The Realms of Gold Read Online Free Page B

the world for walking—Karel, a city man, had no sense of maps or countryside, and would always deliver them, thus, in some impossible place. This time he had looked at the map, at the empty spaces on either side of the port—it must be good there, he said, pointing at a large flat patch without towns or villages, and they had set off, along the coast road, hoping for seclusion, and indeed seclusion they had found, for they ended up in a fiat yellow swamp, crossed by long straight muddy tracks. They left the road and turned down a track through what seemed to be fields, though what they were growing who could have said, for the soil was both yellow and salty, an unpromising combination. There were ditches by either side of the track: the tracks intersected, regularly, at right angles. They aimed for the sea, but the terrain grew more and more difficult, the mud clinging to the tyres of Karel’s car, and the ditches turning in a sinister fashion into banks, until finally they were driving along a kind of yellow muddy tunnel, and then the car went into a deep rut, and stopped. They hadn’t much cared: they had sat and kissed and talked for a while of other matters, and then they’d got out to investigate. The car was deeply embedded: they would clearly have to push it out and reverse back the way they had come. They stood there in the mud, holding hands, his shoes sinking, her sandals full of wet clay. It was one of the most unattractive spots one could have imagined. Frances, being a practical woman and used to excavations, hadn’t worried much: she was more worried about losing Karel the next day than about standing there forever in a muddy estuary. She said this to him. I’ll never leave you, he said, with his usual air of slight panic. You’re leaving me tomorrow, she said, unable to keep a plaintive tremor from her voice. I’ll see you next week, he said. And they stood there, in the immense wet flat silence, where nothing grew.
    Only it wasn’t silence. As they stood and listened, they became aware of a most peculiar noise—a kind of honking and squawking and bubbling, a comic and sinister sound.
    â€˜What on earth is that?’ said Karel.
    â€˜I’ve no idea,’ she said.
    It continued, rhythmically: it came from the end of the canal they were stuck in. They went to see what it was, curious, like children, and located its source: it was coming from a round erect drainage pipe, about four feet across, standing at an arbitrary cross roads. Shall we look down? said Frances, standing at a safe distance, her feet squelching. I think we must, said Karel.
    So they went up to the yellow pot pipe, and stared down it. And there they saw a most amazing sight. Hundreds and hundreds of frogs were sitting down that pipe, and they were all honking, all of them, not in unison but constantly, their little throats going, their mouths open, their eyes staring up with curiosity at Karel and Frances and their large human shadows. Honk, honk, koax, koax, they cried. They were all different shapes and sizes—the same species, probably, all a yellowy grey in colour, but madly, but crazily varied in size, as though some law of nature had gone wrong. Huge big ones, tiny little ones, fat ones, skinny ones, they all sat and honked. Down the pipe they sat, as happy as can be, croaking for joy. Karel and Frances stared, awestruck, amused: the sight was repulsive and at the same time profoundly comic, they loved the little frogs and the big ones. Oh, I love them, said Frances. They looked as though they had been bred from the clay, as in some medieval natural history. A natural product of the landscape, they were. And every time she thought of them, in later years, she felt such pleasure and amusement deep within her, a deep source of it, much deeper than that pipe.
    It had taken them some time to get the car out, she remembered, as she finished up her omelette and chewed a lettuce leaf. In