Remembering Babylon Read Online Free PDF Page A

raw, covered with white flower-like ulcers where the salt had got in, opening mouths that as the soft water touched them lifted pale tentacles. Tiny crabs heaped and climbed over one another’s soft-shelled backs, and heaved and glittered. One of the women tried to drive them off. Seething, they rose up in waves from under him, tumblingout of the folds of bark he was wrapped in, and with the sighing of a million tiny claws as the sand grains slipped under them, wheeled in a cloud over the bubbling sand.
    The creature’s eyes sprang open. They were of a milky colour; blank, maybe blind. The mob shifted closer.
    The eyes were open upon something. Not us, they thought.
    Not them, but some other world, or life, out of which the creature, whatever it was, seacalf or spirit, was still emerging. They started, expecting as they watched to see some further transformation. The eyelids drooped and flickered. Now, they thought. It is letting go of that other life. It sees us. Now. The mouth opened, revealing a swollen tongue. But no change occurred.
    Very timidly, as if fearful of exposing themselves to impiety, or of setting off some change in the creature other than the one it was slowly working towards, they lifted the loose husk that covered it, and found the silvered skin, the belly with its familiar indentation and knot (a flutter of excitement swept over them), and as the last encrustation of crabs broke up and his sea-attendants left him, the white worm of his prick. Again they murmured one to the other but remained puzzled and drew back.
    He watched them. Let them do what they would with him. What struck him was the smell they gave off; or maybe it was the air of the place. Animal, unfamiliar. What he thought was: I am lost again, more lost than ever. It is not what I expected.
    What he had expected, beyond so much flame, after so many days of burning, was Willett, rising up in an odour of char, with his eyebrows ablaze and his scorched boots hanging from their laces at his neck. The disappointment of it was like tears in his throat and choked him.
    One of the older women sent a younger one off, and when she returned it was with water that sloshed from a gourd. They wetted his lips with it. He moaned, clutched, set his teeth to the lip of the thing, gulping. He kept his eyes fixed on them over the rim and they leaned forward to see him drink.
    A little later, he could not say how long, he was no longer at the sea’s edge, but in soft sand, in the shade of a shrubwhose fan-like needles broke the light just inches from his face and fanned it with coolness. The huddle of women, chattering like birds, was moving away.
    Later again he found himself in darkness not far from a fire where shadows flared. The smell of smoke pricked his nostrils – Ah, perhaps, after all!
    The high treetops were filled with a buzzing which he thought the stars were making. How had he got here? Had someone carried him or had he dragged himself up the beach into the scrub, drawn by the sound of voices and the promise of company? For the voices he had heard were human. It was the humming breath of them, rising up in the clear night, that he had taken for stars.
    After a moment, using his elbows, he began to push himself towards them and out into the firelight. Their many faces, touched with flame, turned towards him, mouths open, eyes staring, as the pale, wormlike figure inched towards them.
    He squirmed into a sitting position and heard the gasp of their breath. Dropping forward, he raised himself on all fours; then, with an effort, staggering upright, held his hands out and began to whine in what he had learned, long ago, was a piteous manner – he did not think it would be less effective here than on the streets back home – and with a whole repertoire of gestures that were meant to engage and win them over, waggled his ears, pulled his mouth wide with a finger in each corner, producing at first only a kind of shocked silence in them, till the