Below them, in a huge disorganized mle extending as far as the eye could see, people were climbing slowly to their feet. The diffused murmur of the beach had given way to a more urgent, harsher sound, echoing overhead from either end of the bay. The whole beach seemed to writhe and stir with activity, the only motionless figures those of the people standing by the water. These now formed a continuous palisade along the shore, shutting off the sea. More and more people joined their ranks, and in places the line was nearly ten deep.
Everyone on the terrace was now standing. The crowds already on the beach were being driven forward by the pressure of new arrivals from the promenade, and the party below their table had been swept a further twenty yards towards the sea.
‘Mildred, can you see Sherrington anywhere?’ Confirming from her wristwatch that it was exactly 3:30, Pelham pulled her shoulder, trying to hold her attention. Mildred returned what was almost a vacant stare, an expression of glazed incomprehension. ‘Mildred! We’ve got to get away from here!’ Hoarsely, he shouted: ‘Sherrington’s convinced we can see some of the infra-red light shining from the satellites, they may form a pattern setting off IRM’s laid down millions of years ago when other space vehicles were circling the earth. Mildred—!’
Helplessly, they were lifted from their seats and pressed against the rail. A huge concourse of people was moving down the beach, and soon the entire five-mile-long slope was packed with standing figures. No one was talking, and everywhere there was the same expression, self-immersed and preoccupied, like that on the faces of a crowd leaving a stadium. Behind them the great wheel of the fairground was rotating slowly, but the gondolas were empty, and Pelham looked back at the deserted funfair only a hundred yards from the multitude on the beach, its roundabouts revolving among the empty sideshows.
Quickly he helped Mildred over the edge of the rail, then jumped down on to the sand, hoping to work their way back to the promenade. As they stepped around the corner, however, the crowd advancing down the beach carried them back, tripping over the abandoned radios in the sand.
Still together, they found their footing when the pressure behind them ceased. Steadying himself, Pelham continued: ‘…Sherrington thinks Cro-Magnon Man was driven frantic by panic, like the Gadarene swine — most of the bone-beds have been found under lake shores. The reflex may be too strong—’ He broke off.
The noise had suddenly subsided, as the immense congregation, now packing every available square foot of the beach, stood silently facing the water. Pelham turned towards the sea, where the haze, only fifty yards away, edged in great clouds towards the beach. The forward line of the crowd, their heads bowed slightly, stared passively at the gathering billows. The surface of the water glowed with an intense luminous light, vibrant and spectral, and the air over the beach, grey by comparison, made the lines of motionless figures loom like tombstones.
Obliquely in front of Pelham, twenty yards away in the front rank, stood a tall man with a quiet, meditative expression, his beard and high temples identifying him without doubt.
‘Sherrington!’ Pelham started to shout. Involuntarily he looked upwards to the sky, and felt a blinding speck of light singe his retinas.
In the background the music of the funfair revolved in the empty air.
Then, with a galvanic surge, everyone on the beach began to walk forward into the water.
All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed, and by 3 o’clock had covered some seventy-five miles. Fifty yards away, on either side of the patrol launch, the high walls of the jungle river rose over the water, the unbroken massif of the mato grosso which swept across the Amazonas from Campos Buros to the delta of the Orinoco. Despite their progress they had set off from the telegraph station at Tres Buritis at 7 o’clock that morning — the river showed no inclination to narrow or alter its volume. Sombre and unchanging, the forest followed its course, the aerial canopy shutting off the sunlight and cloaking the water along the banks with a black velvet sheen. Now and then the channel would widen into a flat expanse of what appeared to be stationary water, the slow oily swells which disturbed its surface transforming it into a sluggish mirror of the distant, enigmatic sky, the islands of rotten balsa logs refracted by the layers of haze like the drifting archipelagoes of a dream. Then the channel would narrow again and the cooling jungle darkness enveloped the launch.
