Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [65]
Yattmur fell on her face and covered her eyes.
‘The mighty cliffs are crashing down on us!’ she cried, pulling Gren down with her.
He looked up once. The illusion caught him too: that grand and high tower was coming grandly down on top of them! Together they squeezed their soft bodies among the hard rocks, seeking safety by pressing their faces into damp shingly sand. They were creatures who belonged to the jungles of the hothouse world; so many things here were alien to them, they could respond only with fear.
Instinctively, Gren called the fungus that draped his head and neck.
‘Morel, save us! We trusted you and you brought us to this dreadful place. Now you must get us away from it, quickly before the cliff comes down on us.’
‘If you die, I die,’ said the morel, sending its twanging harmonics through Gren’s head. It added more helpfully, ‘You can both get up. The clouds move; the cliff does not.’
A moment or two passed – an interval of waiting filled with the dirge of the ocean – before Gren dared to test the truth of this observation. At length, finding that no rocks cascaded down on to his naked body, he peered up. Feeling him move, Yattmur whimpered.
Still the cliff seemed to fall. He braced himself to look at it more thoroughly.
The cliff appeared to be sailing out of the heavens on to him, yet at last he assured himself that it did not move. He dared to look away from its pitted face and nudge Yattmur.
‘The cliff is not harming us yet,’ he said. ‘We can go on.’
She raised a woebegone face, its cheeks patterned redly where they had pressed against the tiny stones of the shore, some of which still clung there.
‘It is a magic cliff. It always falls yet it never falls,’ she said at last, after regarding the rock carefully. ‘I don’t like it. It has eyes to watch us.’
They scrambled on, Yattmur looking nervously up from time to time. Clouds were gathering, their shadows moving in from the sea.
The shore curved sharply and continuously, its sands often buried under great masses of rock on which the jungle encroached at one end and the sea at the other. Over these masses they had laboriously to climb, moving as quietly as possible.
‘We shall soon be back where we started from,’ Gren said, looking back and finding that their boat was now concealed behind the central cliff.
‘Correct,’ twanged the morel. ‘We are on a small island, Gren.’
‘We can’t live here then, morel?’
‘I think not.’
‘How do we get away?’
‘As we arrived – in the boat. Some of these giant leaves would serve us as sails.’
‘We hate the boat, morel, and the watery world.’
‘But you prefer them to death. How can we live here, Gren? It is merely a great round tower of rock skirted by a strip of sand.’
Gren lapsed into confused thought without reporting this unspoken conversation to Yattmur. The wise thing, he concluded, would be to postpone a decision until they had found the rest of the tummy-belly men.
He became aware of Yattmur looking more and more frequently over her shoulder at the high tower of rock. Bursting with nerves, he said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Look where you are going or you will break your neck.’
She took his hand.
‘Hush! It will hear you,’ she said. ‘This terrible big tower of cliff has a million eyes that watch us all the time.’
As he began to turn his head she seized his face, pulling him down with her behind a protruding rock.
‘Don’t let it see that we know,’ she whispered. ‘Peep at it from here.’
So he did, his mouth dry, his gaze going over that large and watchful surface of grey. Cloud had obscured the sun, rendering the rock in the dull light more forbidding than ever. Already he had noticed that it was pitted; now he saw how evenly spaced those pits were, how much they resembled sockets, how uncannily they seemed to stare down at him from the rock face.
‘You see!’ Yattmur said. ‘What terrible thing broods over this place? The place is haunted, Gren!