the superimposed jaws and eyes of the great crocodile.
The door of the summer house was open. Sanders climbed the steps and walked into the chamber. He looked down at the bed, in whose frosted depths, like swimmers asleep on the bottom of an enchanted pool, Serena and the mine-owner lay together. Thorensen's eyes were closed, and the delicate petals of a blood red rose blossomed from the hole in his breast like an exquisite marine plant. Beside him Serena slept quietly, the unseen motion of her heart sheathing her body in a faint amber glow, the palest residue of life. Although Thorensen had died trying to save her, she lived on in her own half-death.
Something glittered in the dusk behind Sanders. He turned to see a brilliant chimera, a man with incandescent arms and chest, race past among the trees, a cascade of particles diffusing in the air behind him. He flinched back behind the cross, but the man had vanished, whirling himself away among the crystal vaults. As his luminous wake faded Sanders heard his voice echoing across the frosted air, the plaintive words jeweled and ornamented like everything else in that transmogrified world. "_Serena-! Serena-!_"
14 The prismatic sun
Two months later, as he completed his letter to Dr. Paul Derain, director of the leper hospital at Fort Isabelle, in the quiet of his hotel bedroom at Port Matarre, Sanders wrote:
– it seems hard to believe, Paul, here in this empty hotel, that the strange events of that phantasmagoric forest ever occurred. Yet in fact I am little more than forty miles as the crow (or should I say, the gryphon?) flies from the focal area ten miles to the south of Mont Royal, and if I need any reminder there is the barely healed wound on my arm. According to the bartender downstairs-I'm glad to say that he, at least, is still at his post (almost everyone else has left) -the forest is now advancing at the rate of some four hundred yards each day. One of the visiting journalists talking to Louise claims that at this rate of progress at least a third of the earth's surface will be affected by the end of the next decade, and a score of the world's capital cities petrified beneath layers of prismatic crystal, as Miami has already been-no doubt you have seen reports of the abandoned resort as a city of a thousand cathedral spires, a vision materialized from St. John the Divine.
To tell the truth, however, the prospect causes me little worry. As I have said, Paul, it's obvious to me now that its origins are more than physical. When I stumbled out of the forest into an army cordon five miles from Mont Royal, two days after seeing the helpless phantom that had once been Ventress, the gold cross clutched in my arms, I was determined never to visit the forest again. By one of those ludicrous inversions of logic, I found myself, far from acclaimed as a hero, standing summary trial before a military court and charged with looting. The gold cross had apparently been stripped of its jewels-the generous benefaction of the mining companies-and in vain did I protest that these vanished stones had been the price of my survival. Only the intercession of Max Clair and Louise Peret saved me. At our suggestion a patrol of soldiers equipped with jeweled crosses entered the forest in an attempt to find Suzanne and Ventress, but they were forced to retreat.