The forbidden zone

What is this city that sprawls in the shallow valley between the chalk hills? Why are its buildings all alike, gaunt wooden sheds with iron roofs? Why are there no trees, no gardens, no pleasant places? The sheds are placed on top of the muddy ground like boxes, row after row of them, with iron rails down the centre where the main street of the town should be. But there are no streets. There are only tracks in the mud and wooden walks laid across the mud from one shed to the other, and a railway line.

I see no children playing anywhere. The wind brings no sound of laughter from the place, or splendid shouting, no sound of any kind. Silent men in couples are carrying heavy bundles between them from one shed to the other, heads down to the wind. The small white figure of a solitary woman is crossing a wide open space. She is slipping in the mud. Her white dress is fluttering. The place is immense and empty, new and still and desolate. But the naked wet hills are throbbing. There’s a noise of distant booming as if the sea were breaking against their sides.

You tell me there is no sea over there. But the roar? Surely there are waves breaking, and this desert is wet as if a great wave had just receded, leaving the muddy bottom of the earth uncovered. A bare sea bottom, strewn with bits of iron, coils of wire, stones. No sign of life, no fish fossils, or rotting sea-weed, no plant of any kind, not a blade of green; a dead sea must have lain here.

Whoever built this city on this slippery waste, built it quick, at ebb tide, between tides, to serve some queer purpose between low and high tide. They put up these sheds in a hurry, covered them with sheets of corrugated iron, pinned them to the mud somehow, anyhow, knowing that a roaring surge would rise again, come rolling back over the hills to carry them away again. Then all these new buildings, all this timber and these sheets of iron will be broken up, and will rush down in a torrent.

Down where? How do I know. I’m lost. I’ve lost my way. The road was slippery. There were no landmarks. The village I used to know at the cross-roads was gone. Everything was sliding in the mud and all the villages that I knew here once on a time had slipped clean out of sight, and now all the men and horses in the world with wagons and motor lorries seem to be pouring after them into a gulf. The earth is a greased slide, tilted up and shaking. And the men who built this place knew evidently that there was danger of the face of the earth itself slipping—for look over there on that hill-side and that one—they’ve tied the earth down with wire. You see those intersecting bands of wire, looking like a field of tangled iron weeds and iron thistles? That is evidently to keep the mud from slipping away.

Queer, isn’t it? This new city where there once was a snug town huddled round a church with cafés, little tables under the trees, schoolboys in black pinafores playing on the church steps. The inn, I remember, was famous for its cuisine. What has become of the fat landlord who watched the plump succulent fowls turning on a spit and dripping? Now, there’s this place that looks like a mining town or a lumber camp, only it can’t be. There’s not a tree to be seen, north, south, east, or west, nothing but mud glistening. It’s very queer, I say. That flimsy gate there with a banner across it as if for a celebration, with H.O.E. 32 on it in big black letters, and a flag flying, and those red crosses painted on the iron roofs of the buildings. H.O.E. 32 must be the name of the place; but why such a name? What does it mean?

Perhaps there has been a new flood, since Noah, and you and I slept through it. Perhaps a new race of men has been hatched out of the mud, hatched like newts, slugs, larvæ of water beetles. But slugs who know horribly, acutely, that they have only a moment to live in between flood tides and so built this place quickly, a silly shelter against the wrath of God, and gave it a magic hieroglyphic name, and put the name on a banner and hoisted a flag, and then put those red crosses up there, tipped skywards. Everything showy in the place points skywards, is designed to catch an eye in the sky, a great angry eye.

Otherwise it seems a secret place, vast, spread out, bare but secret; and some strange industry, some dreadful trade is evidently being carried on here in the wet desert, where a flood has passed and another flood will come.

The workers have a curious apprehensive look with their big secretive bundles. They may be smugglers. Certainly some shameful merchandise is being smuggled in here from the shore that you say is not the shore of the sea. If the booming noise beyond the hills were the roar of waves breaking, one would say that these old men were gangs of beachcombers, bringing up bundles of wreckage; that they go out across the mud under cover of the night to hunt in the backwash. You can see from the way they move that the stuff is valuable and breakable. They come out of the sheds cautiously and go carefully along the narrow board walks, two by two, with the heavy brown bundles swinging between them. They are as careful as they can be. They seem to be old men. They stagger under the weight that swings from their arms and their old shoulders cower as if under the lash of an invisible whip; but they go up and down the long rows of sheds, patiently, carefully, gently, taking small careful steps.

You say that these bundles are the citizens of the town? What do you mean? Those heavy brown packages that are carried back and forth, up and down, from shed to shed, those inert lumps cannot be men. They are delivered to this place in closed vans and are unloaded like sacks and are laid out in rows on the ground and are sorted out by the labels pinned to their covers. They lie perfectly still while they are carried back and forth, up and down, shoved into sheds and pulled out again. What do you mean by telling me that they are men?

Why, if they are men, don’t they walk? Why don’t they talk? Why don’t they protest? They lie perfectly still. They make no sound. They are covered up. You do not expect me to believe that inside that roll there is a man, and in that one, and in that one?

Ah, dear God, it’s true! Look! Look through the window. The old men are undoing the bundles inside this shed. Look, there’s a face and there’s an arm hanging down crooked, and there I see a pair of boots sticking out at one end of a bundle.

But how queer they are! How strangely they lie there. They are not the usual shape. They only remind one of men. Some, to be sure, are wearing coats, and some have on iron hats, but all of them seem to be broken and tied together with white rags. And how dirty they are! The mud is crusted on them. Their boots are lumps of mud. Their faces are grey and wet as if modelled of pale mud. But what are those red, rusty stains on their dirty white rags? They have gone rusty lying out there in the mud, in the backwash. Ah, what a pity. Here is one without an arm, and another and another, and there, dear God, is one without a face! Oh! Oh! What are the old men doing to them? They are pulling off their clothes, uncovering the dreadful holes in their sides. Come away, come away from the window. I know now. There is no need to sneak up and stare at them.

They are lost men, wrecked men, survivors from that other world that was here before the flood passed this way, washed up against the shore of this world again by the great backwash. They thought that they had done with it, thought it was over and done with, thought they had left it for ever. But they’ve been brought here, brought back again to this city of refuge called H.O.E. 32, that sprawls under the angry Eye of God. Bundled into vans they were, all mangled and broken, carried back over the sliding mud through that flimsy gate where the flag is flapping, to be saved. To be hauled about and man-handled, to have their broken, bleeding nakedness uncovered, to have their bodies cut again with knives and their deep wounds probed with pincers, and to have the breath choked back in their sobbing lungs again, so that they may be saved for this world.

How strange it must look to them when they open their eyes! There are no trees anywhere. There is no shelter, except under the iron roofs. The place is new and still and desolate. But the wind is howling over the wet desert, and the old men who go carefully up and down with their heavy oblong bundles, stop and listen to the booming sound beyond the hills as if they heard the flood rising.