![]() ![]() At the port downstream in Matarre, Sanders watches the body of a dead man with a crystal arm being washed downriver, rainbows glowing in his emerald eyes. This process creates displaced but identical images of the same material object in almost the same place – flat, dense versions of the same image echoing outwards, crystallised. Soldiers and explorers venturing too far into it have started to petrify into quartz, the atoms of their flesh becoming frozen in time. The Mont Royal forest, where the mines are situated, is the epicentre of a pocket of crystallisation, the result of particles of “anti-time” colliding with particles of time (as anti-matter and matter collide and destroy each other). ![]() Suzanne waits for him in her hospital like a god outside time, a Norma Desmond surrounded by frozen relics. He hires a boat, another Ballardian hero on a doomed journey, this time to a forest of motionless crystal. Sanders is travelling to the forest to find his former lover, Suzanne Clair, a doctor working at a leper colony near the mines. “Day and night,” another passenger remarks looking out over the river, “do they mean much any longer?” ![]() He meets an architect in white linen and a priest in black soutane. ![]() The scene is a chiaroscuro of dark and light, the blackness of the river below the ship set against the glow in the sky. The book opens with a doctor, Edward Sanders, standing at the bow of a steamer in the Matarre estuary in the Cameroon Republic, watching the rippling water and a strange light over the forest near the diamond mines upriver. ![]()
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