Free The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble Page B

stemmed abundance, monkey flowers with yellow throats deep-spotted with red, forget-me-nots straggling in the hedge bottom, their pale blue faces small and perfect, so much perfection in so small a space, as lovely and as oft-repeated as crystals, as sure, as infallible, yet as different as snowflakes. He walked through the flowers as though it were the first morning, and through a little gate and up a hill, where the ground changed suddenly from the gulf-stream haven to a shorter turf starred with saxifrage and thyme and milkweed and speedwell, and there, the most beautiful flower of all, grew the Grass of Parnassus, so aptly named, its white carved petals streaked with its own faint green blood. But he climbed on, upwards, to see the sea, as yet obscured by the brow of the hill: he climbed, breathing heavily, for the hill was steep though small, and there at the top lay a view more splendid, more wild, more various than anything he could have imagined in the darkness of the night, for there before him lay a sea full of small islands, rising like grey seals, raising their backs like dolphins from the water, heaving and burgeoning, as far as the eye could see, an panse of rocky islands lying in the blue green sea. The landscape seemed alive, as though seething in the act of its own creation, for round every island the waves broke white and fell and glittered, in a perpetual swell and heave. The Isles of the Blest, he said to himself. Uninhabited, ancient. Out they stretched forever, to the North and West, to the ultimate reaches of man’s desiring, where man was lost and nothing, at the edges of the world. For what did man desire, but those edges? David Ollerenshaw stood there and gazed, his heart beating strangely. Those islands were granite: Lewisian gneiss, the most ancient rock in Britain.
    He had known they were ancient, he said to himself, as he scrambled back down the hill to his hard scrambled eggs. He had a geiger counter in his blood, a mechanism that responded to rock, as swallows to the magnetism of the earth. He did not really need a computer: all that the computer would do would be to confirm his own innate response. This was what was called a feeling for the subject, he supposed.
    And now they were going to dig it all up. He had to admit that he would himself rather dig up the Sahara. The Grass of Parnassus did not blossom there, nor the pale blue water lobelia and the marsh orchid. If the company sent him off to the Hebrides, should he on grounds of conscience refuse? Not that they were likely to: he was a hard rock man, not an oil man. He wished that his hard rocks would arrive from Africa: he knew what they were made of, but equally knew that the company would prefer confirmation from this convenient new computer. He gazed out of the Institute window, at the famous view. The blue lobelia had pallid flowers, blue white, and it broke the still mirror surface of the lochs, of the all-covering water, of the cold brown peaty water. It was more water than land, that part of Scotland. That, too, could not be said of the Sahara.
    If the rocks turned out to be what he expected (and they would) then he would have been as lucky, in his way, as Frances Wingate. Though he would never get the credit. She, he thought (though without ill-will) seemed to have had more than her fair share of credit. Her performance had amused him.
    He rubbed his glasses on his handkerchief. Remember him, for it will be some months before he and Frances Wingate meet again.
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    By the time Frances got to the dinner on the train, she was in intense pain. The whole of the side of her head was aching and drumming, not quite in time with the train’s rhythm. She thought she probably had an abscess. From time to time she hit at it with her knuckles, horribly aware of bone and mortality, thinking of the poor Pharaohs with their tooth rot, and the insufferable dental decay of the ancient world. She had two more codeine, and got the waiter to