PART I

I

Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections.  The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake.  Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph.  Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men ... Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac.

                       summer:  buff sand, hot marble sky.

                       autumn:  swollen bruise-greys.

                       winter:    freezing snow, cool sand.

                                      clear sky panels, glittering with mica.

                                      washed delta greens.

                                      magnificent starscapes.

      And spring?  Ah! there is no spring in the Delta, no sense of refreshment and renewal in things.  One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe.  But here, at least, in Alexandria, the sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness, creeping over the bar among the warships, to flutter the striped awnings of the cafés upon the Grande Corniche.  I would never have ...

*    *    *    *    *

      The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.  Why must I return to it night after night, writing here by the fire of carob-wood while the Aegean wind clutches at this island house, clutching and releasing it, bending back the cypresses like bows?  Have I not said enough about Alexandria?  Am I to be reinfected once more by the dream of it and the memory of its inhabitants?  Dreams I had thought safely locked up on paper, confided to the strong-rooms of memory!  You will think I am indulging myself.  It is not so.  A single chance factor has altered everything, has turned me back upon my tracks.  A memory which catches sight of itself in a mirror.

      Justine, Melissa, Clea.... There were so few of us really - you would have thought them easily disposed of in a single book, would you not?  So would I, so did I.  Dispersed now by time and circumstance, the circuit broken forever....

      I had set myself the task to trying to recover them in words, reinstate them in memory, allot to each his and her position in my time.  Selfishly.  And with that writing complete, I felt that I had turned a key upon the doll's house of our actions.  Indeed, I saw my lovers and friends no longer as living people but as coloured transfers of the mind; inhabiting my papers now, no longer the city, like tapestry figures.  It was difficult to concede to them any more common reality than to the words I had used about them.  What has recalled me to myself?

      But in order to go on, it is necessary to go back: not that anything I wrote about them is untrue, far from it.  Yet when I wrote, the full facts were not at my disposal.  The picture I drew was a provisional one - like the picture of a lost civilization deduced from a few fragmented vases, an inscribed tablet, an amulet, some human bones, a gold smiling death-mask.

*    *    *    *    *

      'We live,' writes Pursewarden somewhere, 'lives based upon selected fictions.  Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think.  Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position.  Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.'  Something of this order....

      And as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals.  Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predispositions.  Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion - but a necessary illusion if we are to love!

      As for the something that remains constant ... the shy kiss of Melissa is predictable, for example (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the frowns of Justine, which cast a show over those blazing dark eyes - orbits of the Sphinx at noon.  'In the end,' says Pursewarden, 'everything will be found to be true of everybody.  Saint and Villain are co-sharers.'  He is right.

      I am making every attempt to be matter-of-fact....

*    *    *    *    *

      In the last letter which reached me from Balthazar he wrote: 'I think of you often and not without a certain grim humour.  You have retired to your island, with, as you think, all the data about us and our lives.  No doubt you are bringing us to judgement on paper in the manner of writers.  I wish I could see the result.  It must fall very far short of truth: I mean such truths as I could tell you about us all - even perhaps about yourself.  Or the truths Clea could tell you (she is in Paris on a visit and has stopped writing to me recently).  I picture you, wise one, poring over Moeurs, the diaries of Justine, Nessim, etc., imagining that the truth is to be found in them.  Wrong!  Wrong!  A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person.  Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.  Do you know whom Justine really loved?  You believed it was yourself, did you not?  Confess!'

      My only answer was to send him the huge bundle of paper which had grown up so stiffly under my slow pen and to which I had loosely given her name as a title - though Cahiers would have done just as well.  Months passed after this - a blessed silence indeed, for it suggested that my critic had been satisfied, silenced.

      I cannot say that I forgot the city, but I let the memory of it sleep.  Yet of course, it was always there, as it always will be, hanging in the mind like the mirage which travellers so often see.  Pursewarden has described the phenomenon in the following words:

      'We were still almost a couple of hours' steaming distance before land could possibly come into sight when suddenly my companion shouted and pointed at the horizon.  We saw, inverted in the sky, a full-scale mirage of the city, luminous and trembling, as if painted on dusty silk: yet in the nicest detail.  From memory I could clearly make out its features, Ras El Tin Palace, the Nebi Daniel Mosque, and so forth.  The whole representation was as breath-taking as a masterpiece painted in fresh dew.  It hung there in the sky for a considerable time, perhaps twenty-five minutes, before melting slowly into the horizon mist.  An hour later, the real city appeared, swelling from a smudge to the size of its mirage.'

*    *    *    *    *

      The two or three winters we have spent on this island have been lonely ones - dour and windswept winters and hot summers.  Luckily, the child is too young to feel, as I do, the need for books, for conversation.  She is happy and active.

      Now in the spring come the long calms, the tideless, scentless days of premonition.  The sea tames itself and becomes attentive.  Soon the cicadas will bring in their crackling music, background to the shepherd's dry flute among the rocks.  The scrambling tortoise and the lizard are our only companions.

      I should explain that our only regular visitant from the outside world is the Smyrna packet which once a week crosses the headland to the south, always at the same hour, at the same speed, just after dusk.  In winter, the high seas and winds make it invisible, but now - I sit and wait for it.  You hear at first only the faint drumming of engines.  Then the creature slides round the cape, cutting its line of silk froth in the sea, brightly lit up in the moth-soft darkness of the Aegean night - condensed, but without outlines, like a cloud of fireflies moving.  It travels fast, and disappears all too soon round the next headland, leaving behind it perhaps only the half-uttered fragment of a popular song, or the skin of a tangerine which I will find next day, washed up on the long pebbled beach where I bathe with the child.

      The little arbour of oleanders under the planes - this is my writing-room.  After the child has gone to bed, I sit here at the old sea-stained table, waiting for the visitant, unwilling to light the paraffin lamp before it has passed.  It is the only day of the week I know by name here - Thursday.  It sounds silly, but in an island so empty of variety, I look forward to the weekly visit like a child to a school treat.  I know the boat brings letters for which I shall have to wait perhaps twenty-four hours.  But I never see the little ship vanish without regret.  And when it has passed, I light to lamp with a sigh and return to my papers.  I write so slowly, with such pain.  Pursewarden once, speaking about writing, told me that the pain that accompanied composition was entirely due, in artists, to the fear of madness; 'force it a bit and tell yourself that you don't give a damn if you do go mad, and you'll find it comes quicker, you'll break the barrier.'  (I don't know how true that all is.  But the money he left me in his will has served me well, and I still have a few pounds between me and the devils of debt and work.)

      I describe this weekly diversion in some detail because it was into this picture that Balthazar intruded one June evening with a suddenness that surprised me - I was going to write 'deafened' - there is no-one to talk to here - but 'surprised me'.  This evening something like a miracle happened.  The little steamer, instead of disappearing as usual, turned abruptly through an arc of 150 degrees and entered the lagoon, there to lie in a furry cocoon of its own light: and to drop into the centre of the golden puddle it had created the long slow anchor-chain whose symbol itself is like a search for truth.  It was a moving sight to one who, like myself, had been landlocked in spirit as all writers are - indeed, become like a ship in a bottle, sailing nowhere - and I watched as an Indian must perhaps have watched the first white man's craft touch the shores of the New World.

      The darkness, the silence, were broken now by the uneven lap-lap of oars; and then, after an age, by the chink of city-shod feet upon shingle.  A hoarse voice gave a direction.  Then silence.  As I lit the lamp to set the wick in trim and so deliver myself from the spell of this departure from the norm, the grave dark face of my friend, like some goat-like apparition from the Underworld, materialized among the thick branches of myrtle.  We drew a breath and stood smiling at each other in the yellow light: the dark Assyrian ringlets, the beard of Pan.  'No - I am real!' said Balthazar with a laugh and we embraced furiously.  Balthazar!

      The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.  Alexandria indeed - the true no less than the imagined - lay only some hundreds of sea-miles to the south.

      'I am on my way to Smyrna,' said Balthazar, 'from where I was going to post you this.'  He laid upon the scarred old table the immense bundle of manuscript I had sent him - papers now seared and starred by a massive interlinear of sentences, paragraphs and question-marks.  Seating himself opposite with his Mephistophelean air, he said in a lower, more hesitant tone:

      'I have debated in myself very long about telling you some of the things I have put down here.  At times it seemed a folly and an impertinence.  After all, your concern - was it with us as real people or as "characters"?  I didn't know.  I still don't.  These pages may lose me your friendship without adding anything to the sum of your knowledge.  You have been painting the city, touch by touch, upon a curved surface - was your object poetry or fact?  If the latter, then there are things which you have a right to know.'

      He still had not explained his amazing appearance before me, so anxious was he about the central meaning of his visitation.  He did so now, noticing my bewilderment at the cloud of fireflies in the normally deserted bay.  He smiled.

      'The ship is delayed for a few hours with engine trouble.  It is one of Nessim's.  The captain is Hasim Kohly, an old friend: perhaps you remember him?  No.  Well, I guessed from your description roughly where you must be living; but to be landed on your doorstep like this, I confess!'  His laughter was wonderful to hear once more.

      But I hardly listened, for his words had plunged me into a ferment, a desire to study his interlinear, to revise - not my book (that has never been of the slightest importance to me for it will never even be published), but my view of the city and its inhabitants.  For my own personal Alexandria had become, in all this loneliness, as dear as a philosophy of introspection, almost a monomania.  I was so filled with emotion I did not know what to say to him.  'Stay with us, Balthazar - ' I said, 'stay awhile....'

      'We leave in two hours,' he said, and patting the papers before him: 'This may give you visions and fevers,' he added doubtfully.

      'Good,' I said - 'I ask for nothing better.'

      'We are all still real people,' he said, 'whatever you try to do to us - those of us who are still alive.  Melissa, Pursewarden - they can't answer back because they are dead.  At least, so one thinks.'

      'So one thinks.  The best retorts always come from beyond the grave.'

      We sat and began to talk about the past, rather stiffly to be sure.  He had already dined on board and there was nothing I could offer him beyond a glass of the good island wine which he sipped slowly.  Later he asked to see Melissa's child, and I led him back through the clustering oleanders to the place from which we could both look into the great firelit room where she lay looking beautiful and grave, asleep there with her thumb in her mouth.  Balthazar's dark cruel eye softened as he watched her, lightly breathing.  'One day,' he said in a low voice, 'Nessim will want to see her.  Quite soon, mark.  He has begun to talk about her, be curious.  With old age coming on, he will feel he needs her support, mark my words.'  And he quoted in Greek: 'First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.'  I said nothing.  It was the room itself which was breathing now - not our bodies.

      'You have been lonely here,' said Balthazar.

      'But splendidly, desirably lonely.'

      'Yes, I envy you.  But truthfully.'

      And then his eye caught the unfinished portrait of Justine which Clea in another life had given me.

      'That portrait,' he said, 'which was interrupted by a kiss.  How good to see that again - how good!'  He smiled.  'It is like hearing a loved and familiar statement in music which leads one towards an emotion always recapturable, never-failing.'  I did not say anything.  I did not dare.

          He turned to me.  'And Clea?' he said at last, in the voice of someone interrogating an echo.  I said: 'I have heard nothing from her for ages.  Time doesn't count here.  I expect she has married, has gone away to another country, has children, a reputation as a painter ... everything one would wish her.'

      He looked at me curiously and shook his head.  'No,' he said; but that was all.

      It was long after midnight when the seamen called him from the dark olive groves.  I walked to the beach with him, sad to see him leave so soon.  A rowboat waited at the water's edge with a sailor standing to his oars in it.  He said something in Arabic.

      The spring sea was enticingly warm after a day's sunshine and as Balthazar entered the boat the whim seized me to swim out with him to the vessel which lay not two hundred yards away from the shore.  This I did and hovered to watch him climb the rail, and to watch the boat drawn up.  'Don't get caught in the screw,' he called, and 'Go back before the engines start' - 'I will' - 'But wait - before you go - '  He ducked back into a stateroom to reappear and drop something into the water beside me.  It fell with a soft splash.  'A rose from Alexandria,' he said, 'from the city which has everything but happiness to offer its lovers.'  He chuckled.  'Give it to the child.'

      'Balthazar, goodbye!'

      'Write to me - if you dare!'

      Caught like a spider between the cross mesh of lights, and turning towards those yellow pools which still lay between the dark shore and myself, I waved and he waved back.

      I put the precious rose between my teeth and dog-paddled back to my clothes on the pebble beach, talking to myself.

      And there, lying upon the table in the yellow lamplight, lay the great interlinear to Justine - as I had called it.  It was cross-hatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different-coloured inks, in typescript.  It seemed to me then to be somehow symbolic of the very reality we had shared - a palimpsest upon which each of us had left his or her individual traces, layer by layer.

      Must I now learn to see it all with new eyes, to accustom myself to the truths which Balthazar has added?  It is impossible to describe with what emotion I read his words - sometimes so detailed and sometimes so briefly curt - as for example in the list he had headed 'Some Fallacies and Misapprehensions' where he said coldly: 'Number 4.  That Justine "loved" you.  She "loved", if anyone, Pursewarden.  "What does that mean"?  She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married.  Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all - supreme logic of love!'

      In my mind's eye the city rose once more against the flat mirror of the green lake and the broken loins of sandstone which marked the desert's edge.  The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria's streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms - moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.

      It was almost dawn before I surrendered the fascinating mound of paper with its comments upon my own real (inner) life and like a drunkard stumbled to my bed, my head aching, echoing with the city, the only city left where every extreme of race and habit can meet and marry, where inner destines intersect.  I could hear the dry voice of my friend repeating as I fell asleep: 'How much do you care to know ... how much more do you care to know?' - 'I must know everything in order to be at last delivered from the city,' I replied in my dream.

*    *    *    *    *

      'When you pluck a flower, the branch springs back into place.  This is not true of the heart's affections,' is what Clea once said to Balthazar.

*    *    *    *    *

      And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking.  'Truth,' said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, 'Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.'

      And Pursewarden on another occasion, but not less memorably: 'If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!'

      How will I ever deliver myself from this whore among cities - desert, minaret, sand, sea?

      No.  I must set it all down in cold black and white, until such time as the memory and impulse of it is spent.  I know that the key I am trying to turn is in myself.

II

Le cénacle Capodistria used to call us in those days when we gathered for an early morning shave in the Ptolemaic parlour of Mnemjian, with its mirrors and palms, its bead curtains and the delicious mimicry of clear warm water and white linen: a laying out and anointing of corpses.  The violet-eyed hunchback himself officiated, for we were valued customers all (dead Pharaohs at the natron baths, guts and brains to be removed, renovated and replaced).  He himself, the barber, was often unshaven, having just hurried down from the hospital after shaving a corpse.  Briefly we met here in the padded chairs, in the mirrors, before separating to go about our various tasks - Da Capo to see his brokers, Pombal to totter to the French consulate (mouth full of charred moths, hangover, sensation of having walked about all night on his eyeballs), I to teach, Scobie to the Police Bureau, and so on....

