The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(31)

According to the telegrams, once they had located the village, Kaufman and Austin had no real difficulty being accepted as guests. In fact, the Reed People were apparently compliant towards everything, incapable of putting up any form of resistance. Nor did they seem particularly interested in Kaufman and Austin’s reasons for being there. They simply accepted their presence. The two men asked for no more, and rather than lose heart when faced with the difficulty of carrying out the essential part of their mission (which was nothing less than discovering whether these savages could actually open up passageways to other worlds) they resolved to be patient and treat their stay as a paid holiday. Although they did not say so, Gilliam could easily imagine them lounging around in the sun all day, polishing off the crates of whiskey they had sneaked with them on the expedition while Gilliam pretended to be looking the other way. Amazingly, they could not have thought up a better strategy, for their continual state of alcoholic stupor, and the frequent dancing and fighting they engaged in naked in the grass, drew the attention of the Reed People, who were curious about the amber liquid that generated such jolly antics. Once they began sharing their whiskey, a rough camaraderie sprang up between them, which Gilliam rejoiced in back in his office, for it was without doubt the first step towards a future coexistence. He was not mistaken, although fostering this primitive contact until it grew into a common bond of trust and friendship cost him several consignments of the best Scotch, and to this day he wondered whether that many bottles were really necessary for such a small tribe.

At last, one morning, he received the long-awaited telegram in which Kaufman and Austin described how the Reed People had led them to the middle of the village, and in a seemingly beautiful gesture of friendship and gratitude, had opened for them the hole through to the other world. The explorers described the aperture and the pink landscape they were able to glimpse through it, using exactly the same words as Tremanquai five years earlier.

This time however, the young Gilliam no longer saw them as part of a made-up story: now he knew it was for real. All of a sudden he felt trapped, suffocated, and not because he was locked away in his little office. He felt hemmed in by the walls of a universe he now realized was not the only one of its kind. But this constraint would soon end, he thought to himself. Then he devoted a few moments to the memory of poor Oliver Tremanquai. He assumed the man’s deep religious beliefs had prevented him from assimilating what he had seen, leaving him no other course than the precarious path of madness. Luckily, that pair of oafs Kaufman and Austin possessed far simpler minds, which should spare them a similar fate. He reread the telegram hundreds of times. Not only did the Reed People exist, they practiced something Gilliam, unlike Tremanquai, preferred to call magic as opposed to witchcraft.

An unknown world had opened itself up to Kaufman and Austin, and naturally, they could not resist exploring it.

As Gilliam read their subsequent telegrams, he regretted not having accompanied them. With the blessing of the Reed People, who left them to their own devices, Kaufman and Austin began making brief incursions into the other world, diligently reporting back to him on its peculiarities. It consisted largely of a vast pink plain of faintly luminous rock, stretching out beneath a sky permanently obscured by incredibly dense fog. If there were any sun behind it, its rays were unable to shine through. As a consequence, the only light came from the strange substance on the ground, so that while one’s boots were clearly visible, the landscape was plunged into gloom, day and night merging into an eternal dusk, making it very difficult to see long distances. From time to time, a raging wind whipped the plain, producing sandstorms that made everything even more difficult to see. The two men immediately noticed something strange: the moment they stepped through the hole their pocket watches stopped. Once back in their own reality, the sleeping mechanisms mysteriously stirred again. It was as though they had unanimously decided to stop measuring the time their owners spent in the other world.

Kaufman and Austin looked at one another, and it is not difficult to imagine them shrugging their shoulders, baffled. They made a further discovery after spending a night, according to their calculations, in the camp they had set up right beside the opening so that they could keep an eye on the Reed People. There was no need for them to shave, because while they were in the other world their beards stopped growing. In addition, Austin had cut his arm seconds before stepping through the hole, and as soon as he was on the other side it stopped bleeding to the point he even forgot to bandage it. He did not remember the wound until the moment they were back in the village and it started to bleed again. Fascinated, Gilliam wrote down this extraordinary incident in his notebook, as well as what had happened with their watches and beards. Everything pointed to some impossible stoppage of time. While Murray speculated in his office, Kaufman and Austin stocked up on ammunition and food and set out towards the only thing breaking the monotony of the plain: the ghostly mountain range, scarcely visible on the horizon.

As their watches continued to be unusable, they decided to measure the time their journey took by the number of the nights they slept. This method soon proved ineffective, because at times the wind rose so suddenly and with such force they were obliged to stay awake all night holding the tent down, or else their accumulated tiredness crept up on them the moment they stopped for food or a rest. And so all they could say about it was that after an indeterminate length of time that was neither very long nor very short, they reached the longed-for mountains. These proved to be made of the same luminous rock as the plain, only they had a hideous appearance like a set of rotten, broken teeth, their jagged peaks piercing the thick cloudscape that blotted out the sky.