The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [638]
Now the fire, like some inadequately chained-up oriental demon, was roaring and raging on his left, occasionally making sudden darts forward as if to seize him by the leg and drag him back to its lair. Behind him was the river; on his right was a wooden fence and, beyond that, the tenements whose windows he could see were packed with round Chinese heads, like oranges in a box, watching the fire as if it were no concern of theirs. ‘Why doesn’t someone tell them to hop it?’ he shouted at Ehrendorf beside him, but Ehrendorf was too bemused by the heat to reply.
Beside this ocean of flame hours passed in a dream. Every so often the men holding the branch were relieved and led back to splash themselves with the stinking water from the river. Again and again Matthew was scalded with water from another branch, but now he could hardly feel it. One moment he would be drenched from head to foot, the next his clothes would be dry and stiff on his body again.
Suddenly Matthew realized that this fire had a personality of its own. It was not just a fire, in fact, it was a living creature. He tried to explain this to Ehrendorf who was again beside him, holding on like himself to the same struggling branch: he gabbled away laughing at his insight but could not get Ehrendorf to comprehend. But it was so obvious! Not only did this fire have its own delightful fragrance (like sandalwood), it also had a restless and cunning disposition, constantly sending out rivulets of flame like outstretched claws to surround and seize the men fighting it and squeeze them to its fiery heart. But Ehrendorf, on whose forehead a large white blister had appeared, could only shake his head and mumble … meanwhile, the blister grew and presently burst and fluid ran down his face but dried instantly, like a trail of tears on his cheeks. These claws of flame which stretched out from the fire, Matthew noticed, very often overran the lengths of bulging hose that lay between the river and the fire and, presently, on one of his stumbling journeys back and forth, he saw that the canvas skin of the hose had already been eaten so thin by the fire that he could see the water coursing through, as if these were semi-transparent veins pulsing in the direction of the fire to supply it with nourishment. But what they were really trying to do was not to nourish it but to poison it. The fire chuckled and crackled cheerfully at this, and said: ‘You won’t poison me so quickly. You’d better watch out for yourself !’
55
There was something odd about that fire, Matthew found. It hypnotized him. And not only him but everyone else round about. There was another air-raid before the end of the morning, but this time nobody paid it the least attention. The fact that somewhere above the smoke and heat some aeroplanes were dropping bombs seemed, beside that monstrous fire, altogether trivial.
The hours wore on without any appreciable change, except that the heat from the fire seemed to grow more intense. Early in the afternoon another AFS unit arrived and, without a word to anyone, they dropped their hoses into the river and set to work. This new team displayed even greater human variety than the Major’s: if you looked at them closely you could see that it included Indians, Malays, Chinese, Europeans and even an African who spoke only French. But these men had been to another fire and their hands and faces were already so blackened and blistered that it had become difficult to tell them apart. They knew what they were about, though, and positioned their branches so that they could control and repulse the restless claws of fire that continually threatened to encircle the Major’s men.
Matthew now found that he was present at the fire merely in excerpts with long blank intervals in between: one moment he would be holding the branch with someone else and trying to shield himself from the intense heat,