      I have somewhere a faded flashlight photograph of this morning ritual, taken by poor John Keats, the Global Agency correspondent.  It is strange to look at it now.  The smell of the gravecloth is on it.  It is a speaking likeness of an Alexandrian spring morning: quiet rubbing of coffee pestles, curdling crying of fat pigeons.  I recognize my friends by the very sounds they make: Capodistria's characteristic 'Quatch' and 'Pouagh' at some political remark, followed by that dry cachinnation - the retching of a metal stomach; Scobie's tobacco cough 'Teuch, Teuch'; Pombal’s soft 'Tiens', like someone striking a triangle.  'Tiens'.

      And in one corner there I am, in my shabby raincoat - the perfected image of a schoolteacher.  In the other corner sits poor little Toto de Brunel.  Keat's photograph traps him as he is raising a ringed finger to his temple - the fatal temple.

      Toto!  He is an original, a numéro.  His withered witch's features and small boy's brown eyes, widow's peak, queer art nouveau smile.  He was the darling of old society women too proud to pay for gigolos.  'Toto, mon chou, c'est toi!' (Madame Umbada), 'Comme il est charmant, ce Toto!' (Athena Trasha).  He lives on these dry crusts of approbation, an old woman's man, with the dimples sinking daily deeper into the wrinkled skin of an ageless face, quite happy, I suppose.  Yes.

      'Toto - comment vas-tu?' - 'Si heureux de vous voir, Madame Martinengo!'

      He was what Pombal scornfully called 'a Gentleman of the Second Declension'.  His smile dug one's grave, his kindness was anaesthetic.  Though his fortune was small, his excesses trivial, yet he was right in the social swim.  There was, I suppose, nothing to be done with him for he was a woman: yet had he been born one he would long since have cried himself into a decline.  Lacking charm, his pederasty gave him a kind of illicit importance.  'Homme serviable, homme gracieux' (Count Banubula, General Cervoni - what more does one want?).

      Though without humour, he found one day that he could split sides.  He spoke indifferent English and French, but whenever at loss for a word he would put in one whose meaning he did not know and the grotesque substitution was often delightful.  This became his standard mannerism.  In it, he almost reached poetry - as when he said 'Some flies have come off my typewriter' or 'The car is trepanned today' or 'I ran so fast I got dandruff'.  He could do this in three languages.  It excused him from learning them.  He spoke a Toto-tongue of his own.

      Invisible behind the lens itself that morning stood Keats - the world's sort of Good Fellow, empty of ill intentions.  He smelt lightly of perspiration.  C'est le métier qui exige.  Once he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning, and now his profession had so trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts) that he had developed the typical journalist's neurosis (they drink to still it): namely that Something has happened, or is about to happen, in the next street, and that they will not know about it until it is too late to 'send'.  This haunting fear of missing a fragment of reality which one knows in advance will be trivial, even meaningless, had given our friend the conventional tic one sees in children who want to go to the lavatory - shifting about in a chair, crossing and uncrossing of legs.  After a few moments of conversation he would nervously rise and say 'I've just forgotten something - I won't be a minute.'  In the street he would expel his breath in a swish of relief.  He never went far but simply walked around the block to still the unease.  Everything always seemed normal enough, to be sure.  He would wonder whether to phone Mahmoud Pasha about the defence estimates or wait till tomorrow.... He had a pocketful of peanuts which he cracked in his teeth and spat out, feeling restless, unnerved, he did not know why.  After a walk he would come trotting back into the café or barber's shop, beaming shyly, apologetically: an 'Agency Man' - our best-integrated modern type.  There was nothing wrong with John except the level on which he had chosen to live his life - but you could say the same about his famous namesake, could you not?

       I own this faded photograph of him.  The mania to perpetuate, to record, to photograph everything!  I suppose this must come from the feeling that you don't enjoy anything fully, indeed are taking the bloom off it with every breath you draw.  His 'files' were enormous, bulging with signed menus, bands off memorial cigars, postage stamps, picture postcards.... Later this proved useful, for somehow he had captured some of Pursewarden's obiter dicta.

      Farther to the east sits good old big-bellied Pombal, under each eye a veritable diplomatic bag.  Now here is someone on whom one can really lavish a bit of affection.  His only preoccupation is with losing his job or being impuissant: the national worry of every Frenchman since Jean-Jacques.  We quarrel a good deal, though amicably, for we share his little flat which is always full of unconsidered trifles and trifles more considered: les femmes.  But he is a good friend, a tender-hearted man, and really loves women.  When I have insomnia or am ill: 'Dis donc, tu vas bien?'  Roughly, in the manner of a bon copain.  'Ecoute - tu veux une aspirine?' or else 'Ou bien - j'ai une jaune amie dans ma chambre si tu veux....' (Not a misprint: Pombal called all poules 'jaunes femmes'.)  'Hein?  Elle n'est pas mal - et c'est tout payé, mon cher.  Mais se matin, moi je me sens un tout petit peu antiféministe - j'en ai marre, hein!'  Satiety fell upon him at such times.  'Je deviens de plus en plus anthropophage' he would say, rolling that comical eye.  Also, his job worried him; his reputation was pretty bad, people were beginning to talk, especially after what he calls 'l'affaire Sveva'; and yesterday the Consul-General walked in on him while he was cleaning his shoes on the Chancery curtains.... 'Monsieur Pombal!  Je suis obligé de vous faire quelques observations sur votre comportement officiel!'  Ouf!  A reproof of the first grade....

      It explains why Pombal now sits heavily in the photograph, debating all this with a downcast expression.  Lately we have become rather estranged because of Melissa.  He is angry that I have fallen in love with her, for she is only a dancer in a nightclub, and as such unworthy of serious attention.  There is also a question of snobbery, for she is virtually living at the flat now and he feels this to be demeaning: perhaps even diplomatically unwise.

      'Love,' says Toto, 'is a liquid fossil' - a felicitous epigram in all conscience.  Now to fall in love with a banker's wife, that would be forgivable, though ridiculous.... Or would it?  In Alexandria, it is only intrigue per se which is wholeheartedly admired; but to fall in love renders one ridiculous in society.  (Pombal is a provincial at heart.)  I think of the tremendous repose and dignity of Melissa in death, the slender body bandaged and swaddled as if after some consuming and irreparable accident.  Well.

      And Justine?  On the day this picture was taken, Clea's painting was interrupted by a kiss, as Balthazar says.  How am I to make this comprehensible when I can only visualize these scenes with such difficulty?  I must, it seems, try to see a new Justine, a new Pursewarden, a new Clea.... I mean that I must try and strip the opaque membrane which stands between me and the reality of their actions - and which I suppose is composed of my own limitations of vision and temperament.  My envy of Pursewarden, my passion for Justine, my pity for Melissa.  Distorting mirrors, all of them.... The way is through fact.  I must record what more I know and attempt to render it comprehensible or plausible to myself, if necessary, by an act of the imagination.  Or can facts be left to themselves?  Can you say 'he fell in love' or 'she fell in love' without trying to divine its meaning, to set it in a context of plausibilities?  'That bitch,' Pombal said once of Justine.  'Elle a l'air d'être bien chambrée!'  And of Melissa, 'Une pauvre petite poule quelconque ...’ He was right, perhaps, yet the true meaning of them resides elsewhere.  Here, I hope, on this scribbled paper which I have woven, spider-like, from my inner life.

      And Scobie?  Well, he at least has the comprehensibility of a diagram - plain as a national anthem.  He looks particularly pleased this morning, for he has recently achieved apotheosis.  After years as a Bimbashi in the Egyptian Police, in what he calls 'the evening of his life', he has just been appointed to ... I hardly dare to write the words, for I can see his shudder of secrecy, can see his glass eye rolling portentously round in its socket ... the Secret Service.  He is not alive any more, thank God, to read the words and tremble.  Yes, the Ancient Mariner, the secret pirate of Tatwig Street, the man himself.  How much the city misses him.  (His use of the word 'uncanny'!)....

      Elsewhere I have recounted how I answered a mysterious summons to find myself in a room of splendid proportions with my erstwhile pirate friend facing me across a desk, whistling through his ill-fitting dentures.  I think his new assignment was as much a puzzle to him as it was to me, his only confidant.  It is true of course that he had been long in Egypt and knew Arabic well; but his career had been comparatively obscure.  What could an intelligence agency hope to get out of him?  More than this - what did he hope to get out of me?  I had already explained in detail that the little circle which met every month to hear Balthazar expound the principles of the Cabbala had no connection with espionage; it was simply a group of hermetic students drawn by their interest in the matter of the lectures.  Alexandria is a city of sects - and the shallowest inquiry would have revealed to him the existence of other groups akin to the one concerned with the hermetic philosophy which Balthazar addressed: Steinerites, Christian Scientists, Ouspenskyists, Adventists.... What was it that riveted attention particularly on Nessim, Justine, Balthazar, Capodistria, etc.?  I could not tell, nor could he tell me.

      'They're up to something,' he repeated weakly.  'Cairo says so.'  Apparently, he did not even know who is own masters were.  His work was invisibly dictated by a scrambler telephone, as far as I could understand.  But whatever 'Cairo' was it paid him well: and if he had money to throw about on nonsensical investigations, who was I to prevent him throwing it to me?  I thought that my first few reports on Balthazar's Cabal would successfully damp all interest in it - but no.  They wanted more and again more.

      And this very morning, the old sailor in the photograph was celebrating his new post and the increase of salary it carried by having a haircut in the upper town, at the most expensive of shops - Mnemjian's.

      I must not forget that this photograph also records a 'Secret Rendezvous'; no wonder Scobie looks distraught.  For he is surrounded by the very spies into whose activities it is necessary to inquire - not to mention a French diplomat who is widely rumoured to be head of the French Deuxième....

      Normally Scobie would have found this too expensive an establishment to patronize, living as he did upon a tiny nautical pension and his exiguous Police salary.  But now he is a great man.

      He did not dare even to wink at me in the mirror as the hunchback, tactful as a diplomat, elaborated a full-scale haircut out of mere air - for Scobie's glittering dome was very lightly fringed by the kind of fluff one sees on a duckling's bottom, and he had of late years sacrificed the torpedo beard of a wintry sparseness.

      'I must say,' he is about to say throatily (in the presence of so many suspicious people we 'spies' must speak 'normally'), 'I must say, old man, you get a spiffing treatment here, Mnemjian really does understand.'  Clearing his throat, 'The whole art.'  His voice became portentous in the presence of technical terms.  'It's all a question of Graduation - I had a close friend who told me, a barber in Bond Street.  You simply got to graduate.'  Mnemjian thanked him in his pinched ventriloquist's voice.  'Not at all,' said the old man largely.  'I know the wrinkles.'  Now he could wink at me.  I winked back.  We both looked away.

      Released, he stood up, his bones creaking, and set his piratical jaw in a look of full-blooded health.  He examined his reflection in the mirror with complacence.  'Yes,' he said, giving a short authoritative nod, 'it'll do.'

      'Electric friction for scalp, sir?'

      Scobie shook his head masterfully as he placed his red flowerpot tarbush on his skull.  'It brings me out in goose pimples,' he said, and then, with a smirk, 'I'll nourish what's left with arak.'  Mnemjian saluted this stroke of wit with a little gesture.  We were free.

      But he was really not elated at all.  He dropped as we walked slowly down Chérif Pacha together towards the Grande Corniche.  He struck moodily at his knee with the horsehair fly-swatter, puffing moodily at his much-mended briar.  Thought.  All he said with sudden petulance was 'I can't stand that Toto fellow.  He's an open nancy-boy.  In my time we would have....' He grumbled away into his skin for a long time and then petered into silence again.

      'What is it, Scobie?' I said.

      'I'm troubled,' he admitted.  'Really troubled.'

      When he was in the upper town his walk and general bearing had an artificial swagger - it suggested a White Man at large, brooding upon problems peculiar to White Men - their Burden, as they call it.  To judge by Scobie, it hung heavy.  His least gesture had a resounding artificiality, tapping his knees, sucking his lip, falling into brooding attitudes before shop windows.  He gazed at the people around him as if from stilts.  These gestures reminded me in a feeble way of the heroes of domestic English fiction who stand before a Tudor fireplace, impressively whacking their riding-boots with a bull's pizzle.

      By the time we had reached the outskirts of the Arab quarter, however, he had all but shed these mannerisms.  He relaxed, tipped his tarbush up to mop his brow, and gazed around him with the affection of long familiarity.  Here he belonged by adoption, here he was truly at home.  He would defiantly take a drink from the leaden spout sticking out of a wall near the Goharri mosque (a public drinking fountain) though the White Man in him must have been aware that the water was far from safe to drink.  He would pick a stick of sugarcane off a stall as he passed, to gnaw it in the open street: or a sweet locust-bean.  Here, everywhere, the cries of the open street greeted him and he responded radiantly.

      'Y'alla, effendi, Skob.'

      'Naharak said, ya Skob.'

      'Allah salimak.'

      He would sigh and say 'Dear people'; and 'How I love the place, you have no idea!' dodging a liquid-eyed camel as it humped down the narrow street threatening to knock us down with its bulging sumpters of bercim, the wild clover which is used as fodder.

      'May your prosperity increase.'

      'By your leave, my mother.'

      'May your day be blessed.'

      'Favour me, O sheik.'

      Scobie walked here with the ease of a man who has come into his own estate, slowly, sumptuously, like an Arab.

      Today we sat together for a while in the shade of the ancient mosque listening to the clicking of the palms and the hooting of sea-going liners in the invisible basin below.

      'I've just seen a directive,' said Scobie at last, in a sad withered little voice, 'about what they call a Peddyrast.  It's rather shaken me, old man.  I don't mind admitting it - I didn't know the word.  I had to look it up.  At all costs, it says, we must exclude them.  They are dangerous to the security of the net.'  I gave a laugh and for a moment the old man showed signs of wanting to respond with a weak giggle, but his depression overtook the impulse, to leave it buried, a small hollowness in those cherry-red cheeks.  He puffed furiously at his pipe.  'Peddyrast,' he repeated with scorn, and groped for his matchbox.

      'I don't think they quite understand at Home,' he said sadly.  'Now the Egyptians, they don't give a damn about a man if he has Tendencies - provided he's the Soul of Honour, like me.'  He meant it.  'But now, old man, if I am to work for the ... You Know What ... I ought to tell them - what do you say?'

      'Don't be a fool, Scobie.'

      'Well, I don't know,' he said sadly.  'I want to be honest with them.  It isn't that I cause any harm.  I suppose one shouldn't have Tendencies - any more than warts or a big nose.  But what can I do?'

      'Surely at your age very little?'

