of years, over Pleistocene ice fields and Permian deserts, down the
aisles of Carboniferous swamp forests.
His relief was tangible, his body warm. A cloud passed —
cumuli were herding across the sky — and the sun warmed him
more. It would be sometime after midday. All sense of urgency was
draining away. When he was quite rested, quite restored by the expanse of his silent shore, then he could journey up the ages of the world to the shrine, persuade Ilena to return to her own time and
42
Anthony Peacey
perhaps settle in classical Greece. He would need to learn the
language.
His footprints were there, yes, almost shadowless now with the
sun high. Dried mud still stuck to his toes. Something about the
Rhynia plants caught his eye. They stood, shadowless, green spears
in the desert of brown that stretched from the water’s edge to the
mountains and on to the interior deserts of the continent. Spears of
an advance cadre of an army that waited with monumental
patience to overrun the land. The tips of two or three had a ragged
appearance.
Bernheddin descended from the chair, down the bank and across
the flat mud to kneel by the stems. Wavelets from the quiet water
washed the roots of the furthest plants and slid almost to him.
Three sporangia had burst, a golden brown dust clinging down the
stems though most of it must have blown away. Other pods were
swollen and ungainly. Soon to go. Bernheddin was pleased, contemplating the spread of the plant, the sprouting of tiny prothalli where the spores landed, the cycle of the plant’s generations, the
rise of new thickets of spears further and further from the water.
Behind him there was a soft pop. He looked around. The time
chair was gone. He was neither surprised nor horrified, though his
stomach felt a certain hollowness.
For a long time he stared at the Rhynia. Then he stood. There
were fish and invertebrates in the sea; perhaps he would be able to
eat those. He walked off along the beach lost in visions of the rise of
plants: the gradual clothing of the land by Rhynia, Asteroxylon and
other Psilophytes; the appearance of the scale trees, their advance
in the Devonian forests along with club mosses and horsetails; the
growth of the vast Carboniferous forests dominated by fronded
pteridophyte giants beneath which ferns arose in green gloom; the
rise of conifers, cycads, ginkgos, tenanted now by increasing num bers of birds; and at last the arrival of flowering plants and the yearly blazes of spring down through Cenozoic millennia — he
walked lost in visions which sun, solitude and the sighing of the
wind rendered as vivid as the dawn of day.
A step in any direction
©
TIMOTHY DELL
John Hargreaves let the wind push him into the centre of the town.
Even there the title of desert held some meaning. There was no
one. Two rows of houses looked across the track at each other. Some
had verandas. Some had patches of grass and flowers. Nearly all of
them were identical under poorly-maintained facades of gardens
and paint. Fence boundaries showed where the dust of the desert
was supposed to end.
W hen Hargreaves looked back down the track he could see the
desert. It was flat. Ahead, the same desert stretched out till it shimmered and lost all detail. Mirrors.
He looked up and saw that the sun stood directly overhead. His
feet were in shadow. He made himself the mirror, and tried to think
of both directions as the same. He turned around. And then back.
He had to do this for some time to maintain the illusion, and to fix
it within him. The two ends of the town became one, their superficial differences blended. The desert was the same anyway.
Eventually he had stored within him the sight and feel of a town
that was only half a town, and himself as the cause of its reflection.
He liked it, and called it a memory. He looked forward to the time
when he could recall it in another place and regain the feeling of this
place. He didn’t go to the
