The Seeds of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

the building of boats. There had been a kind of plan – well, a rough idea – in his head, at first, but he had had to modify that so many times that most of it had grown empirically from the plates and materials he had been able to find. The result had something of sampan, punt, and rain-water tank in its ancestry, but it satisfied Bert.
    He sprawled in comfortable indolence at the stern of his craft. One arm in a tattered sleeve hung over the tiller, the other lay across his chest. Long legs in patchwork trousers sprawled out to end in strange boots with canvas uppers and soles contrived of woven fibres; he had made those himself, too. The reddish beard on his thin face was trimmed to a point; above it his dark eyes
looked ahead with little interest from under the torn, stained brim of a felt hat.
    He listened to the phut-phutting of the old engine as he might to the purr of a friendly cat; indeed, he thought of it as an old friend, bestowing upon it a kindly care to which it responded with grunts of leisurely goodwill as it bore him along. There were times when he talked to it encouragingly or told it the things he thought; it was a habit he did not approve of and which he curbed when he noticed it, but quite often he did not notice. He felt an affection for the wheezy old thing, not only for carrying him along thousands of miles of water, but because it kept the silence at bay.
    Bert disliked the silence which brooded over desert and water like a symptom of mortification, but he did not fear it. It did not drive him, as it did most, to live in the settlements where there was neighbourliness, noise, and the illusion of hope. His restlessness was stronger than his dislike of the empty lands; it carried him along when the adventurous, finding no adventure, had turned back or given in to despair. He wanted little but, like a gipsy, to keep moving.
    Bert Tasser he had been years ago, but it was so long since he had heard the surname that he had almost forgotten it: everybody else had. He was just Bert – for all he knew he was the only Bert.
    ‘Ought to be showing up soon,’ he murmured, either to the patient engine or himself, and sat up in order to see better.
    A slight change was beginning to show on the bank; a weed was becoming more frequent among the scrawny bushes, a slender-stalked growth with polished, metallic-looking leaves, sensitive to the lightest breath of wind. He could see them shivering with little flashes in increasing numbers ahead, and he knew that if he were to stop the engine now he would hear not the dead envelope of silence, but the ringing clash of myriads of small hard leaves.
    ‘Tinkerbells,’ he said. ‘Yes, it won’t be far now.’
    From
a locker beside him he pulled a much-worn hand-drawn map, and consulted it. From it he referred to an equally well-used notebook, and read over the list of names written on one of the pages. He was still muttering them as he returned the papers to the locker and his attention to the way ahead. Half an hour passed before a dark object became visible to break the monotonous line of the bank.
    ‘There it is now,’ he said, as if to encourage the engine over the last few miles.
    The building, which had appeared oddly shaped even from a distance, revealed itself as a ruin on closer approach. The base was square and decorated on the sides with formal patterns in what had once been high relief, but was now so smoothed that the finer details were lost. Once it had supported some kind of tower; though exactly what kind had to be guessed, for no more than the first twenty feet of the upper structure remained. It, too, bore remnants of worn carving, and, like the base, was built of a dusky red rock. Standing a hundred yards or so back from the bank, it was deceptive in its isolation. The size and the degree of misadventure which time and adaptation had brought it only became appreciable as one approached more closely.
    Bert held on his course until he was opposite