      'Below the belt,' said the pirate with a flash of his old form.  'Dirty.  Cruel.  Narky.'  He looked archly at me round his pipe and suddenly cheered up.  He began one of those delightful rambling monologues - another chapter in the saga he had composed around his oldest friend, the by now mythical Toby Mannering.  'Toby was once Driven Medical by his excesses - I think I told you.  No?  Well, he was.  Driven Medical.'  He was obviously quoting and with relish.  'Lord, how he used to go it as a young man.  Stretched the limit in beating the bounds.  Finally he found himself under the Doctor, had to wear an Appliance.'  His voice rose by nearly an octave.  'He went about in a leopard-skin muff when he had shore leave until the Merchant Navy rose in a body.  He was put away for six months.  Into a Home.  They said "You'll have to have Traction" - whatever that is.  You could hear him scream all over Tewkesbury, so Toby says.  They say they cure you but they don't.  They didn't him, at any rate.  After a bit, they sent him back.  Couldn't do anything with him.  He was afflicted with Dumb Insolence, they said.  Poor Toby!'

      He had fallen effortlessly asleep now, leaning back against the wall of the Mosque.  ('A cat-nap,' he used to say, 'but always woken by the ninth wave.'  For how much longer, I wondered?)  After a moment the ninth wave brought him back through the surf of his dreams to the beach.  He gave a start and sat up.  'What was I saying?  Yes, about Toby.  His father was an M.P.  Very High Placed.  Rich man's son.  Toby tried to go into the Church first.  Said he felt The Call.  I think it was just the costume, myself - he was a great amateur theatrical, was Toby.  Then he lost his faith and slipped up and had a tragedy.  Got run in.  He said the Devil prompted him.  "See he doesn't do it again," says the Beak.  "Not on Tooting Common, anyway."  They wanted to put him in chokey - they said he had a rare disease - cornucopia I think they called it.  But luckily his father went to the Prime Minister and had the whole thing hushed up.  It was lucky, old man, that at that time the whole Cabinet had Tendencies too.  It was uncanny.  The Prime Minister, even the Archbishop of Canterbury.  They sympathized with poor Toby.  It was lucky for him.  After that, he got his master's ticket and put to see.'

      Scobie was asleep once more; only to wake again after a few seconds with a histrionic start.  'It was old Toby,' he went on, without a pause, though now crossing himself devoutly and gulping, 'who put me on to the Faith.  One night when we were on watch together on the Meredith (fine old ship) he says to me: "Scurvy, there's something you should know.  Ever heard of the Virgin Mary?"  I had of course, vaguely.  I didn't know what her duties were, so to speak...."

      Once more he fell asleep and this time there issued from between his lips a small croaking snore.  I carefully took his pipe from between his fingers and lit myself a cigarette.  This appearance and disappearance into the simulacrum of death was somehow touching.  These little visits paid to an eternity which he would soon be inhabiting, complete with the comfortable forms of Toby and Budgie, and a Virgin Mary with specified duties.... And to be obsessed by such problems at an age when, as far as I could judge, there was little beyond verbal boasting to make him a nuisance.  (I was wrong - Scobie was indomitable.)

      After a while he woke again from this deeper sleep, shook himself and rose, knuckling his eyes.  We made our way together to the sordid purlieus of the town where he lived, in Tatwig Street, in a couple of tumbledown rooms.  'And yet,' he said once more, carrying his chain of thought perfectly, 'it's all very well for you to say I shouldn't tell him.  But I wonder.'  (Here he paused to inhale the draught of cooking Arab bread from the doorway of a shop and the old man exclaimed 'It smells like mother's lap!')  His ambling walk kept pace with his deliberations.  'You see the Egyptians are marvellous, old man.  Kindly.  They know me well.  From some points of view, they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that's what I always say.  They make allowances for each other.  Why, Nimrod Pasha himself said to me the other day "Peddyrasty is one thing - hashish quite another."  He's serious, you see.  Now I never smoke hashish when I'm on duty - that would be bad.  Of course, from another point of view, the British couldn't do anything to a man with an official position like me.  But if the Gyppos once thought they were - well, critical about me - old man, I might lose both jobs, and both salaries.  That's what troubles me.'

      We mounted the flyblown staircase with its ragged rat-holes.  'It smells a bit,' he agreed, 'but you get quite used to it.  It's the mice.  No, I'm not going to move.  I've lived in this quarter for years now - years!  Everybody knows me and likes me.  And besides, old Abdul is only round the corner.'

      He chuckled and stopped for breath on the first landing, taking off his flowerpot the better to mop his brow.  Then he hung downwards, sagging as he always did when he was thinking seriously, as if the very weight of the thought itself bore down upon him.  He sighed.  'The thing,' he said slowly, and with the air of a man who wishes at all costs to be explicit, to formulate an idea as clearly as lies within his power, 'the thing is about Tendencies - you only realize it when you're not a hot-blooded young sprig any more.'  He sighed again.  'It's the lack of tenderness, old man.  It all depends on cunning somehow, you get lonely.  Now Abdul is a true friend.'  He chuckled and cheered up once more.  'I call him the Bul Bul Emir.  I set him up in his business, just out of friendly affection.  Bought him everything: his shop, his little wife.  Never laid a finger on him nor ever could, because I love the man.  I'm glad I did now, because though I'm getting on, I still have a true friend.  I pop in every day to see them.  It's uncanny how happy it makes me.  I really do enjoy their happiness, old man.  They are like son and daughter to me, the poor perishing coons.  I can't hardly bear to hear them quarrel.  It makes me anxious about their kids.  I think Abdul is jealous of her, and not without cause, mark you.  She looks flirty to me.  But then, sex is so powerful in this heat - a spoonful goes a long way as we used to say about rum in the Merchant Navy.  You lie and dream about it like ice-cream, sex, not rum.  And these Moslem girls - old boy - they circumcise them.  It's cruel.  Really cruel.  It only makes them harp on the subject.  I tried to get her to learn knitting or crewel-work, but she's so stupid she didn't understand.  They made a joke of it.  Not that I mind.  I was only trying to help.  Two hundred pounds it took me to set Abdul up  - all my savings.  But he's doing well now - yes, very well.'

      The monologue had had the effect of allowing him to muster his energies for the final assault.  We addressed the last ten stairs at a comfortable pace and Scobie unlocked the door of his rooms.  Originally he had only been able to rent one - but with his new salary he had rented the whole shabby floor.

      The largest was the old Arab room which served as a bedroom and reception-room in one.  It was furnished by an uncomfortable-looking truckle bed and an old-fashioned cake-stand.  A few joss-sticks, a police calendar, and Clea's as yet unfinished portrait of the pirate stood upon the crumbling mantelpiece.  Scobie switched on a single dusty electric light-bulb - a recent innovation of which he was extremely proud ('Paraffin gets in the food') - and looked round him with unaffected pleasure.  Then he tiptoed to the far corner.  In the gloom I had at first overlooked the room's other occupant: a brilliant green Amazonian parrot in a brass cage.  It was at present shrouded in a dark cloth, and this the old man now removed with a faintly defensive air.

      'I was telling you about Toby,' he said, 'because last week he came through Alex on the Yokohama run.  I got this from him - he had to sell - the damn bird caused such a riot.  It's a brilliant conversationalist, aren't you Ron, eh?  Crisp as a fart, aren't you?'  The parrot gave a low whistle and ducked.  'That's the boy,' said Scobie with approval, and turning to me added 'I got Ron for a very keen price, yes, a very keen price.  Shall I tell you why?'

      Suddenly, inexplicably, he doubled up with laughter, nearly joining nose to knee and whizzing soundlessly like a small human top, to emerge at last with an equally soundless slap on his own thigh - a sudden paroxysm.  'You'd never imagine the row Ron caused,' he said.  'Toby brought the bird ashore.  He knew it could talk, but now Arabic.  By God.  We were sitting at a café yarning (I haven't seen Toby for five whole years) when Ron suddenly started.  In Arabic.  You know, he recited the Kalima, a very sacred, not to mention holy, text from the Koran.  The Kalima.  And at every other word, he gives a fart, didn't you Ron?'  The parrot agreed with another whistle.  'It's so sacred, the Kalima,' explained Scobie gravely, 'that the next thing was a raging crowd round us.  It was lucky I knew what was going on.  I knew that if a non-Moslem was caught reciting this particular text he was liable to Instant Circumcision!'  His eye flashed.  'It was a pretty poor outlook for Toby to be circumcised like that while one was taking shore leave and I was worried.  (I'm circumcised already.)  However, my presence of mind didn't desert me.  He wanted to punch a few heads, but I restrained him.  I was in police uniform, you see, and that made it easier.  I made a little speech to the crowd saying that I was going to take the infidel and this perishing bird into chokey to hand them over to the Parquet.  That satisfied them.  But there was no way of silencing Ron, even under his little veil, was there Ron?  The little bastard recited the Kalima all the way back here.  We had to run for it.  My word, what an experience!'

      He was changing out of his police rig as he talked, placing his tarbush on the rusty iron nail above his bed, above the crucifix in the little alcove where a stone jar of drinking-water also stood.  He put on a frayed old blazer with tin buttons, and still mopping his head went on: 'I must say - it was wonderful to see old Toby again after so long.  He had to sell the bird, of course, after such a riot.  Didn't dare go through the dock area again with it.  But now I'm doubtful, for I daren't take it out of the room hardly for fear of what more it knows.'  He sighed.  'Another good thing,' he went on, 'was the recipe Toby brought for Mock Whisky - ever heard of it?  Nor had I.  Better than Scotch and dirt cheap, old man.  From now on I'm going to brew all my own drinks, thanks to Toby.  Here.  Look at this.'  He indicated a grubby bottle full of some fiery-looking liquid.  'It's home-made beer,' he said, 'and jolly good too.  I made three, but the other two exploded.  I going to call it Plaza beer.'

      'Why?' I asked.  'Are you going to sell it?'

      'Good Lord, no!' said Scobie.  'Just for home use.'  He rubbed his stomach reflectively and licked his lips.  'Try a glass,' he said.

      'No thanks.'

      The old man now consulted a huge watch and pursed his lips.  'In a little while I must say an Ave Maria.  I'll have to push you out, old man.  But just let's have a look and see how the Mock Whisky is getting on for a moment, shall we?'

      I was most curious to see how he was conducting these new experiments and willingly followed him out on to the landing again and into the shabby alcove which now housed a gaunt galvanized iron bath which he must have bought specially for these illicit purposes.  It stood under a grimy closet window, and the shelves around it were crowded with the impedimenta of the new trade - a dozen empty beer bottles, two broken, and the huge chamberpot which Scobie always called 'the Heirloom'; not to mention a tattered beach umbrella and a pair of galoshes.  'What part do these play?' I could not help asking, indicating the latter.  'Do you tread the grapes or potatoes in them?'

      Scobie took on an old-maidish, squinting-down-the-nose expression which always meant that levity on the topic under discussion was out of place.  He listened keenly for a moment, as if to sounds of fermentation.  Then he got down on one shaky knee and regarded the contents of the bath with a doubtful but intense eye.  His glass eye gave him a more than mechanical expression as it stared into the rather tired-looking mixture with which the bath was brimming.  He sniffed dispassionately and tutted once before rising again with creaking joints.  'It doesn't look as good as I hoped,' he admitted.  'But give it time, it has to be given time.'  He tried some on his finger and rolled his glass eye.  'It seems to have gone a bit turpid,' he admitted.  'As if someone had peed in it.'  As Abdul and himself shared the only key to this little illicit still, I was able to look innocent.

      'Do you want to try it?' he asked doubtfully.

      'Thank you, Scobie - no.'

      'Ah well,' he said philosophically, 'maybe the copper sulphate wasn't fresh.  I had to order the rhubarb from Blighty.  Forty pounds.  That looked pretty tired when it got here, I don't mind telling you.  But I know the proportions are right because I went into it all thoroughly with young Toby before he left.  It needs time, that's what it needs.'

      And made buoyant once more by the hope, he led the way back into the bedroom, whistling under his breath a few staves of the famous song which he only sang aloud when he was drunk on brandy.  It went something like this:

                              'I want

                                      Someone to match my fancy

                              I want

                                      Someone to match my style

                              I've been good for an awful long while

                              Now 'I'll take her in my arms

                              Tum ti Tum Tum ti charms....'

      Somewhere here the melody fell down a cliff and was lost to sight, though Scobie hummed out the stave and beat time with his finger.

      He was sitting down on the bed now and staring at his shabby shoes.

      Abruptly, without apparent premeditation (though he closed his eyes fast as if to shut the subject away out of sight forever) Scobie lay back on the bed, hands behind his head, and said:

      'Before you go, there's a small confession I'd like to make to you, old man.  Right?'

      I sat down on the uncomfortable chair and nodded.  'Right,' he said emphatically and drew a breath.  'Well then: sometimes at the full moon, I'm Took.  I come under An Influence.'

      This was on the face of it a somewhat puzzling departure from accepted form, for the old man looked quite disturbed by his own revelation.  He gobbled for a moment and then went on in a small humbled voice devoid of his customary swagger.  'I don't know what comes over me.'  I did not quite understand all this.  'Do you mean you walk in your sleep, or what?'  He shook his head and gulped again.  'Do you turn into a werewolf, Scobie?'  Once more he shook his head like a child upon the point of tears.  'I slip on female duds and my Dolly Varden,' he said, and opened his eyes fully to stare pathetically at me.

      'You what?' I said.

      To my intense surprise he rose now and walked stiffly to a cupboard which he unlocked.  Inside, hanging up, moth-eaten and unbrushed, was a suit of female clothes of ancient cut, and on a nail beside it a greasy old cloche hat which I took to be the so-called 'Dolly Varden'.  A pair of antediluvian court shoes with very high heels and long pointed toes completed this staggering outfit.  He did not know how quite to respond to the laugh which I was now compelled to utter.  He gave a weak giggle.  'It's silly, isn't it?' he said, still hovering somewhere on the edge of tears despite his smiling face, and still by his own tone inviting sympathy in misfortune.  'I don't know what comes over me.  And yet, you know, it's always the old thrill....'

      A sudden and characteristic change of mood came over him at the words: his disharmony, his discomfiture gave place to a new jauntiness.  His look became arch now, not wistful, and crossing to the mirror before my astonished eyes, he placed the hat upon his bald head.  In a second he replaced his own image with that of a little old tart, button-eyed and razor-nosed - a tart of the Waterloo Bridge epoch, a veritable Tuppeny Upright.  Laughter and astonishment packed themselves into a huge parcel inside me, neither finding expression.  'For God's sake!' I said at last.  'You don't go around like that, do you, Scobie?'

      'Only,' said Scobie, sitting helplessly down on the bed again and relapsing into a gloom which gave his funny little face an even more comical expression (he still wore the Dolly Varden), 'only when the Influence comes over me.  When I'm not fully Answerable, old man.'

