Mara and Dann. Doris Lessing

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      Dann had gone to sleep holding a half-eaten hunk of the white stuff. The woman took it from him and put it in her bag. She sat down and her eyes closed and her head fell forward. The man’s eyes closed and he sank down, asleep.

      ‘But we must keep awake,’ the little girl was pleading, ‘we must. Suppose the bad people come? Suppose a snake bites us?’ And then she tumbled off to sleep, but later only knew she had been asleep because she was scrambling up, thinking, Where’s my brother? Where are the others? And her head was aching because she had been lying in the sun, which had moved and was going down, sending pink reflections from the sky across the water. But the water that had covered everything had gone down and was a river racing down the middle part of the valley. Dann was awake and holding the hand of the woman, and they were standing higher up where they could see everything easily. This hill was now surrounded by brown mud, and the yellow grasses were just beginning to lift up.

      ‘Where are we going to cross over?’ asked the woman.

      ‘I don’t know, but we’ve got to,’ said the man.

      Now the rocks around them did not have animals all over them, for they were carefully making their way back towards the high ground on the ridge. Mara thought that soon they would all be thirsty again. And then: We’ll be thirsty too, and hungry. They had slept all afternoon.

      ‘I think it would be safe to have a try,’ said the man. ‘Between the waterholes there will be hard ground.’

      ‘A bit dangerous.’

      ‘Not as dangerous as staying here if they are coming after us.’

      The dark was filling the sky. The stars came out, and up climbed a bright yellow moon. The mud shone, the tufts of grass shone, and the fast water that was now a river shone.

      The man jumped down off the rocks and down the hill to the bottom, where his feet squelched as he took a few steps. ‘It is hard underneath,’ he said.

      He picked up Dann, who was sleepy and silent, and said to Mara, ‘Can you manage?’

      When Mara jumped down there was a thickness of mud under her feet, but a hardness under that. The moonlight was so strong it made big shadows from the rocks, and from the branches that were stuck in the mud, and sad shadows from the drowned animals lying about everywhere. The grasses dragged at their feet, but they went on, past the hill where they had been first, and where now there were no animals at all, and then they reached the edge of the river. The other side seemed a long way off. The man picked up one of the torn-off branches, held the leafy part, carefully stepped to the very edge of the water. He poked the branch in and it went right down. He went squelching along the edge and tried again, and it went down. He did it farther along and this time the wood only went in to about the height of the children’s knees. ‘Here,’ he said, and the woman lifted Mara up. The two big people stepped into the brown water, which was racing past, rippling and noisy, but not deep, not here. The man went ahead with Dann, poking the wood of the branch into the water at every step, and the woman, with Mara, was just behind. Mara thought, Suppose the flood comes down now? We’ll be drowned. And she was trembling with fear. They were right in the middle now, and everything glistened and shone because of the moon, which was making a gold edge on every ripple. The mud on the other side of the water was a stretch of yellowish light. They were going so slowly, a step and then a stop, while the man poked the water, and then another step and a stop. It seemed to go on and on, and then they were out of the water and on the mud. Close by were some trees. They had had water quite high up their trunks, though usually they were on the edge of a waterhole. They seemed quite fresh and green, and that was because they were here, not far from water, while the trees around Mara’s home were dying, or dead. There were dark blotches on the branches. Birds. They must have been sitting here safely all through the flood.

      Now they were well past the water. Mara felt herself being set down, while the woman’s whole body seemed to lift itself up because of the relief of not having Mara’s weight. And again Mara thought, She must be so tired, and weak too, because I’m not so heavy really.

      They were walking carefully through the dirty and wet tussocks of grass, away from the water. They reached the rise that was as far as they had been able to see from the top of the big hill they had been on and, when they were over it, ahead were trees, quite a lot. So this couldn’t be anywhere near their home – Mara had been thinking wildly, although she knew it couldn’t be true, that perhaps they were going back home. She was trying to remember if she had ever seen so many trees all together. These had their leaves, but as she passed under them she could smell their dryness. These thirsty trees must have been thinking of all that water rushing past, just over the ridge, but they couldn’t get to it.

      The man stumbled and fell because he had tripped over a big white thing. It was a bone. He was on his feet at once, telling Dann, who had taken another tumble and was wailing, ‘Don’t cry, hush, be quiet.’

      Ahead was another river, full of fast water, and the wet had reached all the way up here to the edge of the trees and had pushed away earth from under a bank, making a cave; and in the cave were a lot of white sticks: bones. The man poked his branch into the bones and they came clattering out.

      ‘Do you realise what we are seeing?’

      ‘Yes,’ said the woman, and although she was tired she was actually interested.

      ‘What is it, what is it?’ Mara demanded, tugging at the woman’s hand and then at the man’s.

      ‘This is where the old animals’ bones piled up, and the water has exposed them – look.’

      Mara saw tusks so long and thick they were like trees; she saw enormous white bones; she saw cages made of bones, but she knew they were ribs. She had never imagined anything could be this big.

      ‘These are the extinct animals,’ said the man. ‘They died out hundreds of years ago.’

      ‘Why did they?’

      ‘It was the last time there was a very bad drought. It lasted for so long all the animals died. The big ones. Twice as big as our animals.’

      ‘Will this drought be as long as that?’

      ‘Let’s hope not,’ he said, ‘or we’ll all be extinct too.’ The woman laughed. She actually laughed; but Mara thought it was not funny, it was dreadful. ‘Really we should cover all these bones up again and mark where they are, and when things get better we can come and examine them properly.’

      He believed that things were going to get better, Mara thought.

      ‘No time now,’ the woman said.

      The man was poking with his branch at the wet earth, and it was falling away and the bones kept tumbling out, clashing and clattering.

      ‘Why here?’ whispered Mara.

      ‘Probably another flood like this brought down dead animals and they piled up here. Or perhaps it was a graveyard.’

      ‘I didn’t know animals had graveyards.’

      ‘The big animals were very intelligent. Nearly as clever as people.’

      ‘This is no graveyard,’ said the woman. ‘All the different species together? No, it was a flood. We’ve seen today how it must have happened.’

      The man was pulling СКАЧАТЬ