By his agency the main lagoon is drained and a paranoid Walpurgisnacht enacted among the slime-coated buildings of what proves to be Leicester Square. There is plenty of drama, notably after the arrival of a diabolical free-booter, bone-white in a world of darkened skins, whose ship is crammed with salvaged altar-pieces and equestrian statues and whose entourage consists of a band of negroes and a pack of alligators. In their waking hours they withdraw more and more irrevocably into the “consciousness of their remote biological past”, and the book ends with the hero’s departure on a lone trek southward towards some kind of paradisal graveyard of the species. Those so affected share a recurrent dream in which they appear to be reversing the process of their birth, losing their identity in a warm sea that is at once the uterino fluid and the primeval ocean from which life emerged. The book blazes with images, striking and continuously meaningful Among the members of a survey team, sent south from Greenland to determine whether parts of Europe may some day be reclaimable, a parallel but far more complex and disturbing regression can be glimpsed. Plant and animal life is reverting to the giant bamboos and reptiles of the Triassic age. The setting is among the super-tropical swamps, lagoons and jungles that, as a result of an increase in the sun’s heat, now cover most of Earth’s surfaces.
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