      He sat there looking crushed.  I gave a low whistle of surprise which the parrot immediately copied.  This was indeed serious.  I understood now why the deliberations which had consumed him all morning had been so full of heart-searching.  Obviously if one went around in a rig like that in the Arab quarter.... He must have been following my train of thought, for he said 'It's only sometimes when the Fleet's in.'  Then he went on with a touch of self-righteousness: 'Of course, if there was ever any trouble, I'd say I was in disguise.  I am a policeman when you come to think of it.  After all, even Lawrence of Arabia wore a nightshirt, didn't he?'  I nodded.  'But not a Dolly Varden,' I said.  'You must admit, Scobie, it's most original ...' and here the laughter overtook me.

      Scobie watched me laugh, still sitting on the bed in that fantastic headpiece.  'Take it off!' I implored.  He looked serious and preoccupied now, but made no motion.  'Now you know all,' he said.  'The best and the worst in the old skipper.  Now what I was going to ----'

      At this moment there came a knock at the landing door.  With surprising presence of mind Scobie leaped spryly into the cupboard, locking himself noisily in.  I went to the door.  On the landing stood a servant with a pitcher full of some liquid which he said was for the Effendi Skob.  I took it from him and got rid of him, before returning to the room and shouting to the old man who emerged once more - now completely himself, bareheaded and blazered.

      'That was a near shave,' he breathed.  'What was it?'  I indicated the pitcher.  'Oh, that - it's for the Mock Whisky.  Every three hours.'

      'Well,' I said at last, still struggling with these new and indigestible revelations of temperament, 'I must be going.'  I was still hovering explosively between amazement and laughter at the thought of Scobie's second life at full moon - how had he managed to avoid a scandal all these years? - when he said: 'Just a minute, old man.  I only told you all this because I want you to do me a favour.'  His false eye rolled around earnestly now under the pressure of thought.  He sagged again.  'A thing like that could do me Untold Harm,' he said.  'Untold Harm, old man.'

      'I should think it could.'

      'Old man,' said Scobie, 'I want you to confiscate my duds.  It's the only way of controlling the Influence.'

      'Confiscate them?'

      'Take them away.  Lock them up.  It'll save me, old man.  I know it will.  The whim is too strong for me otherwise, when it comes.'

      'All right,' I said.

      'God bless you, son.'

      Together we wrapped his full-moon regalia in some newspapers and tied the bundle up with string.  His relief was tempered with doubt.  'You won't lose them?' he said anxiously.

      'Give them to me,' I said firmly, and he handed me the parcel meekly.  As I went down the stairs he called after me to express relief and gratitude, adding the words: 'I'll say a little prayer for you, son.'  I walked back slowly through the dock-area with the parcel under my arm, wondering whether I would ever dare confide this wonderful story to someone worth sharing it with.

      The warships turned in their inky reflections - the forests of masts and rigging in the Commercial Port swayed softly among the mirror-images of the water: somewhere a ship's radio was blaring out the latest jazz-hit to reach Alexandria:

                                      Old Tiresias

                                      No-one half so breezy as,

                                      Half so free and easy as

                                      Old Tiresias.

*    *    *    *    *

III

Somehow, then, the problem is just how to introject this new and disturbing material into (under?) the skin of the old without changing or irremediably damaging the contours of my subjects or the solution in which I see them move.  The golden fish circling so languidly in their great bowl of light - they are hardly aware that their world, the field of their journeys, is a curved one....

      The sinking sun which had emptied the harbour roads of all but the black silhouettes of the foreign warships had nevertheless left a flickering greyness - the play of light without colour or resonance upon the surface of a sea still dappled with sails.  Dinghies racing for home moved about the floor of the inner harbour, scuttling in and out among the ships like mice among the great boots of primitive cottagers.  The sprouting tier of guns on the Jean Bart moved slowly - tilted - and then settled back into brooding stillness, aimed at the rosy heart of the city whose highest minarets still gleamed gold in the last rays of the sunset.  The flocks of spring pigeons glittered like confetti as they turned their wings to the light.  (Fine writing!)

      But the great panels of the brass-framed windows in the Yacht Club blazed like diamonds, throwing a brilliant light upon the snowy tables with their food, setting fire to the glasses and jewellery and eyes in a last uneasy conflagration before the heavy curtains would be drawn and the faces which had gathered to greet Mountolive took on the warm pallors of candlelight.

      The triumphs of polity, the resources of tact, the warmth, the patience.... Profligacy and sentimentality ... killing love by taking things easy ... sleeping out a chagrin.... This was Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history.  Listen.

      Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Claude Amaril, Paul Capodistria,  Demitri Randidi, Onouphrios Papas, Count Banubula, Jacques de Guéry, Athena Trasha, Djamboulat Bey, Selphine de Francueil, General Cervoni, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Pozzo di Borgo, Pierre Balbz, Gaston Phipps, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Mehmet Adm, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Toto de Brunel, Colonel Neguib, Dante Borromeo, Benedict Dangeau, Pia dei Tolomei, Gilda Ambron.... The poetry and history of commerce, the rhyme-schemes of the Levant which had swallowed Venice and Genoa.  (Names which the passer-by may one day read upon the tombs in the cemetery.)

      The conversation rose in a steamy cloud to envelop Mountolive whose personal triumph it was and who stood talking to Nessim, his host, with the gentle-mannered expression on his face which, like a lens, betrayed all the stylized diffidence of his perfect breeding.  The two men indeed were much alike; only Nessim's darkness was smooth, cleanly surfaced, and his eyes and hands restless.  Despite a difference of age they were well matched - even to the tastes they shared, which the years had done nothing to diminish though they had hardly corresponded directly all the time Mountolive had been away from Egypt.  It had always been to Leila that he wrote, not to her sons.  Nevertheless, once he had returned, they were much together and found they had as much to discuss as ever in the past.  You would hear the sharp pang of their tennis racquets every spring afternoon on the Legation court at an hour when everyone normally slept.  They rode in the desert together or sat for hours side by side, studying the stars, at the telescope which Justine had had installed in the Summer Palace.  They painted and shot in company.  Indeed, since Mountolive's return they had become once more almost inseparables.  Tonight the soft light touched them both with an equal distinction, yet softly enough to disguise the white hairs at Mountolive's temples and the crow's-feet around those thoughtful arbitrator's eyes.  By candlelight the two men seemed exactly of an age if indeed not of the same family.

      A thousand faces whose reverberating expressions I do not understand ('We are all racing under sealed handicaps' says a character in Pursewarden's book), and out of them all there is one only I am burning to see, the black stern face of Justine.  I must learn to see even myself in a new context, after reading those cold cruel words of Balthazar.  How does a man look when he is 'in love'?  (The words in English should be uttered in a low bleating tone.)  Peccavi!  Imbecile!  There I stand in my only decent suit, whose kneecaps are bagged and shiny with age, gazing fondly and short-sightedly around me for a glimpse of the woman who.... What does it matter?  I do not need a Keats to photograph me.  I do not suppose I am uglier than anyone else or less pleasant; and certainly my vanity is of a very general order - for how have I never stopped to ask myself for a second why Justine should turn aside to bestow her favours on me?

      What could I give her that she could not get elsewhere?  Does she want my bookish talk and amateurish love-making - she with the whole bargain-basement of male Alexandria in her grasp?  'A decoy!'  I find this very wounding to understand, to swallow, yet it has all the authority of curt fact.  Moreover, it explains several things which have been for me up to now inexplicable - such as the legacy Pursewarden left me.  It was his guilt, I think, for what he knew Justine was doing to Melissa: in 'loving' me.  While she, for her part, was simply protecting him against the possible power of Nessim (how gentle and calm he looks in the candlelight).  He once said with a small sigh 'Nothing is easier to arrange in our city than a death or a disappearance.'

      A thousand conversations, seeking out for each other like the tap-roots of trees for moisture - the hidden meaning of lives disguised in brilliant smiles, in hands pressed upon the eyes, in malice, in fevers and contents.  (Justine now breakfasted silently surrounded by tall black footmen, and dined by candlelight in brilliant company.  She had started from nothing - from the open street - and was now married to the city's handsomest banker.  How had all this come about?  You would never been able to tell by watching that dark, graceful form with its untamed glances, the smile of the magnificent white teeth....). Yet one trite conversation can contain the germ of a whole life.  Balthazar, for example, meeting Clea against a red brocade curtain, holding a glass of Pernod, could say: 'Clea, I have something to tell you'; taking in as he spoke the warm gold of her hair and a skin honeyed almost to the tone of burnt sugar by sea-bathing in the warm spring sunshine.  'What?'  Her candid eyes were as blue as cornflowers and set in her head like precision-made objects of beauty - the life-work of a jeweller.  'Speak, my dear.'  Black head of hair (he dyed it), lowered voice set in its customary sardonic croak, Balthazar said: 'Your father came to see me.  He is worried about an illicit relationship you are supposed to have formed with another woman.  Wait - don't speak, and don't look hurt.'  For Clear looked now as if he were pressing upon a bruise, the sad grave mouth set in a childish expression, imploring no further penetration.  'He says you are an innocent, a goose, and that Alexandria does not permit innocent people to....'

      'Please, Balthazar.'

      'I would not have spoken had I not been impressed by his genuine anguish - not about scandal: who cares for gossip?  But he was worried lest you should be hurt.'

      In a small compressed voice, like some packaged thought squeezed to a hundredth of its size by machinery, Clea said:

      'I have not been alone with Justine for months now.  Do you understand?  It ended when the painting ended.  If you wish us to be friends you will never refer to this subject again,' smiling a little tremulously, for in the same breath Justine came sailing down upon them, smiling warmly, radiantly.  (It is quite possible to love those whom you most wound.)  She passed, turning in the candlelight of the room like some great seabird, and came at last to where I was standing.  'I cannot come tonight,' she whispered.  'Nessim wants me to stay at home.'  I can feel still the uncomprehending weight of my disappointment at the words.  'You must,' I muttered.  Should I have known that not ten minutes before she had said to Nessim, knowing he hated bridge: 'Darling, can I go and play bridge with the Cervonis - do you need the car?'  It must have been one of those rare evenings when Pursewarden consented to meet her out in the desert - meetings to which she went unerringly, like a sleepwalker.  Why?  Why?

      Balthazar at this moment is saying: 'Your father said: "I cannot bear to watch it, and I do not know what to do.  It is like watching a small child skipping near a powerful piece of unprotected machinery."' Tears came into Clea's eyes and slowly vanished again as she sipped her drink.  'It is over,' she said, turning her back upon the subject and upon Balthazar in one and the same motion.  She turned her sullen mouth now to the discussion of meaningless matters with Count Banubula, who bowed and swung as gallantly as Scobie's green parrot ducking on its perch.  She was pleased to see that her beauty had a direct, clearly discernible effect upon him, like a shower of golden arrows.  Presently, Justine herself passed again, and in passing caught Clea's wrist.  'How is it?' said Clea, in the manner of one who asks after a sick child.  Justine gave the shadow of a grimace and whispered dramatically: 'Oh, Clea - it is very bad.  What a terrible mistake.  Nessim is wonderful - I should never have done it.  I am followed everywhere.'  They stared at each other sympathetically for a long moment.  It was their first encounter for some time.  (That afternoon, Pursewarden had written: 'A few hasty and not entirely unloving words from my sickbed about this evening.'  He was not in bed but sitting at a café on the seafront, smiling as he wrote.)  Messages spoken and unspoken, crossing and interlacing, carrying the currents of our lives, the fears, dissimulations, the griefs.  Justine was speaking now about her marriage which still exhibited to the outer world a clearness of shape and context - the plaster cast of a perfection which I myself had envied when first I met them both.  'The marriage of true minds,' I thought; but where is the 'magnificent two-headed animal' to be found?  When she first became aware of the terrible jealousy of Nessim, the jealousy of the spiritually impotent man, she had been appalled and terrified.  She had fallen by mistake into a trap.  (All this, like the fever-chart of a stricken patient, Clea watched, purely out of friendship, with no desire to renew the love she felt for this dispersed unself-comprehending Jewess.)

      Justine put the matter to herself another way, a much more primitive way, by thinking: up to now she had always judged her men by their smell.  This was the first time ever that she had neglected to consult the sense.  And Nessim had the odourless purity of the desert airs, the desert in summer, unconfiding and dry.  Pure.  How she hated purity!  Afterwards?  Yes, she was revolted by the little gold cross which nestled in the hair of his chest.  He was a Copt - a Christian.  This is the way women work in the privacy of their own minds.  Yet out of shame at such thoughts she became doubly passionate and attentive to her husband, though even between kisses, in the depths of her mind, she longed only for the calm and peace of widowhood!  Am I imagining this?  I do not think so.

      How had all this come about?  To understand, it is necessary to work backwards, through the great Interlinear which Balthazar has constructed around my manuscript, towards that point in time where the portrait which Clea was painting was interrupted by a kiss.  It is strange to look at it now, the portrait, standing unfinished on the old-fashioned mantelpiece of the island house.  'An idea had just come into her mind, but had not yet reached the lips.'  And then, softly, her lips fell where the painter's wet brush should have fallen.  Kisses and brushstrokes - I should be writing of poor Melissa!

      How distasteful all this subject-matter is - what Pursewarden has called 'the insipid kiss of familiars'; and how innocent!  The black gloves she wore in the portrait left a small open space when they were buttoned up - the shape of a heart.  And that innocent, ridiculous kiss only spoke admiration and pity for the things Justine was telling her about the loss of her child - the daughter which had been stolen from her while it was playing on the riverbank.  'Her wrists, her small wrists.  If you could have seen how beautiful and tame she was, a squirrel.'  In the hoarseness of the tone, in the sad eyes and the down-pointed mouth with a comma at each cheek.  And holding out a hand with fingers and thumb joined to describe the circuit of those small wrists.  Clea took and kissed the heart in the black glove.  She was really kissing the child, the mother.  Out of this terrible sympathy her innocence projected the consuming shape of a sterile love.  But I am going too fast.  Moreover, how am I to make comprehensible scenes which I myself see only with such difficulty - these two women, the blonde and the bronze in a darkening studio at Saint Saba, among the rags and the paintpots and the warm gallery of portraits which lined the walls, Balthazar, Da Capo, even Nessim himself, Clea's dearest friend?  It is hard to compose them in a stable colour so that the outlines are not blurred.

      Justine at this time ... coming from nowhere, she had performed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexandria.  She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the contempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her.  Of the fate of the child, few people knew or cared.  She was not 'in society' as the saying goes.... For a time poverty forced her to do a little modelling at so many piastres an hour for the art-students of the Atelier.  Clea, who knew her only by hearsay, passed through the long gallery one day when she was posing and, struck by the dark Alexandrian beauty of her face, engaged her for a portrait.  That was how those long conversations grew up in the silences of the painter; for Clea liked her subjects to talk freely, provided they stayed still.  It gave a submarine life to their features, and filled their looks with unconscious interpretations of thought - the true beauty in otherwise dead flesh.

      Clea's generous innocence - it needed something like that to see the emptiness in which Justine lived with her particular sorrows - factual illustrations merely of a mind at odds with itself: for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints.  The gesture itself was simply a clumsy attempt to appropriate the mystery of true experience, true suffering - as by touching a holy man the supplicant hopes for a transference of the grace he lacks.  The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another - to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a looking-glass.  That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated.  So it proved!  Clea's own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author.  Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine's ageless; her innocence was as defenceless as memory itself.  Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine's sorrow she found herself left with all the bitter lye of an uninvited love.

