Sweetlights

You couldn’t say what was going on with the time.  Even if you had a good watch.  Like Stinson had.  When he looked at his Constantin Vacheron, all it said to him was, Forget it, come back some other time. 

The Aurora came and it sprinkled colour in the dust, making tinsel-rain trickle over them.  The ravines they’d been stepping over turned to liquorice bands in the light-spray and they found themselves walking through a wonderland of nostalgia concepts; it got Stinson’s sweet tooth going.

‘What’s your favourite sweet, Captain?’

‘We don’t eat sweets... anymore.’

‘Past- tense favourite then?’

‘I never liked sweets.’

‘I don’t believe you.  And who’s we?’

‘WE?  Fishermen.  We catch fish, not sweets.’

‘All of you fishermen caught sweets when you were younger.’

‘Yes, we all did....but not anymore.’

‘Come on....’

‘Gobstoppers.  Of which I wish there were many available now.’

‘Oh, let’s not be fighting anymore. The world is too ambiguous.  I love liquorice.’

They came to the bottom of the first hill and decided to stop and have a snack before continuing.  Littlewood used that moment to vomit up some more and while he was doing that they both remarked on the glaciated cliffs that necked the hill like a white scarf one would wear in the cold weather.  The hills were cold like them, they both remarked.  While chuckling.  And vomiting.  One of them.  A part of the glacier jutted out like the visor of Littlewood’s cap, a long frosted beam dripping with snaky trestles of ice.  It was a spectacular formation and it made Stinson think of that first description Walter had imported from his projection: mountains mounting one another.  Although Walter’s metaphysical reportage was excessive in comparison, the scene now was nonetheless astounding.

It was after eating a sardine and vomiting it out and eating another one and vomiting half of that one out that Littlewood observed a winding path around the hill.  It had a human tactility about it,  the kind of path formed out of consistent treading on by people; but it appeared now unruffled, like it had seen footprints, but forgotten them.

‘It looks like we’re going to be heading up that way.’

‘Do you think anything will be there?’ said Stinson.  ‘It looks like it hasn’t been used in years.’

‘There’s nothing else around here.  Don’t worry, we’ll just walk a few yards, and if we don’t find anything, we’ll start backwards.’

‘I’m finding it very difficult to believe anyone lived in a place like this.  I can imagine someone being marooned after a shipwreck like a boreal Robinson Crusoe – but not a whole colony of people.’

‘Human beings are funny.  They would go to the ends of Earth merely to observe a funeral.’