The Immeasurable World by William Atkins

Author:William Atkins [William Atkins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571319756
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

Zalanash means ‘naked’, and naked it was, as a person raised by wolves. In the distance was a rise of rocky land beyond which, Serik said, lay the waterless sea.

Under the steel arch that heralded every village, and down the hard-packed earth of Zalanash’s broad main thoroughfare we drove, white housing compounds hunkered on either side. On the edge of the street were more billboards hailing the president. We drove on, the roadway tipping down towards the sea and Zalanash’s onetime landing berths and slipways – and then the wind slamming against the vehicle’s flank, and once more the colossal dry crater.

I climbed out of the Land Cruiser. A cliff-face, perhaps twenty metres high, a couple of kilometres away to my right; another, snow-topped, ten kilometres away to my left; and ahead nothing but the dry lakebed corrugated by spits and sandbars. But not lunar or stripped, not a saltscape or sandscape: camels had been put out to graze on the carpet of halophytes that had developed since the great reversal of thirty years ago. The track, deep-cut into the surface, as if a monolith had been dragged across the desert, was leading me towards a dark mechanical constellation in the distance, eerie as the abandoned craft of a failed invasion.

Serik, as usual, stayed in the warm Land Cruiser. I walked until I could no longer hear the radio. Apart from the scattered camels, swaying on their splint legs, there was the shrilling of the pale finches that skimmed in mobs between denser patches of vegetation, the same birds I had seen near the fish-receiving station, less like things flying, flap-flap-glide, than projectiles collectively blasted from one point to the next. More abundantly there were the ‘great gerbils’ (thousands per hectare, there must have been), tawny rattish things whose burrow-holes cratered and honeycombed certain plots so densely that all vegetation was discouraged, and to inadvertently walk across one meant collapsing the animals’ tunnels and sinking ankle-deep into the sediment. Occasionally one of them would sight the intruder from a dozen metres and, rather than ducking instantly into its burrow, would pause in scrutiny – neither eagle nor fox nor wolf, but predator, predator; and – blink – vanish, into its subterrain of fishbones and clamshells. As so often in the desert, there was a sense of being watched: the birds, the gerbils, the camels, not one of them was unaware of you.

As I remember it, the ship is a terrific edifice, as big as an oil tanker; but then I look at my photos, and it’s just a rusted conning tower no roomier than my London flat, stilted on an array of bulkheads corroded to a filigree. The ground around the hulk, if hulk was right, had been eroded and manured by the camels that used its shade, and, it seemed, treated by the farmers as a mausoleum, for the ground was scattered with bones and bundles of wool scarcely identifiable as lambs or camel calves save for a few triskeles of hoofed legs rooted to a blackened bundle of organs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.