      She was 'white of heart', in the expressive Arabic phrase, and painting the darkness of Justine's head and shoulders she suddenly felt as if, stroke by stroke, the brush itself had begun to imitate caresses she had neither foreseen nor even thought to permit.  As she listened to that strong deep voice recounting these misfortunes, so desirable in that they belonged to the active living world of experience, she caught her breath between her teeth, trying now to think only of the unconscious signs of good breeding in her subject: hands still in the lap, voice low, the reserve which delineates true power.  Yet even she, from her own inexperience, could not little but pity Justine when she said things like 'I am not much good, you know.  I can only inflict sadness, Arnauti used to say.  He brought me to my senses and taught me that nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.'  Clea was touched by this because it seemed clear to her that Justine had never really experiences pleasure - one has to be generous for that.  Egotism is a fortress in which the conscience de soi-même, like a corrosive, eats away everything.  True pleasure is in giving, surely.

      'As for Arnauti, he nearly drove me mad with his inquisitions.  What I lost as a wife I gained as a patient - his interest in what he called "my case" outweighed any love he might have had for me.  And then losing the child made me hate him where before I had only seen a rather sensitive and kindly man.  You have probably read his book Moeurs.  Much of it is invented - mostly to satisfy his own vanity and get his own back on me for the way I wounded his pride in refusing to be "cured" - so-called.  You can't put a soul into splints.  If you say to a Frenchman "I can't make love to you unless I imagine a palm-tree," he will go out and cut down the nearest palm-tree."

      Clea was too noble to love otherwise than passionately; and yet at the same time quite capable of loving someone to whom she spoke only once a year.  The deep still river of her heart hoarded its images, ever reflecting them in the racing current, letting them sink deeper into memory than most of us can.  Real innocence can do nothing that is trivial, and when it is allied to generosity of heart, the combination makes it the most vulnerable of qualities under heaven.

      In this sudden self-consuming experience, comparable in its tension and ardour to those ridiculous passions which schoolgirls have so often for their mistresses - yet touched in by the fierce mature lines of nature (the demonic line-drawings of an expert love which Justine could always oppose as a response to those who faced her) - she felt really the growing-pains of old age: her flesh and spirit quailing before demands which it knows it cannot meet, which will tear it to rags.  Inside herself she had the first stirrings of a sensation new to her: the sensation of a yolk inside her separating from the egg.  These are the strange ways in which people grow up.

      Poor dear, she was to go through the same ridiculous contortions as the rest of us - feeling her body like a bed of quicklime clumsily slaked to burn away the corpse of the criminal it covered.  The world of secret meetings, of impulses that brand one like an iron, of doubts - this suddenly descended upon her.  So great was her confusion of mind that she would sit and stare at the metamorphosed Justine and try to remember what she really looked like on the other side of the transforming membrane, the cataract with which Aphrodite seals up the sick eyes of lovers, the thick, opaque form of a sacred sightlessness.

      She would be in a fever all day until the appointed moment when her model met her.  At four she stood before the closed door of the studio, seeing clearly through it to the corner where Justine already sat, turning over the pages of a Vogue and smoking as she waited, legs crossed.  The idea crossed her mind.  'I pray to God she has not come, is ill, has gone away.  How eagerly I would welcome indifference!'  Surprised too, for these disgusts came from precisely the same quarters as the desire to hear once more that hoarse noble voice - they too arose only from the expectation of seeing her beloved once more.  These polarities of feeling bewildered and frightened her by their suddenness.

      Then sometimes she wished to go away simply in order to belong more fully to her familiar!  Poor fool, she was not spared anything in the long catalogue of self-deceptions which constitute a love affair.  She tried to fall back on other pleasures, to find that none existed.  She knew that the heart wearies of monotony, that habit and despair are the bedfellows of love, and she waited patiently, as a very old woman might, for the flesh to outgrow its promptings, to deliver itself from an attachment which she now recognized was not of her seeking.  Waited in vain.  Each day she plunged deeper.  Yet all this, at any rate, performed one valuable service for her, proving that relationships like these did not answer the needs of her nature.  Just as a man knows inside himself from the first hour that he has married the wrong woman but that there is nothing to be done about it.  She knew she was a woman at last and belonged to men - and this gave her misery a fugitive relief.

      But the distortions of reality were deeply interesting to someone who recognized that for the artist in herself some confusions of sensibility were valuable.  'Walking towards the studio she would suddenly feel herself becoming breathlessly insubstantial, as if she were a figure painted on canvas.  Her breathing became painful.  Then after a moment she was overtaken by a feeling of happiness and well-being so intense that she seemed to have become weightless.  Only the weight of her shoes, it seemed held her to the ground.  At any moment she might fly off the earth's surface, breaking through the membrane of gravity, unable to stop.  This feeling was so piercing that she had to stop and hold on to the nearest wall and then to walk along it bent double like someone on the deck of a liner in a hurricane.  This was itself succeeded by other disagreeable sensations - as of a hot clamp round her skull, pressing it, of the beating of wings in her ears.  Half-dreaming in bed, suddenly horns rammed downwards into her brain, impaling her mind; in a brazen red glare she saw the bloodshot eyes of the mithraic animal.  It was a cool night with soft pockets of chemical light in the Arab town.  The Ginks were abroad with their long oiled plaits and tinselled clothes; the faces of black angels; the men-women of the suburbs.'  (I copy these words from the case history of a female mental patient who came under Balthazar's professional care - a nervous breakdown due to 'love' - requited or unrequited, who can say?  Does it matter?  The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree, and this passage could serve not only for Clea but indeed for all of us.)

      But it was not only of the past that Justine spoke but of a present which was weighing upon her full of decisions which must be taken.  In a sense, everything that Clea felt was at this time meaningless to her.  As a prostitute may be unaware that her client is a poet who will immortalize her in a sonnet she will never read, so Justine in pursuing these deeper sexual pleasures was unaware that they would mark Clea: enfeeble her in her power of giving undivided love - what she was most designed to give by temperament.  Her youth, you see.  And yet the wretched creature meant no harm.  She was simply a victim of that Oriental desire to please, to make this golden friend of hers free of treasures which her own experience had gathered and which, in sum, were as yet meaningless to her.  She gave everything, knowing the value of nothing, a true parvenue of the soul.  To love (from any quarter) she could respond, but only with the worn felicities of friendship.  Her body really meant nothing to her.  It was a dupe.  Her modesty was supreme.  This sort of giving is really shocking because it is as simple as an Arab, without precociousness, unrefined as a drinking habit among peasants.  It was born long before the idea of love was formed in the fragmented psyche of European man 0 the knowledge (or invention) of which was to make him the most vulnerable of creatures in the scale of being, subject to hungers which could only be killed by satiety, but never satisfied; which nourished a literature of affectation whose subject-matter would otherwise have belonged to religion - its true sphere of operation.  How does one say these things?

      Nor, in another scale of reference, is it of the slightest importance - that a woman disoriented by the vagaries of her feelings, tormented, inundated by frightening aspects of her own unrecognized selves, should like a soldier afraid of death, throw herself into the heart of the mêlée to wound those whom truly she most loved and most admired - Clea, myself, lastly Nessim.  Some people are born to bring good and evil in greater measure than the rest of us - the unconscious carriers of diseases they cannot cure.  I think perhaps we must study them, for it is possible that they promote creation in the very degree of the apparent corruption and confusion they spread or seek.  I dare not say even now that she was stupid or unfeeling; only that she could not recognize what passed within herself ('the camera obscura of the heart'), could not put a precise frame around the frightening image of her own meaninglessness in the world of ordinary action.  The sort of abyss which seemed to lie around her was composed of one quality - a failure of value, a failure to attach meaning which kills joys - which is itself only the internal morality of a soul which has discovered the royal road to happiness, whose nakedness does not shame itself.  It is easy for me to criticize now that I see a little further into the truth of her predicament and my own.  She must, I know, have been bitterly ashamed of the trick she was playing on me and the danger into which she put me.  Once at the Café El Bab where we were sitting over an arak, talking, she burst into tears and kissed my hands, saying: 'You are a good man, really a good man.  And I am so sorry.'  For what?  For her tears?  I had been speaking about Goethe.  Fool!  Imbecile!  I thought I had perhaps moved her by the sensibility with which I expressed myself.  I gave her presents.  So had Clea, so did Clea now: and the strange thing was that for the first time her taste in choosing objects of vertu deserted this most gifted and sensitive of painters.  Earrings and brooches of a commonness which was truly Alexandrian!  I am at a loss to understand this phenomenon, unless to love is to become besotted....Yes.

      But then I don't know; I am reminded of Balthazar's dry marginal comment on the matter.  'One is apt,' he writes, 'to take a high moral tone about these things - but in fact, who will criticize himself for reaching up to pluck an apple lying ripe upon a sun-warmed wall?  Most women of Justine's temperament and background would not have the courage to imitate her even if they were free to do so.  Is it more or less expensive to the spirit to endure dreams and petit mal so that the physician will always find a hot forehead and a guilty air?  I don't know.  It is hard to isolate a moral quality in the free act.  And then again, all love-making to one less instructed than oneself has the added delicious thrill which comes from the consciousness of perverting, of pulling them down into the mud from which passions rise - together with poems and theories of God.  It is wiser perhaps not to make a judgement.'

      But outside all this, in the sphere of daily life, there were problems about which Justine herself needed reassurance.  'I am astonished and a little horrified that Nessim whom I hardly know, has asked to marry me.  Am I to laugh, dearest Clea, or be ashamed, or both?'  Clea in her innocence was delighted at the news, for Nessim was her dearest friend and the thought of him bringing his dignity and gentleness to bear on the very real unhappiness of Justine's life seemed suddenly illuminating - a solution to everything.  When one invites rescue by the mess one creates around oneself, what better than that a knight should be riding by?  Justine put her hands over her eyes and said with difficulty 'For a moment my heart leapt up and I was about to shout "yes"; ah, Clea my dear, you will guess why.  I need his riches to trace the child - really, somewhere in the length and breadth of Egypt in must be, suffering terribly, alone, perhaps ill-treated.'  She began to cry and then stopped abruptly, angrily.  'In order to safeguard us both from what would be a disaster I said to Nessim "I could never love a man like you: I could never give you an instant's happiness.  Thank you and goodbye."'

      'But are you sure?'

      'To use a man for his fortune, by God I'll never.'

      'Justine, what do you want?'

      'First the child.  Then to escape from the eyes of the world into some quiet corner where I can possess myself.  There are whole parts of my character I do not understand.  I need time.  Today again Nessim has written to me.  What can he want?  He knows all about me.'

      The thought crossed Clea's mind: 'The most dangerous thing in the world is a love founded on pity.'  But she dismissed it and allowed herself to see once more the image of this gentle, wise, undissimulating man breasting the torrent of Justine's misfortunes and damning them up.  Am I unjust in crediting her with another desire which such a solution would satisfy?  (Namely, to be rid of Justine, free from the demands she made upon her heart and mind.  She had stopped painting altogether.)  The kindness of Nessim - the tall dark figure which drifted unresponsible around the corridors of society - needed some such task; how could a knight of the order born acquit himself if there were no castles and no desponding maidens weaving in them?  Their preoccupations matched in everything - save the demand for love.

      'But the money is nothing,' she said; and here indeed she was speaking of what she knew to be precisely true of Nessim.  He himself did not really care about the immense fortune which was his.  But here one should add that he had already made a gesture which had touched and overwhelmed Justine.  They met more than once, formally, like business partners, in the lounge of the Cecil Hotel to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger.  This is the way of the city.  We are mental people, and worldly, and have always made a clear distinction between the passional life and the life of the family.  These distinctions are part of the whole complex of Mediterranean life, ancient and touchingly prosaic.

      'And lest an inequality of fortune should make your decision difficult,' said Nessim, flushing and lowering his head, 'I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person - simply as a woman, Justine.  This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone's thoughts in the city, poisoning everything!  Let us be free of it before deciding anything.'  He passed across the table a slim green cheque with the words 'Three Thousand Pounds' written on it.  She stared at it for a long time with surprise but did not touch it.  'It has not offended you,' he said hastily at last, stammering in his anxiety.  'No,' she said.  'It is like everything you do.  Only what can I do about not loving you?'

      'You must, of course, never try to.'

      'Then what sort of life could we make?'

      Nessim looked at her with hot shy eyes and then lowered his glance to the table, as if under a cruel rebuke.  'Tell me,' she said after a silence.  'Please tell me.  I cannot use your fortune and your position and give you nothing in exchange, Nessim.'

      'If you would care to try,' he said gently, 'we need not delude each other.  Life isn't very long.  One owes it to oneself to try and find a means to happiness.'

      'Is it that you want to sleep with me?' asked Justine suddenly: disgusted yet touched beyond measure by his tone.  'You may.  Yes.  Oh! I would do anything for you, Nessim - anything.'

      But he flinched and said: 'I am speaking about an understanding in which friendship and knowledge can take the place of love until and if it comes, as I hope.  Of course I shall sleep with you - myself a love, and you a friend.  Who knows?  In a year perhaps.  All Alexandrian marriages are business ventures after all.  My God, Justine, what a fool you are.  Can't you see that we might possibly need each other without every fully realizing it?  It's worth trying.  Everything may stand in the way.  But I can't get over the thought that in the whole city the woman I most need is you.  There are any number a man may want, but to want is not to need.  I may want others - you I need!  I do not dare to say the same for you.  How cruel life is, and how absurd.'  Nobody had said anything like that to her before - had offered her a partnership as coolly designed, as wholly pure in intention.  It must be admired from this point of view.  'You are not the sort of man to stake everything on a single throw at rouge et noir,' she said slowly.  'Our bankers who are so brilliant with money are notoriously weak in the head when it comes to women.'  She put her hand upon his wrist.

      'You should have your doctor examine you, my dear.  To take on a woman who has said that she can never love you - what sort of temerity is that?  Ah, no!'

      He did not say anything at all, recognizing that her words were really not addressed to him: they were part of a long internal argument with herself.  How beautiful her disaffected face looked - chloroformed by its own simplicity: she simply could not believe that someone might value her for herself - if she had a self.  He was indeed, he thought, like a gambler putting everything on the turn of a wheel.  She was standing now upon the very edge of a decision, like a sleepwalker on a cliff: should she awake before she jumped, or let the dream continue?  Being a woman, she still felt it necessary to pose conditions; to withdrawn herself further into secrecy as this man encroached upon it with his steady beguiling gentleness.  'Nessim,' she said, 'wake up.'  And she shook him gently.

      'I am awake,' he said quietly.

