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J. G. Ballard
The Crystal World
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1966
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1966
PS™ Section interview copyright © Vanora Bennett 2004
Article ‘Ballard’s Worlds’ originally ‘J G Ballard’ from Visiting Mrs Nabokov by Martin Amis, published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
J. G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher
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Source ISBN:9780586024195
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007374892
Version: 2018-06-05
By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jewelled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river.
By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…
CONTENTS
Copyright
Epigraph
Part One: EQUINOX
CHAPTER ONE: THE DARK RIVER
CHAPTER TWO: THE JEWELLED ORCHID
CHAPTER THREE: MULATTO ON THE CATWALKS
CHAPTER FOUR: A DROWNED MAN
CHAPTER FIVE: THE CRYSTALLIZED FOREST
CHAPTER SIX: THE CRASH
Part Two: THE ILLUMINATED MAN
CHAPTER SEVEN: MIRRORS AND ASSASSINS
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE SUMMER-HOUSE
CHAPTER NINE: SERENA
CHAPTER TEN: THE MASK
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE WHITE HOTEL
CHAPTER TWELVE: DUEL WITH A CROCODILE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SARABAND FOR LEPERS
THE PRISMATIC SUN
P. S. Ideas, interviews & features…
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ABOVE all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary. After many delays, the small passenger steamer was at last approaching the line of jetties, but although it was ten o’clock the surface of the water was still grey and sluggish, leaching away the sombre tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks.
At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilion of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle.
This pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light, Dr. Sanders had noticed during his long wait at the rail of the passenger-deck. For two hours the steamer had sat out in the centre of the estuary, now and then blowing its whistle at the shore in a half-hearted way. But for the vague sense of uncertainty induced by the darkness over the river, the few passengers would have been driven mad with annoyance. Apart from a French military landing-craft there seemed to be no other vessels of any size berthed along the jetties. As he watched the shore, Sanders was almost certain that the steamer was being deliberately held off, though the reason was hard to see. The steamer was the regular packet-boat from Libreville, with its weekly cargo of mail, brandy and automobile spare parts, not to be postponed for more than a moment by anything less than an outbreak of the plague.
Politically, this isolated corner of the Cameroon Republic was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal, fifty miles up the Matarre River. Despite the presence of the landing-craft – a French military mission supervised the training of the local troops – life in the nondescript port at the river-mouth seemed entirely normal. Watched by a group of children, a jeep was at that moment being unloaded. People wandered along the wharves and through the arcades in the main street, and a few outriggers loaded with jars of crude palm-oil drifted past on the dark water towards the native market to the west of the port.
Nevertheless, the sense of unease persisted. Puzzled by the dim light, Sanders turned his attention to the inshore areas, following the river as it made a slow clockwise turn to the south-east. Here and there a break in the forest canopy