Sanders stood up, finishing his brandy. ‘However, it’s a point. I think I’ll have a word with the good Father. I’ll see you back at the hotel – perhaps we can have dinner together?’
‘Of course.’ She waved to him as he went out and then sat back against the window, her face motionless and without expression.
A hundred yards away, Sanders caught sight of the priest. Balthus had reached the outskirts of the native market and was moving among the first of the stalls, turning from left to right as if looking for someone. Dr. Sanders followed at a distance. The market was almost empty and he decided to keep the priest under observation for a few minutes before approaching him. Now and then, when Father Balthus glanced about, Sanders saw his lean face, the thin nose raised critically as he peered above the heads of the native women.
Dr. Sanders glanced down at the stalls, pausing to examine the carved statuettes and curios. The small local industry had made full use of the waste products of the mines at Mont Royal, and many of the teak and ivory carvings were decorated with fragments of calcite and fluorspar picked from the refuse heaps, ingeniously worked into the statuettes to form miniature crowns and necklaces. Many of the carvings were made from lumps of impure jade and amber, and the sculptors had abandoned all pretence to Christian imagery and produced squatting idols with pendulous abdomens and grimacing faces.
Still keeping Father Balthus under scrutiny, Dr. Sanders examined a large statuette of a native deity in which two crystals of calcium fluoride formed the eyes, the mineral phosphorescing in the sunlight. Nodding to the stallholder, he complimented her on the piece. Making the most of her opportunity, she gave him a wide smile and then drew back a strip of faded calico that covered the rear of the stall.
‘My, that is a beauty!’ Sanders reached forward to take the ornament she had exposed, but the woman held back his hands. Glittering below her in the sunlight was what appeared to be an immense crystalline orchid carved from some quartz-like mineral. The entire structure of the flower had been reproduced and then embedded within the crystal base, almost as if a living specimen had been conjured into the centre of a huge cut-glass pendant. The internal faces of the quartz had been cut with remarkable skill, so that a dozen images of the orchid were refracted, one upon the other, as if seen through a maze of prisms. As Dr. Sanders moved his head a continuous fount of light poured from the jewel.
Sanders reached into his pocket for his wallet, and the woman smiled again and drew the cover back to expose several more of the ornaments. Next to the orchid was a spray of leaves attached to a twig, carved from a translucent jade-like stone. Each of the leaves had been reproduced with exquisite craftsmanship, the veins forming a pale lattice beneath the crystal. The spray of seven leaves, faithfully rendered down to the axillary buds and the faint warping of the twig, seemed characteristic more of some medieval Japanese jeweller’s art than of the crude massive sculpture of Africa.
Next to the spray was an even more bizarre piece, a carved tree-fungus that resembled a huge jewelled sponge. Both this and the spray of leaves shone with a dozen images of themselves refracted through the faces of the surrounding mount. Bending forward, Sanders placed himself between the ornaments and the sun, but the light within them sparkled as if coming from some interior source.
Before he could open his wallet there was a shout in the distance. A disturbance had broken out near one of the stalls. The stall-holders ran about in all directions, and a woman’s voice cried out. In the centre of this scene stood Father Balthus, arms raised above his head as he held something in his hands, black robes lifted like the wings of a revenging bird.
‘Wait for me!’ Sanders called over his shoulder to the stall-owner, but she had covered up her display, sliding the tray out of sight among the stacks of palm leaves and baskets of cocoa meal at the back of the stall.
Leaving her, Sanders ran through the crowd towards Father Balthus. The priest now stood alone, surrounded by a circle of onlookers, holding in his upraised hands a large native carving of a crucifix. Brandishing it like a sword over his head, he waved it from left to right as if semaphoring to some distant peak. Every few seconds he stopped and lowered the carving to inspect it, his thin face perspiring.
The statuette, a cruder cousin of the jewelled orchid Sanders had seen, was carved from a pale-yellow gem-stone similar to chrysolite, the outstretched figure of the Christ embedded in a sheath of prism-like quartz. As the priest waved the statuette in the air, shaking it in a paroxysm of anger, the crystals seemed to deliquesce, the light pouring from them as from a burning taper.
‘Balthus—!’
Dr. Sanders pushed through the crowd watching the priest. The faces were half averted, keeping an eye open for the police, as if the people were aware of their own complicity in whatever act of lèse-majesté Father Balthus was now punishing. The priest ignored them and continued to shake the carving, then lowered it from the air and felt the crystalline surface.
‘Balthus, what on earth—?’ Sanders began, but the priest shouldered him aside. Whirling the crucifix like a propeller, he watched its light flashing away, intent only on exorcizing whatever powers it held for him.
There was a shout from one of the stall-holders, and Dr. Sanders saw a native police-sergeant approaching cautiously in the distance. Immediately the crowd began to scatter. Panting from his efforts, Father Balthus let one end of the crucifix fall to the ground. Still holding it like a blunted sword, he looked down at its dull surface. The crystalline sheath had vanished into the air.
‘Obscene, obscene …!’ he muttered to Dr. Sanders, as the latter took his arm and propelled him through the stalls. Sanders paused to toss the carving on to the blue sheet covering the owner’s stall. The shaft, fashioned from some kind of polished wood, felt like a stick of ice. He pulled a five-franc note from his wallet and stuffed it into the stall-owner’s hands, then pushed Father Balthus in front of him. The priest was staring up at the sky and at the distant forest beyond the market. Deep within the great boughs the leaves flickered with the same hard light that had flared from the cross.
‘Balthus, can’t you see …?’ Sanders took the priest’s hand in a firm grip when they reached the wharf. The pale hand was as cold as the crucifix. ‘It was meant as a compliment. There was nothing obscene there – you’ve seen a thousand jewelled crosses.’
The priest at last seemed to recognize him. His narrow face stared sharply at the doctor. He pulled his hand away. ‘You obviously don’t understand, Doctor! That cross was not jewelled!’
Dr. Sanders watched him stride off, head and shoulders held stiffly with a fierce self-sufficient pride, the slim hands behind his back twisting and fretting like nervous serpents.
Later that day, as he and Louise Peret had dinner together in the deserted hotel, Dr. Sanders said: ‘I don’t know what the good Father’s motives are, but I’m certain his bishop wouldn’t approve of them.’
‘You think he may have … changed sides?’ Louise asked.
Laughing at this, Sanders replied: ‘That may be putting it too strongly, but I suspect that, professionally speaking, he was trying to confirm his doubts rather than allay them. That cross in the market drove him into a frenzy – he was literally trying to shake it to death.’
‘But why? I’ve seen those native carvings, they’re beautiful but just ordinary pieces of jewellery.’
‘No, Louise. That’s the point. As Balthus knew, they’re not ordinary by any means. There’s something about the light they give out – I didn’t get a chance to examine one closely – but it seems to come from inside them, not from the sun. A hard, intense light, you can see it all over Port Matarre.’