      Outside in the square with its palms nibbled by the sea-wind, a light rain was falling.  It was the tenth Zu-el-Higga, the first day of Courban Bairam, and fragments of the great procession were assembling in their coloured robes, holding the great silk banners and censers, insignia of the religion they honoured, and chanting passages from the litany: litany of the forgotten Nubian race which every year makes its great resurrection at the Mosque of Nebi Daniel.  The crowd was brilliant, spotted with primary colours.  The air rippled with tambourines, while here and there in the lags of silence which fell over the shouts and chanting, there came the sudden jabbering of the long drums as their hide was slowly stiffened at the hissing braziers.  Horses moaned and the gonfalons bellied like sails in the rain-starred afternoon.  A cart filled with the prostitutes of the Arab town in coloured robes went by with shrill screams and shouts, and the singing of painted young men to the gnash of cymbals and scribbling of mandolines: the whole as gorgeous as a tropical animal.

      'Nessim,' she said foolishly.  'On one sole condition - that we sleep together absolutely tonight.'  His features drew tight against his skull and he set his teeth tightly as he said angrily: 'You should have some intelligence to go with your lack of breeding - where is it?'

      'I'm sorry,' seeing how deeply and suddenly she had annoyed him.  'I felt in need of reassurance.'  He had become quite pale.

      'I proposed something so different,' he said, replacing the cheque in his wallet.  'I am rather staggered by your lack of understanding.  Of course we can sleep together if you wish to make it a condition.  Let us take a room at the hotel here, now, this minute.'  He looked really splendid when he was wounded like this, and suddenly there stirred inside her the realization that his quietness was not weakness, and that an uncommon sort of sensibility underlay these confusing thoughts and deliberate words, perhaps not altogether good, either.  'What could we prove to each other,' he went on more gently, 'by it or by its opposite: never making love?'  She saw now how hopelessly out of context her words had been.  'I'm bitterly ashamed of my vulgarity.'  She said this without really meaning the words, as a concession to his world as much as to himself - a world which dealt in the refinements of manners she was as yet too coarse to enjoy, which could afford to cultivate emotions posées by taste.  A world which could only be knocked off its feet when you were skin to skin with it, so to speak!  No, she did not mean the words, for vulgar as the idea sounded she knew that she was right by the terms of her intuition since the thing she proposed is really, for women, the vital touchstone to a man's being; the knowledge, not of his qualities which can be analysed or inferred, but of the very flavour of his personality.  Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another.  She bitterly regretted his unwisdom in denying her a concrete-chance to see for herself what underlay his beauty and persuasion.  Yet how could one insist?

      'Good,' he said, 'for our marriage will be a delicate affair, and very much a question of manners, until ----'

      'I'm sorry,' she said.  'I really did not know how to treat honourably with you and avoid disappointing you.'

      He kissed her lightly on the mouth as he stood up.  'I must go first and get the permission of my mother, and tell my brother.  I am terribly happy, even though now I am furious with you.'

      They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean.  'I don't know what more to say.'

      'Nothing.  You must start living,' he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth.  She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands.  Then she combed her hair and made up her face.  She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain.  No, somewhere she was truly a woman.

      Nessim took the lift up to his office, and sitting down at his desk wrote upon a card the following words: 'My dearest Clea, Justine has agreed to marry me.  I could never do this if I thought it would qualify or interfere in any way with either her love for you or mine....'

      Then, appalled by the thought that whatever he might write to Clea might sound mawkish, he tore the note up and folded his arms.  After a long moment of thought he picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria's number.  'Da Capo,' he said quietly.  'You remember my plans for marrying Justine?  All is well.'  He replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk.

*    *    *    *    *

IV

It was now, having achieved the major task of persuasion, that his self-assurance fled and left him face to face with a sensation entirely new to him, namely an acute shyness, an acute unwillingness to face his mother directly, to confront her with his intentions.  He himself was puzzled by it, for they had always been close together, their confidences linked by an affection too deep to need the interpretation of words.  If he had ever been shy or awkward it was with his awkward brother, never with her.  And now?  It was not as if he even feared his disfavour - he knew she would fall in with his wishes as soon as they were spoken.  What then inhibited him?  He could not tell.  Yet he flushed as he thought of her now, and passed the whole of that morning in restless automatic acts, picking up a novel only to lay it down, mixing a drink only to abandon it, starting to sketch and then abruptly dropping the charcoal to walk out into the garden of the great house, ill at ease.  He had telephoned his office to say that he was indisposed and then, as always when he had told a lie, began to suffer in truth with an attack of indigestion.

      Then he started to ask for the number of the old country house where Leila and Narouz lived, but changed his mind and asked the operator instead for the number of his garage.  The car would be back, they told him, cleaned and greased by noon.  He lay down and covered his face with his hands.  Then he rang up Selim, his secretary, and told him to telephone to his brother and say that he was coming to Karm Abu Girg for the weekend.  Heavens! what could be more normal?  'You go on like a chambermaid who has got engaged,' he told himself hotly.  Then for a moment he thought of taking someone with him to ease the strain of the meeting - Justine?  Impossible.  He picked up a novel of Pursewarden's and came upon the phase: 'Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.'

      The doorbell rang.  Selim brought him some letters to sign and then went silently upstairs to pack his bag and briefcase.  There were papers he must take for Narouz to see - papers about the lift machinery needed to drain and reclaim the desert which fringed the plantations.  Business matters were a welcome drug.

      The Hosnani fortunes were deployed in two directions, separated into two spheres of responsibility, and each brother had his own.  Nessim controlled the banking house and its ancillaries all over the Mediterranean, while Narouz lived the life of a Coptic squire, never stirring from Karm Abu Girg where the Hosnani lands marched with the fringe of the desert, gradually eating into it, expropriating it year by year, spreading their squares of cultivation - carob and melon and corn - and pumping out the salt which poisoned it.

      'The car is here,' said the hawk-faced secretary as he returned.  'Am I to drive you, sir?'  Nessim shook his head and dismissed him quietly, before crossing the garden once more, chin in hand.  He paused by the lily pond to study the fish - those expensive toys of the ancient Japanese Emperors, survivals from an age of luxury, which he had imported at such cost, only to find them gradually dying off of some unknown illness - homesickness, perhaps?  Pursewarden spent hours watching them.  He said that they helped him to think about art!

      The great silver car stood at the door with the ignition key in the dashboard.  He got in thoughtfully and drove slowly across the town, examining its parks and squares and buildings with a serene eye, but deliberately dawdling, irresolutely, emptying his mind by an act of will every time the thought of his destination came upon him.  When he reached the sea he turned at last down the shining Corniche in the sunlight to watch the smooth sea and cloudless air for a moment, the car almost at a standstill.  Then suddenly he changed gear and began to travel along the seashore at a more resolute pace.  He was going home.

      Soon he turned inland, leaving the town with its palms crackling in the spring wind and turning towards the barren network of faults and dried-out lakebeds where the metalled road gave place to the brown earth tracks along embankments lined with black swamps and fringed by barbed reeds and a cross-hatching of sweetcorn plantations.  The dust came up between his wheels and filled the air of the saloon, coating everything in a fine-grained pollen.  The windscreen became gradually snowed-up and he switched on the wipers to keep it clear.

      Following little winding lanes which he knew by heart he came, after more than an hour, to the edge of a spit flanked by bluer water and left the car in the shadow of a tumbledown house, the remains perhaps of some ancient customs-shed built in the days when river traffic plied between Damietta and the Gulf: now drying up day by day, withering and cracking under the brazen Egyptian sky, forgotten by its keepers.

      He locked the car carefully and followed a narrow path across a holding of poverty-stricken beanrows and dusty melons, fringed with ragged and noisy Indian corn, to come upon a landing-stage where an aged ferryman awaited him in a ramshackle boat.  At once he saw the horses waiting upon the other side, and the foreshortened figure of Narouz beside them.  He threw up an excited arm in an awkward gesture of pleasure as he saw Nessim.  Nessim stepped into the boat with beating heart.

      'Narouz!'  The two brothers, so unlike in physique and looks, embraced with feeling which was qualified in Nessim by the silent agony of a shyness new to him.

      The younger brother, shorter and more squarely built than Nessim, wore a blue French peasant's blouse open at the throat and with the sleeves rolled back, exposing arms and hands of great power covered by curly dark hair.  An old Italian cartridge bandolier hung down upon his haunches.  The ends of his baggy Turkish trousers with an old-fashioned drawstring, were stuffed into crumpled old jackboots of soft leather.  He ducked, excitedly, awkwardly, into his brother's arms and out again, like a boxer from a clinch.  But when he raised his head to look at him, you saw at once what it was that had ruled Narouz' life like a dark star.  His upper lip was split literally from the spur of the nose - as if by some terrific punch: it was a harelip which had not been caught up and basted in time.  It exposed the ends of a white tooth and ended in two little pink tongues of flesh in the centre of his upper lip which were always wet.  His dark hair grew down low and curly, like a heifer's, on to his brow.  His eyes were splendid: of a blueness and innocence that made them almost like Clea's: indeed his whole ugliness took splendour from them.  He had grown a ragged and uneven moustache over his upper lip, as someone will train ivy over an ugly wall - but the scar showed through wherever the hair was thin: and his short, unsatisfactory beard too was a poor disguise: looked simply as if he had remained unshaven for a week.  It had no shape of its own and confused the outlines of his taurine neck and high cheekbones.  He had a curious hissing shy laugh which he always pointed downward into the ground to hide his lip.  The whole sum of his movements was ungainly - arms and legs somewhat curved and hairy as a spider - but they gave off a sensation of overwhelming strength held rigidly under control.  His voice was deep and thrilling and held something of the magic of a woman's contralto.

      Whenever possible they tried to have servants or friends with them when they met - to temper their shyness; and so today Narouz had brought Ali, his factor, with the horses to meet the ferry.  The old servant with the cropped ears took a pinch of dust from the ground before Nessim's feet and pressed it to his forehead before extending his hand for a handshake, and then diffidently partook of the embrace Nessim offered him - as someone he had loved from his childhood onwards.  Narouz was charmed by his brother's easy, comradely but feeling gesture - and he laughed downwards into the ground with pleasure.

      'And Leila?' said Nessim in a low voice, raising his fingers to his temple for a moment as he did so.

      'Is well,' said Narouz in the tone that springs from a freshly rosined bow.  'This past two months.  Praise God.'

      Their mother sometimes went through periods of mental instability lasting for weeks, always to recover again.  It was a quiet surrender of the real world that surprised no-one any longer, for she herself now knew when such an attack was coming on and would make preparations for it.  At such times, she spent all day in the little hut at the end of the rose-garden, reading and writing, mostly the long letters which Mountolive read with such tenderness in Japan or Finland or Peru.  With only the cobra for company, she waited until the influence of the afreet or spirit was spent.  This habit had lasted for many years now, since the death of their father and her illness, and neither son took any account of these departures from the normal life of the great house.  'Leila is well in her mind!' said Narouz again in that thrilling voice.  'So happy too that Mountolive is posted back.  She looks years younger.'

      'I understand.'

      The two brothers now mounted their horses and started slowly along the network of embankments and causeways which led them over the lake with its panels of cultivation.  Nessim always loved this ride, for it evoked his real childhood - so much richer in variety than those few years spent in the house at Aboukir where Leila had moved for a while after their father's death.  'All your new lift pumps should be here next month,' he shouted, and Narouz chuckled with pleasure; but with another part of his mind he allowed the soft black earthworks of the river, with its precarious tracks separating the squares of cultivated soil, to lead him steadily back to the remembered treasures of his childhood here.  For this was really Egypt - a Copt's Egypt - while the white city, as if in some dusty spectrum, was filled with the troubling and alien images of lands foreign to it - the intimations of Greece, Syria, Tunis.

      It was a fine day and shallow draught boats were coursing among the beanfields towards the river tributaries, with their long curved spines of mast, lateen rigs bents like bows in the freshets.  Somewhere a boatman sang and kept time on a finger-drum, his voice mixing with the sighing of sakkias and the distant village bangings of wheelwrights and carpenters manufacturing disc-wheels for wagons of the shallow-bladed ploughs which worked the alluvial riverside holdings.

      Brilliant kingfishes hunted the shallows like thunderbolts, their wings slurring, while here and there the small brown owls, having forgotten the night habits of their kind, flew between the banks, or nestled together in songless couples among the trees.

      The fields had begun to spread away on either side of the little cavalcade now, green and scented with their rich crops of bercim and beanrows, though the road still obstinately followed along the banks of the river so that their reflections rode with them.  Here and there were hamlets whose houses of unbaked mud wore flat roofs made brilliant now by stacks of Indian corn which yellowed them.  They passed an occasional line of camels moving down towards a ferry, or a herd of great black gamoose - Egyptian buffalo - dipping their shiny noises in the rich ooze and filth of some backwater, flicking the flies from their papery skins with lead tails.  Their great curved horns belonged to forgotten frescoes.

      It was strange now how slowly life moved here, he reflected with pleasure as he moved towards the Hosnani property - women churning butter in goatskins suspended from bamboo tripods or walking in single file down to the river with their pots.  Men in robes of blue cotton at the waterwheels, singing, matrons swathed from crown to ankle in the light dusty black robes which custom demanded, blue-headed against the evil eye.  And then all the primeval courtesies of the road exchanged between passers-by to which Narouz responded in his plangent voice, sounding as if it belonged to the language as much as to the place.  'Naharak Said!' he cried cheerfully, or 'Said Embarak!' as the wayfarers smiled and greeted them.  'May your day be blessed,' thought Nessim in remembered translation as he smiled and nodded, overcome at the splendour of these old-fashioned greetings one never heard except in the Arab quarters of the city; 'may today be as blessed as yesterday.'

      He turned and said 'Narouz' and his brother rode up beside him tenderly, saying 'Have you seen my whip?'  Laughing downwards again, his tooth showing through the rent in his lips.  He carried a splendid hippopotamus-hide whip, loosely coiled at the saddlebow.  'I found the perfect one - after three years.  Sheik Bedawi sent it down from Assuan.  Do you know?'  He turned those brilliant blue eyes upwards for a moment to stare into the dark eyes of his brother with intense joy.  'It is better than a pistol, at any rate a .99,' he said, thrilled as a child.  'I've been practising hard with it - do you want to see?'

      Without waiting for an answer he tucked his head down and rode forward at a trot to where some dozen chickens were scratching at the bare ground near a herdsman's cot.  A frightened rooster running faster than the others took off under his horse's hooves: Nessim reined back to watch.  Narouz' arm shot up, the long lash uncurled slowly on the air and then went rigid with a sudden dull welt of sound, a sullen thwack, and laughing, the rider dismounted to pick up the mutilated creature, still warm and palpitating, its wings half-severed from its body, its head smashed.  He brought it back to Nessim in triumph, wiping his head casually on his baggy trousers.  'What do you think?'  Nessim gripped and admired the great whip while his brother threw the dead fowl to his factor, still laughing himself, and so slowly remounted.  They rode side by side now, as if the spell upon their communication were broken, and Nessim talked of the new machinery which had been ordered and heard of Narouz' battle against drought and sand-drift.  In such neutral subjects they could lose themselves and become natural.  United most closely by such topics, they were like two blind people in love who can only express themselves through touch: the subject of their hands.

