"Good God, he's trying to drag his raft back into the water!”

Thirty yards away, Hardman was dragging the catamaran across the caking mass of silt, the tow-rope over his shoulders, jerking its bows into the air with demoniac energy.

Through the cracks in the floors rose the stench of the greasy water swirling through the windows below.

The water drummed against the portico beneath his feet, beating slowly against his mind, and setting up a widening circle of interference patterns as if crossing it at an opposite direction to its own course of flow. He watched a succession of wavelets lapping at the sloping roof, wishing that he could leave the Colonel and walk straight down into the water, dissolve himself and the ever-present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical call, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea

Clamped securely to the cabin handrail by the nylon around his waist and shoulders, Kerans gazed down at the unfolding landscape, following the waterways un- winding from the three central lagoons. Five hundred feet below, the shadow of the helicopter raced across the mottled green surface of the water, and he focused his attention on the area immediately around it. An immense profusion of animal life filled the creeks and canals:water-snakes coiled themselves among the crushed palisades of the water- logged bamboo groves, colonies of bats erupted out of the green tunnels like clouds of exploding soot, iguanas sat motionlessly on the shaded cornices like stone sphinxes. Often, as if disturbed by the noise of the helicopter, a human form seemed to dart and hide amnong the water-line windows, then revealed itself to be a crocodile snapping at a water- fowl, or one end of a subsiding log dislodged from the atricc gonal f sighi paper o the the ed he of buffeted tree-ferns.

Narrow creeks, the canopies overhead turning them into green-lit tunnels, wound away from the larger lagoons, eventually joining the six hundred-yard-wide channels which broadened outwards across the former suburbs of the city. Everywhere the silt encroaçhed, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of ofces, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow. discs of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.

Kerans shielded his head from the engine roar and stared out across the green-ringed lagoons stretching towards the horizon, a sudden spasm of anxiety twisting one corner of his mouth

What are these nightmares you're having? Beatrice shrugged: Jungle dreams Robert

In order not to attract attention by re-starting the engine, he pushed out into the sunlight, the giant leaves sinking to their hilts in the green jelly of the water, and paddled slowly around the perimeter of the lagoon to Beatrice's apartment

the sunlight expanding across the dark water bathing his lean ebony body. Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber. The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth's magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence.

The tacit assumption made by the UN directorate-that within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and and satisfactions-was obviously fallacious, as the mounting flood-water and temperature would show when they reached the so-called polar redoubts.

For the previous three weeks his dreams were almost driving him out of his mind, but during the last few davs he's been mch less disturbed.

The brief span of an individual life is misleading Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus memory. recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

The further down the CNS you move, from the hind- brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and Triassic Eras."

Steeped in the vast heat, the lagoon lay motionlessly, palls of steam humped over the water like elephantine spectres

everywhere the same pattern has unfolded countless mutations completely transforming the organisms to adapt them for survival in the new environment. Everywhere there's been the same avalanche backwards into the past so much so that the few complex organisms which have managed to retain a foothold unchanged on the slope look distinctly anomalous--a handful of amphibians, the birds, and Man. It's a curious thing that although we've carefully catalogued the backward journeys of so many plants and animals, we've ignored the most important creature on this planet."

Clumps of dried air-weed and red kelp were encrusted across the bitumened plates of the pontoon, shrivelled and burnt by the sun before they could reach the railing around the laboratory, while a dense refuse-filled mass of sargassum and spirogyra cushioned their impact as they reached the narrow jetty, oozing and subsiding like an immense soggy raft

The raked perspex windows of the driving cabin were cracked and stained, and the exhaust vents leaked a scaly oil on to the water.

The continued heating of the atmosphere had begun to melt the polar ice-caps. The entrained ice-seas of the Antarctic plateau broke and dissolved, tens of thousands of glaciers around the Arctic Circle, from Greenland and Northern Europe, Russia and North America, poured themselves into the sea, millions of acres of permafrost liquefied into gigantic rivers. Here again the rise of global water-levels would have been little more than a few feet, but the huge discharging channels carried with them billions of tons of top-soil. Massive deltas formed at their mouths, extending the continental coastlines and damming up the oceans. Their effective spread shrank from two-thirds of the world's area to only slightly more than half.

At the end of the creek they entered the next lagoon, a wide circle of dark green water almost half a mile in diameter. A lane of red plastic buoys marked a channel towards an opening on the far side. The cutter had a draught of little more than a foot, and as they moved along through the flat water, the sun slanting down behind them opening up the submerged depths, they could see the clear outlines of five- and six-storey buildings looming like giant ghosts, here and there a moss-covered roof breaking the surface as the swell rolled past it.

8 In the latter task he often needed Kerans' help, for most of the people still living on in the sinking cities were either psycho- paths or suffering from malnutrition and radiation sickness.

Although he was only forty, Kerans' beard had been turned white by the radio-fluorine in the water

Water had long ceased to flow through the taps, but Kerans maintained a reservoir in the plunge bath, carefully purified in a home-made still on the roof and piped in through the window

On reflection it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last ten years in London.

I think young writers today are tempted into writing novels far too early. I think part of the reason I did take such a long time to write my first novel was that, of course, there was this huge market for short stories, which doesn’t exist today.

the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives, the familiar street and all the rest of it, the trips to the swimming pool and the cinema – were just a stage set. They could be dismantled overnight, which they literally were when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and turned our lives upside down.