Turning Back the Sun(63)

Rayner stared back across the chasm, with sweat dripping into his eyes. He could make out the painted countenances on the natives” shields now and the jostling, whitened faces above them, and the feathered tassels on the ceremonial thongs. As he watched, the natives” dancing trembled to a halt at the edge of the drop. Nothing intervened now between them and the sun. Their keening rose to a heartbreaking crescendo, and some of them lifted long, cylindrical wooden horns to their mouths, like monstrous bassoons, which blared and moaned under the chanting.

All around Rayner the soldiers were standing up in full view and gazing across the chasm, uncomprehending. Their rifles strewed the rocks. The sun burnished the earth round them and lit their astonished faces. Some of them sat speechless on the boulders. The sergeant, who had just noticed the women crowded along the ridge behind, kept muttering, “What”s happening here? What the hell”s happening?”

By now, at the headland”s end, the savages were massed in a coppery glow of bodies, their shields fallen to their sides. As the sun touched the skyline, the singing and the bray of the horns quickened with pathetic urgency. Rayner felt a foolish grief for them. Their sounds intertwined in a wavering threnody, which echoed less like the prayer of humans than the mourning of some unearthly animal. Perhaps it was a distortion of the atmosphere which delayed the sun on the wilderness”s rim. But for an instant—so Rayner thought—its red circle and the sharp-edged clouds froze in the sky.

Then, inexorably, yet half against his expectation, the sun was halved, then quartered, by the black edge of the wilderness, and disappeared.

At first, while scarlet clouds littered the sky, all the force of the chanting continued. Then, in slow groups of two or three, the natives began to disperse back over the promontory, and the sounds broke up and faded away. Momentarily, from the point where the sun had vanished, there radiated upwards an enigmatic flush, as if a furnace had been lit just beneath the horizon. Then this too retreated, and left only a pallor over the desert.

For a day and a night the convoy made its way back over the bush. Even a distant fall of rain might have stranded them beyond some swollen river, and the officers ceaselessly scanned the sky while the dark-bottomed clouds put on weight and multiplied.

A mechanical failure delayed their progress for four hours, and one of the water drums sprang a leak and emptied away unnoticed. But mainly the going was easy. The soldiers bellowed jokes from one vehicle to another, and at night the lurch and jolt of the jeeps seemed barely to disturb their exhausted bodies. One man became feverish, and Rayner could only treat him with cold compresses on a truck floor, and drug him. But by dawn of the second day they were crossing the familiar savannah—now piebald with cloud shadows—and were less than two hours from the town.

As they passed between derelict farmhouses, where a few cattle still stood, the first drop of water hit the windscreen, and Rayner, looking up at a sky which had been void for half a year, saw the massed rain clouds unfurl over the earth.