      The holdings became richer now, planted out with tamarisk and carob, though here and there they passed the remains of properties abandoned by owners too poor or too lazy to contend with the deserts, which encircled the fertile strip on three sides.  Old houses, fallen now into desuetude, abandoned and overgrown, stared out across the water with unframed windows and shattered doors.  Their gates, half smothered in bougainvillaea, opened rustily into gardens of wild and unkempt beauty where marble fountains and rotted statuary still testified to a glory since departed.  On either side of them one could glimpse the well-wooded lands which formed the edge, the outer perimeter of the family estates - palm, acacia and sycamore which still offered the precarious purchase to life which without shade and water perished, reverted to the desert.  Indeed, one was conscious of the desert here although one could not see it - melodramatically tasteless as a communion wafer.

      Here an old island with a ruined palace; there tortuous paths and channels of running water where the slim bird-forms of river-craft moved about their task of loading tibbin (corn); they were nearing the village now.  A bridge rose high upon mudbanks, crowned by a magnificent grove of palms, with a row of coloured boats waiting for the boom to lift.  Here on the rise one glimpsed for a moment the blue magnetic haze of a desert horizon lying beyond this hoarded strip of plenty, of green plantations and water.

      Round a corner they came upon a knot of villagers waiting for them who set up cries of 'What honour to the village!' and 'You bring blessings!' walking beside them as they rode smiling onwards.  Some advanced on them, the notables, catching a hand to kiss, and some even kissing Nessim's stirrup-irons.  So they passed through the village against its patch of emerald water and dominated by the graceful fig-shaped minaret, and the cluster of dazzling beehive domes which distinguished the Coptic church of their forefathers.  From here, the road turned back again across the fields to the great house with its weather-stained outer walls, ruined and crumbling with damp in many places, and in others covered by such graffiti as the superstitious leave to charm the afreet - black talismanic handprints, or the legend 'B'ism'illah ma'sha'llah' (may God avert evil).  It was for these pious villagers that its tenants had raised on the corners of the wall tiny wooden windmills in the shape of men with revolving arms, to scare the afreet away.  This was the manor-house of Karm Abu Girg which belonged to them.

      Emin, the chief steward, was waiting at the outer gate with the usual gruff greetings which custom demanded, surrounded by a group of shy boys to hold the horses and help their riders dismount.

      The great folding doors of the courtyard with their pistol bolts and inscribed panels were set back so that they could walk directly into the courtyard against which the house itself was built, tilted upon two levels - the ceremonial first floor looking down sideways along the vaulted arches below - a courtyard with its granaries and reception-rooms, storehouses and stables.  Nessim did not cross the threshold before examining once more the faded but still visible cartoons which decorated the wall at the right-hand side of it - and which depicted in a series of almost hieroglyphic signs the sacred journey he had made to bathe in the Jordan: a horse, a motorcar, a ship, an aeroplane, all crudely represented.  He muttered a pious text, and the little group of servants smiled with satisfaction, understanding by this that his long residence in the city had not made him forget country ways.  He never forgot to do this.  It was like a man showing his passport.  And Narouz too was grateful for the tack such a gesture showed - which not only endeared his brother to the dependants of the house, but also strengthened his own position with them as a ruling master of it.

      On the other side of the lintel, a similar set of pictures showed that he also, the younger brother, had made the pious pilgrimage which is incumbent upon every Copt of religious principles.

      The main gateway was flanked on each side by a pigeon-tower - those clumsy columns built of earthen pitchers pasted together anyhow with mud-cement: which are characteristic of country houses in Egypt and which supplied the choicest dish for the country squire's table.  A cloud of its inhabitants fluttered and crooned all day over the barrel-vaulted court.  Here all was activity: the negro night-watchman, the ghaffirs, factors, stewards came forth one by one to salute the eldest brother, the heir.  He was given a bowl of wine and a nosegay of flowers while Narouz stood by proudly smiling.

      Then they went at ceremonial pace through the gallery with its windows of many-coloured glass which for a brief moment transformed them into harlequins, and then out into the rose-garden with its ragged and unkempt arbour and winding paths towards the little summerhouse where Leila sat reading, unveiled.  Narouz called her name once to warn her as they neared the house, adding 'Guess who has come!'  The woman quickly replaced her veil and turned her wise dark eyes towards the sunlit door saying: 'The boy did not bring the milk again.  I wish you would tell him, Narouz.  His mind is salt.  The snake must be fed regularly or it becomes ill-tempered.'  And then the voice, swerving like a bird in mid-air, foundered and fell to a rich melodious near-sob on the name 'Nessim'.  And this she repeated twice as they embraced with such trembling tenderness that Narouz laughed, swallowing, and tasted both the joy of his brother's love for Leila and his own bitterness in realizing that he, Nessim, was her favourite - the beautiful son.  He was not jealous of Nessim; only heartsick at the melody in his mother's voice - the tone she had never used in speaking to him.  It had always been so.

      'I will speak to the boy,' he said, and looked about him for signs of the snake.  Egyptians regard the snake as too lucky a visitant to a house to kill and so tempt ill-luck, and Leila's long self-communing in the little summerhouse would not have been complete without this indolent cobra which had learned to drink milk from a saucer like a cat.

      Still holding hands they sat down together and Nessim started to speak of political matters with those dark, clever, youthful eyes looking steadily into his.  From time to time Leila nodded vigorously, with a determined air, while the younger son watched them both hungrily, with a heavy admiration at the concise way Nessim abbreviated and expressed his ideas - the fruit of a long public life.  Narouz felt these abstract words fall dully upon his ear, fraught with meanings he only half-guessed, and though he knew that they concerned him as much as anyone, they seemed to him to belong to some rarer world inhabited by sophists or mathematicians - creatures who would forge and give utterance to the vague longings and incoherent desires he felt forming inside him whenever Egypt was mentioned or the family estates.  He sucked the knuckle of his forefinger, and sat beside them, listening, looking first at his mother and then back to Nessim.

      'And now Mountolive is coming back,' concluded Nessim, 'and for the first time what we are trying to do will be understood.  Surely he will help us, if it is possible?  He understands.'

      The name of Mountolive struck two ways.  The woman lowered her eyes to her own white hands which lay before her upon a half-finished letter - eyes so brilliantly made up with kohl and antimony that to discern tears in them would have been difficult.  Yet there were none.  They sparked only with affection.  Was she thinking of those long letters which she had so faithfully written during the whole period of their separation?  But Narouz felt a sudden stirring of jealousy in his brain at the mention of the name, under which, interred as if under a tombstone, he had hidden memories of a different epoch - of the young secretary of the High Commission whom his mother had - (mentally he never used the world 'loved' but left a blank space in his thoughts where it should stand); moreover of the sick husband in the wheelchair who had watched so uncomplainingly.  Narouz' soul vibrated with his father's passion when Mountolive's name, like a note of music, was struck.  He swallowed and stirred uneasily now as he watched his mother tremblingly fold a letter and slide it into an envelope.  'Can we trust him?' she asked Nessim.  She would have struck him over the mouth if he had answered ‘No.’ She simply wanted to hear him pronounce the name again.  Her question was a prompting, nothing more.  He kissed her hand, and Narouz greedily admired his courtier's smiling air as he replied 'If we cannot, who can we trust?'

      As a girl, Leila had been both beautiful and rich.  The daughter of a blue-stocking, convent-bred and very much in society, she had been among the first Coptic women to abandon the veil and to start to take up the study of medicine against her parents' will.  But an early marriage to a man very much older than herself had put an end to these excursions into the world of scope where her abilities might have given her a foothold.  The temper of Egyptian life, too, was hostile to the freedom of women, and she had resigned a career in favour of a husband she very much admired and the uneventful round of country life.  Yet somehow, under it all, the fire had burned on.  She had kept friends and interests, had visited Europe every few years, had subscribed to periodicals in four languages.  Her mind had been formed by solitude, enriched by books which she could only discuss in letters to friends in remote places, could only read in the privacy of the harim.  Then came the advent of Mountolive and the death of her husband.  She stood free and breathing upon the brink of a new world with no charge upon her but two growing sons.  For a year she had hesitated between Paris and London as a capital of residence, and while she hesitated, all was lost.  Her beauty, of which until then she had taken no particular account, as is the way with the beautiful, had been suddenly ravaged by a confluent smallpox which melted down those lovely features and left her only the magnificent eyes of an Egyptian sibyl.  The black hideous veil which so long had seemed to her a symbol of servitude became now a refuge in which she could hide the ruins of a beauty which had been considered so outstanding in her youth.  She had not the heart to parade this new melted face through the capitals of Europe, to brave the silent condolences of friends who might remember her as she had once been.  Turned back upon her tracks so summarily, she had decided to stay on and end her life in the family estates in such seclusion as might be permitted to her.  Her only outlet now would be in letter-writing and in reading - her only care her sons.  All the unsteadiness of her passions was canalized into this narrow field.  A whole world of relations had to be mastered and she turned her resolution to it like a man.  Ill-health, loneliness, boredom - she faced them one by one and overcame them - living here in retirement like a dethroned Empress, feeding her snake and writing her interminable letters which were full of the liveliness and sparkle of a life which now the veil masked and which could escape only through those still youthful dark eyes.

      She was now never seen in society and had become something of a legend amongst those who remembered her in the past, and who indeed had once nicknamed her the 'dark swallow'.  Now she sat all day at a rough deal table, writing in that tall, thoughtful handwriting, dipping her quill into a golden inkpot.  Her letters had become her very life, and in the writing of them she had begun to suffer from that curious sense of distorted reality which writers have when they are dealing with real people; in the years of writing to Mountolive, for example, she had so to speak re-invented him so successfully that he existed for her now not so much as a real human being but as a character out of her own imagination.  She had even almost forgotten what he looked like, what to expect of his physical presence, and when his telegram came to say that he expected to be in Egypt again within a few months, she felt at first nothing but irritation that he should intrude, bodily as it were, upon the picture projected by her imagination.  'I shall not see him,' she muttered at first, angrily; and only then did she start to tremble and cover her ravaged face with her hands.

      'Mountolive will want to see you,' said Nessim at last, as the conversation veered round in his direction again.  'When may I bring him?  The Legation is moving up to summer quarters soon, so he will be in Alexandria all the time.'

      'He must wait until I am ready,' she said, once more feeling the anger stir in her at the intrusion of this beloved figment.  'After all these years.'  And then she asked with a pathetic lustful eagerness, 'Is he old now - is he grey?  Is his leg all right?  Can he walk?  That skiing fall in Austria....'

      To all this Narouz listened with cocked head and sullen heavy heart: he could follow the feeling in her voice as one follows a line of music.

      'He is younger than ever,' said Nessim, 'hasn't aged by a day': and to his surprise she took his hand, and putting it to her cheek she said brokenly 'Oh - you are horrible, both of you.  Go.  Leave me alone now.  I have letters to write.'

      She permitted no mirrors in the harim since the illness which had deprived her of her self-esteem; but privately in a gold-backed pocket-mirror, she touched and pencilled her eyes in secret - her remaining treasure - practising different make-ups on them, practising different glances and matching them to different remarks - trying to give what was left of her looks a vocabulary as large as her lively mind.  She was like a man struck suddenly blind learning to spell, with the only member left him, his hands.

      Now the two men walked back into the old house, with its cool but dusty rooms whose walls were hung with ancient carpets and embroidered mats, and crowded with gigantic carcasses of furniture long since outmoded - a sort of Ottoman Buhl such as one sees in the old houses of Egypt.  Nessim's heartstrings were tugged by the memory of its ugliness, its old-fashioned Second Empire pieces and its jealously guarded routines.  The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks.  This, in the language of Narouz, said 'Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours.  God made eternity.  Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether.'  These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.  Even the primitive sanitary arrangements - there were no bathrooms - seemed to him somehow in keeping with the character of things, though he loved hot water.  Narouz himself slept naked winter and summer.  He washed in the courtyard - a servant threw water over him from a pitcher.  Indoors, he usually wore an old blue cloak and Turkish slippers.  He smoked tobacco, too, in a narguileh the length of a musket.

      While the elder brother unpacked his clothes, Narouz sat on the end of the bed studying the papers which filled the briefcase, musing with a quiet intentness, for they related to the machinery with the help of which he proposed to keep up and extend his attack on the dead sand.  In the back of his mind he could see an army of trees and shrubs marching steadily forward into the emptiness - carob and olive, vine and jujube, pistachio, peace and apricot, spreading around them the green colours of quickness in those tenantless areas of dust choked with sea-salt.  He looked almost lustfully upon the pictures of equipment in the shiny brochures Nessim had brought him, lovingly touching them with his finger, hearing in his imagination the suck and swell of sweet water through pumps gradually expelling the dead salts from the ground and quickening it to nourish the sipping roots of his trees.  Gebel Maryut, Abusir - his mind winged away like a swallow across the dunes into the Nitrian desert itself - mentally conquering it.

      'The desert,' said Narouz.  'By the way, will you ride out with me to the tents of Abu Kar tomorrow?  I have been promised an Arab and I want to break it myself.  It would make a pleasant excursion.'  Nessim was at once delighted at the prospect.  'Yes,' he said.  'But early,' said Narouz, 'and we can pass the olive plantation for you to see what progress we're making.  Will you?  Please do!'  He squeezed his arm.  'Since we started with the Tunisian chimlali we haven't had a single casualty.  Oh, Nessim!  I wish you stayed here.  Your place is here.'

      Nessim as always was beginning to wish the same.  That night they dined in the old-fashioned way - so different from the impertinent luxury of Alexandrian forms - each taking his napkin from the table and proceeding to the yard for the elaborate handwashing ceremony which preceded a meal in the country.  Two servants poured for them as they stood side by side, washing their fingers with yellow soap, and rinsed them off with orange-water.  Then to the table where their only cutlery was a wooden spoon each for dealing with soup - otherwise they broke the flat thin cakes of the country to dip into the dishes of cooked meats.  Leila had always dined alone in the women's quarters, and retired to bed early so that the two brothers were left alone to their repast.  They ate in leisurely fashion, with long pauses between the courses, and Narouz acted host, placing choice morsels upon Nessim's plate and breaking up the fowl and the turkey with his strong fingers the better to serve his guest.  At last, when sweetmeats and fruit had been served, they returned once more to where the waiting servants stood and washed their hands again.

      In the interval, the table had been cleared of dishes and set back to make room for the old-fashioned divans to pass through the room and out on to the balcony.  Smoking materials had been set out - the long-barrelled narguilehs with Narouz' favourite tobacco and a silver dish of sweets.  Here they sat together for a while in silence to drink their coffee.  Nessim had kicked off his slippers and drawn his legs up under him: he sat with his chin in his hand wondering how he could impart his news, the marriage which nibbled at the edge of his mind: and whether he should be frank about his motives in choosing for a wife a woman who was of a different faith from his own.  The night was hot and still, and the scent of magnolia blossom came up to the balcony in little drifts and eddies of air which made the candles flutter and dance; he was gnawed by irresolution.

