He gestured towards the low ridge of sandstone, its profile illuminated against the white moonlit clouds, which marked the margins of the alluvial bench half a mile from the camp. Before Gifford’s accident their chairs had faced the ruined terrace city emerging from the thistles which covered the ridge. But Gifford had tired of staring all day at the crumbling galleries and colonnades where his wife and Lowry worked together. He told Mechippe to dismantle the tent and turn it through ninety degrees, so that he could watch the last light of the sunset fading over the western delta. The burning refuse fires they now faced provided at least a few wisps of motion. Gazing for hours across the endless creeks and mud-banks, whose winding outlines became more and more serpentine as the summer drought persisted and the level of the water table fell, he had one evening discovered the snakes.
‘Surely it’s simply a shortage of dissolved oxygen,’ Lowry commented.
He noticed Gifford regarding him with an expression of critical distaste, and added: ‘Jung believes the snake is primarily a symbol of the unconscious, and that its appearance always heralds a crisis in the psyche.’
‘I suppose I accept that,’ Charles Gifford said. With rather forced laughter he added, shaking his foot in the cradle: ‘I have to. Don’t I, Louise?’ Before his wife, who was watching the fires with a distracted expression, could reply he went on: ‘Though in fact I disagree with Jung. For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Paleocene are re-created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing is the snake a symbol of wisdom.’
Richard Lowry frowned doubtfully into his glass. ‘I’m not convinced, sir. It was primitive man who had to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche.’
‘Absolutely right,’ Gifford rejoined. ‘How else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience? The only real landscapes are the internal ones, or the external projections of them, such as this delta.’ He passed his empty glass to his wife. ‘Agree, Louise? Though perhaps you take a Freudian view of the snakes?’
This thin jibe, uttered with the cold humour which had become characteristic of Gifford4 brought their conversation to a halt. Restlessly, Lowry looked at his watch, eager to be away from Gifford and his pathetic boorishness. Gifford, a cold smirk on his lips, waited for Lowry to catch his eye; by a curious paradox his dislike of his assistant was encouraged by the latter’s reluctance to retaliate, rather than by the still ambiguous but crystallizing relationship between Lowry and Louise. Lowry’s meticulous neutrality and good manners seemed to Gifford an attempt to preserve a world on which Gifford had turned his back, that world where there were no snakes on the beaches and where events moved on a single plane of time like the blurred projection of a three-dimensional object by a defective camera obscura.
Lowry’s politeness was also, of course, an attempt to shield himself and Louise from Gifford’s waspish tongue. Like Hamlet taking advantage of his madness to insult and cross-examine anyone at will, Gifford often used the exhausted half-lucid interval after his fever subsided to make his more pointed comments. As he emerged from the penumbral shallows, the looming figures of his wife and assistant still surrounded by the rotating mandalas he saw in his dreams, he would give full rein to his tortured humour. That in this way he was helping his wife and Lowry towards an inevitable climax only encouraged Gifford.
His long farewell to Louise, protracted now for so many years, at last seemed feasible, even if only part of the greater goodbye, the vast leave-taking that Gifford was about to embark upon. The fifteen years of their marriage had been little more than a single frustrated farewell, a search for a means to an end which their own strengths of character had always prevented.
Looking up at Louise’s sun-grazed but still handsome profile, at her fading blonde hair swept back off her angular shoulders, Gifford realized that his dislike of her was in no way personal, but merely part of the cordial distaste he felt for almost the entire human race. And even this deeply ingrained misanthropy was only a reflection of his own undying self-contempt. If there were few people whom he had ever liked, there were, equally, few moments during which he had ever liked himself. His entire life as an archaeologist, from his early adolescence when he had first collected fossil ammonites from a nearby limestone outcropping, was an explicit attempt to return to the past and discover the sources of his self-loathing.
‘Do you think they’ll send an aeroplane?’ Louise asked after breakfast the next morning. ‘There was a noise then…’
