‘The innocent are safer knowing as little as possible,’ said the Swami very seriously, after prolonged consideration. ‘From tomorrow it may be necessary to improvise afresh, but let us first take care of tonight.’
‘It seems crazy,’ Dominic said in helpless protest, ‘that four of us here should be virtually under siege from one miserable individual. Aren’t we attaching too much importance to this threat?’
‘The man without scruples,’ said the Swami sadly, ‘to whom every life but his own is expendable, always starts with an advantage worth a whole army over the man who regards life as holy. And the man who creeps in secret is more dangerous than armies. Never be ashamed of taking precautions against snakes. Though indeed,’ he added remorsefully, ‘not all snakes are vicious or treacherous, they want only to defend themselves. Men who should walk upright, but creep in the grass with poison like snakes, have no such justification.’
‘And tomorrow?’ Dominic asked. ‘Do we pay our score and get out of here?’
The distant voice, after due thought, said gently and finally: ‘Cape Comorin is the end of the world, where is there to go beyond? In the end one battlefield is as good as another.’
Dominic waited, but there was nothing more. And after a moment he heard the soft click of the distant receiver being replaced in its cradle.
Eleven
« ^ »
Beyond the garden, all grass and sand, they stepped out on to a metalled road. To the left it wound away along the coast, growing more confident and freer of sand with every yard gained, to the village and the temple; but to the right, to westward, it struggled feebly along for only a few hundred yards, increasingly trammelled with sand, before the dunes swept over it, and rose in undulating waves of yellow and dun and grey to the skyline, unbroken to the very edge of the rocks. In that direction the coastline also rose, jutting in low but jagged cliffs; but in the sector where they stood the road was not very far above the level of beach and sea. They crossed it, and advanced into a zone of broken gunmetal rocks that slashed out into the ocean in oblique strata, knife-edge beyond knife-edge, laced with the froth of surf, and ripping every incoming wave to angry shreds. And behind this boiling filigree of black rocks and reefs and white foam, the Indian Ocean opened, sundrenched and cobalt blue, surging away due south without a break to the Antarctic.
Because of the stormy contention of the rocks against the incoming tide they had the impression that there was a fine gale blowing, but in fact it was no more than a fresh breeze that fluttered their hair, and the air was warm and clear. They scrambled out to the edge of the rocks, and looked down upon a narrow beach of smooth sand, up which the waves hissed and withdrew in steady rhythm; and to their left, perhaps half a mile away beyond an arc of troubled water, they saw the cape itself at last, the final promontory of rocks jutting far into the sea, with tidal foam washing round its feet.
Inland from it the roofs of the village began, and the temple of Kumari, the virgin aspect of Parvati, who gives Cape Comorin its name. And firmly planted on the outermost platform of rock, its
‘It’s odd,’ said Priya, ‘but seen from here it fits in so well. And when you see it close to it’s rather dreadful, like blue and white plastic’
They turned westwards, following the road until it succumbed to the encroachments of the sand, and then began to climb up into the dunes. And presently there were small naked feet pattering alongside, and two little boys who had appeared out of nowhere were uttering soft blandishments in Malayalam and English, and holding out for their inspection long strings of pierced shells, some inch-long and oval-smooth in matt brown and white, some smaller and slimmer, textured liked fine hoar-frost in several shades from white to fawn. The Swami had known this coast. Probably these bead-sellers were never far from the hotel, waiting for a well-disposed tourist to emerge on the evening pilgrimage. A young woman, wearing a faded red sari without a blouse, added herself to the group, proffering her own merchandise. The woman spoke a few words of English, one of the boys rather more, and Purushottam, at his most serene and sociable, spoke Malayalam with the other one. At the cost of a few
They reached the crest, and emerged upon an undulating plateau of fine sand, dappled only, here and there, by low clumps of tamarisks and wisps of dry grass in the slightly sheltered places, and little stars of sea plants. Here the coast rose in a jagged series of low cliffs embracing, with long, steely arms and granite talons, deeply indented coves into which the waves came seething at high speed, over sands fantastically coloured in shades of dark blackberry reds, and angry purples, and rusty black. These shades seemed to be laid down by the tides in a series of overlapping scallops, and in places the dark, sultry colours were varied by planes of yellow and grey-green. The necklace boys, amused by Larry’s surprise and interest, shrugged their shoulders over this phenomenon; everyone knew that the sands at the Cape, and further up this western coast in Kerala, too, were coloured like this.
‘It’s ilmenite and monazite mostly,’ said Purushottam. ‘Quite valuable deposits. They get most of the world’s thorium supply out of monazite sand. It occurs in this same form in other places, too.’
They slithered down a narrow, rocky path, and picked up handfuls of the copper-beech-red and crow-black sand, clean and fine and glittering, cool in the palm of the hand. For a while they walked along the beach, but the coastline was too deeply indented, and rocks and tide drove them up to the dunes again. Fold upon fold of sand, rolling in smooth curves from the broken coast more than a mile inland, to where the distant and scattered crests of trees showed like stains of green moss. The Swami had known what he was talking about. No one in his senses would dare to attempt to get within striking distance of a prospective victim here at this hour, where there was no cover at all, and no hope of withdrawal unseen.
There was only one thing to break the monotony, a squat little hut of timber and matting and thatch, perched on the neck of a long, narrow peninsula of rocks, tilted in knife-edged, striated layers. There was a small cove beneath it, the alluvial sand patterning it in dull green and sultry crimson. They crossed the neck of the peninsula behind the hut – it was only a few yards – and looked down into another bay, somewhat larger than the first and much more sheltered by the enfolding arm of rock; and here there were two fishing boats beached above the tide, and covered over with little gabled roofs of coconut fibre matting, and a net lay draped to dry in long serpentines across the sand, which here was clear and golden. The hut was evidently for the storage of nets and ropes and tackle, and had access by steep and difficult rock tracks to both little bays. It turned its back upon the weather and the sea, crouched into the last sheltering rise to the cliff-edge, and opened its narrow doorway and mat-screened window towards the land, scanning the miles of dunes with one blank dark eye beneath a coconut fibre eyebrow.
