The Crystal World. Robert MacFarlane

the window and look up to the southeast.’

      ‘What?’ Sanders gazed at her serious face, beckoning him across the room in the moonlight. ‘Of course, Louise …’

      She waited by the bed as he crossed the faded carpet and unlatched the mosquito doors. Peering upwards, he stared into the star-filled sky. In front of him, at an elevation of forty-five degrees, he picked out the constellations Taurus and Orion. Passing them was a star of immense magnitude, a huge corona of light borne in front of it and eclipsing the smaller stars in its path. At first Sanders failed to recognize this as the Echo satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least ten-fold, transforming the thin pin-point of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jewelled flowers that afternoon.

      Thinking lamely that perhaps the balloon might be breaking up, forming a cloud of aluminium like a gigantic mirror, Sanders watched the satellite setting in the southeast. As it faded the dark canopy of the jungle flickered with a million points of light. Beside him Louise’s white body glittered in a sheath of diamonds, the black surface of the river below spangled like the back of a sleeping snake.

       CHAPTER THREE

       MULATTO ON THE CATWALKS

      IN the darkness the worn columns of the arcade receded towards the eastern fringes of the town like pale ghosts, over-topped by the silent canopy of the forest. Sanders stopped outside the entrance of the hotel, and let the night air play on his creased suit. The faint odour of Louise’s scent still clung to his face and hands. He stepped out into the road and looked up at his window. Unsettled by the image of the satellite, which had crossed the night sky like a warning beacon, Sanders had left the narrow, high-ceilinged hotel room and decided to go out for a walk. As he set off along the arcade towards the river, now and then passing the huddled form of a native asleep inside a roll of corrugated paper, he thought of Louise, with her quick smile and nervous hands, and her obsessional sun-glasses. For the first time he felt convinced of the complete reality of Port Matarre. Already his memories of the leproserie and Suzanne Clair had faded. In some ways his journey to Mont Royal had lost its point. If anything it would have made more sense to take Louise back to Fort Isabelle and try to work out his life afresh there in terms of her rather than Suzanne.

      Yet the need to find Suzanne Clair, whose distant presence, like a baleful planet, hung over the jungle towards Mont Royal, still remained. For Louise, too, he sensed that there were other preoccupations. She had told him something of her unsettled background, a childhood in one of the French communities in the Congo, and later of some kind of humiliation during the revolt against the central government after independence, when she and several other journalists had been caught in the rebel province of Katanga by mutinous gendarmerie. For Louise, as well as for himself, Port Matarre with its empty light was a neutral point, a dead zone on the African equator to which they had both been drawn. However, nothing achieved there, between themselves or anyone else, would necessarily have any lasting value.

      At the end of the street, opposite the lights of the half-empty police prefecture, Sanders turned along the river and walked towards the native market. The steamer had sailed for Libreville, and the main wharves were deserted, the grey hulls of four landing-craft tied together in pairs. Below the market was the native harbour, a maze of small piers and catwalks. This water-borne shanty town of some two hundred boats and rafts was occupied at night by the stall-holders in the market. A few fires burned from the tin stoves in the steering wells, lighting up the sleeping cubicles beneath the curved rattan roofs. One or two men sat on the catwalks above the boats, and a small group were playing dice at the end of the first pier, but otherwise the floating cantonment was silent, its cargo of jewellery eclipsed by the night.

      The bar which Louise and he had visited the previous afternoon was still open. In the alley-way opposite the entrance two African youths in blue denims were lounging around an abandoned motor-car, one of them sitting on the bonnet against the windscreen. As Sanders entered the bar they watched him with studied casualness.

      The bar was almost empty. At the far end a European plantation manager and his African foreman were talking to two of the local half-caste traders. Sanders carried his whisky to a booth by the window, and looked out across the river, calculating when the satellite would make a second traverse.

      He was thinking again of the jewelled leaves he had seen in the market that afternoon when someone touched his shoulder. ‘Dr. Sanders? You’re up late, Doctor?’

      Sanders turned to find the small, white-suited figure of Ventress gazing down at him with his familiar ironic smile. Remembering their brush the previous day, Sanders said: ‘No, Ventress, early. I’m a day ahead of you.’

      Ventress nodded eagerly, as if glad to see Sanders gaining an advantage over him, even if only a verbal one. Although he was standing, he seemed to Sanders to have shrunk in size, his jacket tightly buttoned across his narrow chest.

      ‘That’s good, Sanders, very good.’ Ventress glanced around the deserted booths. ‘Can I join you for a moment?’

      ‘Well …’ Sanders made no effort to be agreeable. The incident with the automatic pistol reminded him of the element of calculation in everything Ventress did. After the past few hours with Louise the last person he wanted near him was Ventress with his manic rhythms. ‘Could you—?’

      ‘My dear Sanders, don’t let me embarrass you! I’ll stand.’ Oblivious of Sanders’s half-turned shoulder, Ventress carried on. ‘How sensible of you, Doctor, the nights in Port Matarre are far more interesting than the days. Don’t you agree?’

      Sanders looked around at this, uncertain of Ventress’s point. The man watching from the opposite arcade as he and Louise made their way up the staircase might well have been Ventress. ‘In a sense …’

      ‘Astronomy isn’t one of your hobbies, by any chance?’ Ventress asked. He leaned over the table with his mock smile.

      ‘I saw the satellite, if that’s what you’re driving at,’ Sanders said. ‘Tell me, how do you account for it – the sudden increase in magnitude?’

      Ventress nodded sagely. ‘A large question, Doctor. To answer it I would need – literally, I fear – all the time in the world …’

      Before Sanders could question him the door opened and one of the African youths he had seen by the car entered. A quick glance passed between himself and Ventress, and the youth slipped out again.

      With a short bow at Sanders, Ventress turned and pulled his crocodile-skin suitcase from the booth behind Sanders. He paused on his way out and whispered at Sanders: ‘All the time in the world … remember that, Doctor!’

      Wondering what it was that Ventress felt the need to hide behind these riddles, Dr. Sanders finished his whisky. Ventress’s white figure, suitcase in hand, disappeared into the darkness near the piers, the two Africans moving ahead of him.

      Sanders gave him five minutes to make his departure, assuming that Ventress was about to leave by boat, whether hired or stolen, for Mont Royal. Although he would soon be following Ventress there, Sanders was glad to be left alone in Port Matarre. Ventress’s presence in some way added an unnecessary random element to the already confused patterns of arcade and shadow, like a chess-game in which both players suspected that there was a concealed piece on the board.

      As he walked past the abandoned motor-car, Sanders noticed that some sort of commotion was going on in the centre of the native harbour. Many of the fires had been doused. Others were being fanned to life, and the flames danced in the disturbed water as the boats shifted and moved about. The overhead catwalks that criss-crossed the piers swayed under the