The Drought by Ballard J. G

Author:Ballard, J. G. [Ballard, J. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

barricade. As they stopped, four or five men appeared from the doorways of the trailers. They waved at Ransom, gesturing him back. One of them carried a metal fencing post. He walked up to the car and banged it against the grille.

Ransom held his ground. Ahead the road disappeared within fifty yards into the jungle of shacks and cars. The ground was churned into huge ruts.

A dirty hand spread across the windshield. A man’s unshaven face poked through the window like a muzzle. ‘Come on, mister I back the hell out of here’

Ransom started to argue, but then gave up and reversed back to the road junction. They set off along the coast road below the cliffs. The motor camps stretched ahead of them to the right, the backs of trailers jutting out over the empty pavement. On the left, where the cliffs had been cut back at intervals to provide small lay-bys, single families squatted under makeshift awnings, out of sight of sea and sky, gazing at the camps separating them from the beach.

Half a mile ahead they climbed a small rise, and could see the endless extent of the camps, reaching far into the haze beyond the cape ten miles away. Ransom stopped at a deserted filling station, and peered down a narrow lane that ran into the trailer camp. Small children squatted with their mothers, watching the menfolk stand and argue. The smoke of garbage fires drifted across the blank sky, and the air was touched by the sweet smells of unburied sewage.

A few dust-streaked cars cruised past in the opposite direction, faces pressed to the windows as their occupants searched for some foothold off the road.

Ransom pointed to the licence plates. ‘Some of these people must have been driving along the coast for days.’ He opened the door. ‘There’s no point in going on any farther. I’ll get out and have another look around.’

Leaving Philip Jordan to guard the car, Ransom walked down the road, glancing between the lines of vehicles. People were lying about in the shade, or had walled in the narrow alleys with squares of canvas.

Farther in, a crowd of people had surrounded a large chromium-sided trailer and were rocking it from side to side, drumming on the doors and windows with spades and pick-axe handles.

An old cigarette kiosk leaned against a concrete telegraph pole by the side of the road. Ransom managed to lift one foot on to the counter, and pulled himself up on to the roof. Far into the distance the silver flanks of the metal hangars along the shore glistened in the sunlight like an unattainableEl Dorado .

The sounds of pumping equipment drummed across to him, overlaid by the murmur and babble of the people in the camps.

Below Ransom, in a small niche off the edge of the pavement, a middle-aged man in shirt sleeves was working a primus stove below the awning of his trailer. This miniature vehicle was little larger than a sedan chair. Sitting inside the doorway was his wife, a sedate round faced woman in a floral dress.

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