      In such a mood every promise of distraction offered relief, and he was pleased when Narouz suggested that the village singer should be called to play for them, a custom which they had so often enjoyed as youths.  There is nothing more appropriate to the heavy silence of the Egyptian night than the childish poignance of the kemengeh's note.  Narouz clapped his hands and despatched a message and presently the old man came from the servant's quarters where he dined each night on the charity of the house, walking with the slow and submissive step of extreme old age and approaching blindness.  The sounding-board of his small viol was made from half a coconut.  Narouz sprang up and settled him upon a cushion at the end of the balcony.  There came footsteps in the courtyard and a familiar voice, that of the old schoolmaster Mohammed Shebab, who climbed the stairs, smiling and wrinkled, to clasp Narouz' hand.  He had the bright hairy face of a monkey and wore, as usual, an immaculate dark suit with a rose in his buttonhole.  He was something of a dandy and an epicure and these visits to the great house were his only distraction, living as he did for the greater part of the year buried in the depths of the delta; he had brought the old treasured narguileh mouthpiece which he had owned for a quarter of a century.  He was delighted to hear some music and listened with emotion to the wild quasidas that the old man sang - songs of the Arab canon full of the wild heartsickness of the desert.  The old voice, crumpled here and there like a fragile leaf, rose and fell upon the night; tracing the quavering melodic line of the songs as if it were following the ancient highways of half-obliterated thoughts and feelings.  The little viol scribbled its complaints upon the text reaching back into their childhood.  And now suddenly the singer burst into the passionate pilgrim song which expresses so marvellously the Moslem's longing for Mecca and his adoration of the Prophet - and the melody fluttered inside the brothers' hearts, imprisoned like a bird with beating wings.  Narouz, though a Copt, was repeating 'All-ah, All-ah!' in a rapture of praise.

      'Enough, enough!' cried Nessim at last.  'If we are to be up early, we should sleep early, don't you think?'

      Narouz sprang up too, and still acting the host called for lights and water and walked before him to the guest-room.  Here he waited until Nessim had washed and undressed and climbed into the creaking old-fashioned bed before bidding him goodnight.  As he stood in the doorway, Nessim said impulsively: 'Narouz - I've something to tell you.'  And then, overcome once more with shyness, added: 'But it will keep until tomorrow.  We shall be alone, shan't we?'  Narouz nodded and smiled.  'The desert is such torture for them that I always send them back at the fringe, the servants.'

      'Yes.'  Nessim well knew that Egyptians believe the desert to be an emptiness populated entirely by the spirits of demons and other grotesque visitants from Eblis, the Moslem Satan.

      Nessim slept and awoke to find his brother, fully dressed, standing beside his bed with coffee and cigarettes.  'It's time,' he said.  'I suppose in Alexandria you sleep late....'

      'No,' said Nessim, 'strangely enough I am usually at my office by eight.'

      'Eight!  Oh! my poor brother,' said Narouz mockingly, and helped him to dress.  The horses were waiting and together they rode out upon a dawn with a thick bluish mist rising from the lake.  Crisp air, inclining to frost - but already the sun was beginning to soak into the upper air and dry up the  dew upon the minaret of the mosque.

      Narouz led now, down winding ways, along the tortuous bridle paths, and across embankments, quite unerringly, for the whole land existed in his mind like the most detailed map by a master cartographer.  He carried it always in his head like a battle-plan, knowing the age of every tree, the poundage of every well's water, the drift of sand to an inch.  He was possessed by it.

      Slowly they made a circuit of the great plantation, soberly assessing progress and discussing plans for the next offensive when the new machinery should be installed.  And then, presently when they had come to a lonely spot by the river, screened on all sides by reeds, Narouz said 'Wait a second....' and dismounted, taking as he did so the old leather game-bag from his shoulders.  'Something to hide,' he said, smiling downwards shyly.  Nessim watched him idly as he turned the bag over to tip its contents into the dank waters of the river.  But he was not prepared to see a shrunken human head, lips drawn back over yellow teeth, eyes squinting inwards upon each other, roll out of the bag and sink slowly out of sight into the green depths beneath.  'What the devil's that?' he asked, and Narouz gave his little hissing titter at the ground and replied 'Abdel-Kader - head of.'  He knelt down and started washing the bag out in the water, moving it vigorously to and fro, and then with a gesture turned it inside out as one might turn a sleeve and returned to his horse.  Nessim was thinking deeply.  'So you had to do it at last,' he said.  'I was afraid you might.'

      Narouz turned his brilliant eyes upon his brother for a moment and said seriously: 'More troubles with Bedouin labour could have cost us a thousand trees next year.  It was too much of a risk to take.  Besides, he was going to poison me.'

      He said no more and they rode on in silence until they reached the thinning edges of cultivation - the front line, so to speak, where the battle was actually being joined at present - a long ragged territory like the edges of a wound.  Along the whole length of it infiltration from the arable land on the one side and the desert drainage on the other, both charged with the rotten salts, had poisoned the ground and made it the image of desolation.

      Here only giant reeds and bulrushes grew or an occasional thornbush.  No fish could live in the brackish water.  Birds shunned it.  It lay in the stagnant belt of its own foul air, weird, obsessive and utterly silent - the point at which the desert and the sown met in a death-embrace.  They rode now among towering rushes whose stems were bleached and salt-encrusted, glittering in the sun.  The horses gasped and scrambled through the dead water which splashed upon them, crystallizing into spots of salt wherever it fell; pools of slime were covered with a crust of salt through which their plunging hooves broke, releasing horrible odours from the black mud beneath and sudden swarms of small stinging flies and mosquitoes.  But Narouz looked about him with interest even here, his eyes alight, for he had already mentally planted this waste with carobs and green shrubs - conquered it.  But they both held their breath and did not speak as they traversed this last mephitic barrier and the long patches of wrinkled mummy-like soil to which it gave place.  Then at last they were on the edge of the desert and they paused in shadow while Narouz fished in his clothes for a little stick of blue billiard-marker's chalk.  They rubbed a little chalk under each of their eyelids with a finger against the glare - as they had always done, even as children; and each tied a cloth around his head in Bedouin fashion.

      And then the first pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of space, pure as a theorem, stretching away into the sky drenched in all its own silence and majesty, untenanted except by such figures as the imagination of man has invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his passions and whose purity flays the mind.

      Narouz gave a shout and the horses, suddenly awoken and filled with a sense of new freedom and space around them, started their peculiar tearing plunging gallop across the dunes, manes and tassels tossing, saddles creaking.  They raced like this for many minutes, Nessim giggling with excitement and joy.  It was so long since he had ridden at this wild gallop.

      But they held it, completing a slow arc eastwards across scrubby land where wild flowers bloomed and butterflies tippled amongst the waste of dunes and the dingy tenacious specimens of plant-life.  Their hooves rattled across shingle floors, through stone valleys with great sandstone needles and chines of rosy shale filling in the known horizons.  Nessim was busy with his memories of those youthful nights camped out here under a sky hoary with stars, in a booming tent (whose frosted guy-ropes glittered like brilliants) pitched under Vega, the whole desert spread around them like an empty room.  How did one come to forget the greatest of one's experiences?  It was all lying there like a piano that one could play but which one had somehow forgotten to touch for years.  He was irradiated by the visions of his inner eye and followed Narouz blindly.  He saw them in all that immensity - two spots like pigeons flying in an empty sky.

      They halted for a short rest in the shadow of a great rock - a purple oasis of darkness - panting and happy.  'If we put up a desert wolf,' said Narouz, 'I'll run it down with my kurbash,' and he caressed the great whip lovingly, running it through his fingers.

      When they set off again, Narouz started a slow tacking path, questing about for the ancient caravan route - the masrab which would take them to the Quasur el Atash (Castles of the Thirsty) where the Sheik's men were due to meet them before noon.  Once Nessim, too, had known these highways by heart - the smugglers' roads which had been used for centuries by the caravans which plied between Algiers and Mecca - the 'bountiful highways' which steered the fortunes of men through the wilderness of the desert, taking spices and stuffs from one part of Africa to another or affording to the pious their only means of reaching the Holy City.  He was suddenly jealous of his brother's familiarity with the desert they had once equally owned.  He copied him eagerly.

      Presently Narouz gave a hoarse shout and pointed and in a little while they came upon the marsrab - a highway of camel-tracks deeply worn in some places into solid rock, but running in a wavy series, parallel from horizon to horizon.  And here once more they younger brother set the pace.  His blue shirt was now stained violet at the armpits.  'Nearly there,' he cried, and out of the trembling pearly edges of the sky there swam slowly a high cluster of reddish basalt blocks, carved into the vague semblance (like a face in the fire) of a sphinx tortured by thirst; and there, gibbering in the dark shade of a rock, the little party waited to conduct them to the Sheik's tents - four tall lean men, made of brown paper, whose voices cracked at the edges of meaning with thirst, and whose laughter was like fury unleashed.  To them they rode - into the embrace of arms like dry sticks and the thorny clicking of an unfamiliar Arabic in which Narouz did all the talking and explaining.

      Nessim waited, feeling suddenly like a European, city-bred, a visitor: for the little party carried with them all the feeling of the tight inbred Arab world - its formal courtesies and feuds - its primitiveness.  He surprised himself by seeking in his own mind the memory of a painting by Bonnard or a poem by Blake - as a thirsty man might grope at a spring for water.  In such a way might a traveller present himself to some rude mountain clan, admiring their bunioned feet and coarse hairy legs, but grateful too that the sum of European culture was not expressed by their life-hating, unpleasure-loving strength.  Here he suddenly lost his brother, parted company with him, for Narouz had plunged into the life of these Arabian herdsmen with the same intensity as he plunged into the life of his land, his trees.  The great corded muscles in his hairy body were tense with pride, for he, a city-bred Alexandrian - almost a despised Nasrany - could out-shoot, out-talk and out-gallop any of them.  On him whose mettle they knew they kept a speculative aboriginal eye; the gentle Nessim they had seen in many guises before, his well-kept hands betrayed a city gentleman.  But they were polite.

      A knowledge of forms only was necessary now, not insight, for these delightful desert folk were automata; thinking of Mountolive, Nessim smiled suddenly and wondered where the British had found the substance of their myths about the desert Arab.  The fierce banality of their lives was so narrow, so regulated.  If they stirred one at all it was as the bagpipe can, without expressing anything above the level of the primitive.  He watched his brother handle them, simply from a knowledge of their forms of behaviour, as a showman handles dancing flees.  Poor souls!  He felt the power and resource of his city-bred intelligence stir in him.

      They all rode now in a compact group to the Sheik's tents, down long ribbed inclines of sand, through mirages of pastures which only the rain clouds imagined, until they came there, to the little circle of tents, manhood's skies of hide, invented by men whose childish memories were so fearful they had had perforce to invent a narrower heaven in which to contain the germ of the race; in this little cone of hide the first child was born, the first privacy of the human kiss invented.... Nessim wished bitterly that he could paint as well as Clea.  Absurd thoughts, and out of place.

      But the Sheik's tents were extensive, covering nearly two thousand square feet with a tent-cloth woven of goat-hair in broad stitches of black, green, maroon and white.  Long tassels hung down from the seams, playing in the wind.

      The Sheik and his sons, like a gallery of playing cards, awaited them with the conventional greetings to which Narouz at last knew every response.  The Sheik himself conducted them to a tent saying 'This house is your house; do as you please.  We are your servants.'  And behind him pressed the water-carriers to bathe their hands and feet and faces - the latter now somewhat dry and blistered by the journey.  They rested for at least an hour, for the heat of the day was at full, in that brown darkness.  Narouz lay snoring upon the cushions with arms and legs outspread while Nessim dozed fitfully, awakening from time to time to watch him - the effortless progress of sleep which physical surrender to action always brings.  He brooded upon his brother's ugliness - the magnificent set of white teeth showing through the pink rent in his upper lip.  From time to time, too, as they rested, the headmen of the tribe called noiselessly, taking off their shoes at the entrance of the tent, to enter and kiss Nessim's hand.  Each uttered the single word of welcome 'Mahubbah' in a whisper.

      It was late in the afternoon when Narouz woke and calling for water doused his body down, asking at the same time for a change of clothes which were at once brought to him by the Sheik's eldest son.  He strode out into the heat of the sand saying: 'Now for the colt.  It may take a couple of hours?  You won't mind?  We'll be back a bit late, eh?'  Cushions had been set for them in the shade and here Nessim was glad to recline and watch his brother moving quickly across the dazzle of sand towards a group of colts which had been driven up for him to examine.

      They played gracefully and innocently, the tossing of their heads and manes seeming to him 'like the surf of the June sea' as the proverb has it.  Narouz stopped keenly as he neared them, watching.  Then he shouted something and a man raced out to him with a bridle and bit.  'The white one,' he cried hoarsely and the Sheik's sons shouted a response which Nessim did not catch.  Narouz turned again, and softly with a queer ducking discretion, slipped in among the young creatures and almost before one could think was astride a white colt after having bridled it with a single almost invisible gesture.

      The mythical creature stood quite still, its eyes wide and lustrous as if fully to comprehend this tremendous new intelligence of a rider upon its back, then a slow shudder rippled through its flesh - the tides of the panic which always greets such a collision of human and animal worlds.  Horse and rider stood as if posing for a statue, buried in thought.

      Now the animal suddenly gave a low whistling cry of fear, shook itself and completed a dozen curious arching jumps, stiffly as a mechanical toy, coming down savagely on its forelegs each time with the downthrust.  This did not dislodge Narouz who only leaned forward and growled something in its ear that drove it frantic, for it now set off at a ragged plunging tossing canter, turning and curvetting and ducking.  They made a slow irregular circle round the tents until at last they came back to where the crowd of Arabs stood at the doorway of the main tent, watching silently.  And now the poor creature, as if aware that some great portion of its real life - its childhood perhaps - was irrevocably over, gave another low whistling groan and broke suddenly into the long tireless flying gallop of its breed, aimed like a shooting-star to pierce the very sky, and whirled away across the dunes with its rider secured to it by the powerful scissors of his legs - firm as a figure held by ringbolts - diminishing rapidly in size until both were lost to sight.  A great cry of approval went up from the tents and Nessim accepted, besides the curd cheese and coffee, the compliments which were his brother's due.

      Two hours later Narouz brought her back, glistening with sweat, dejected, staggering, with only enough fight in her to blow dejectedly and stamp, conquered.  But he himself was deliriously exhausted, dazed as if he had ridden through an oven, while his bloodshot eyes and drawn twitching face testified to the severity of the fight.  The endearments he uttered to the horse came from between parched and cracked lips.  But he was happy underneath it all - indeed radiant - as he croaked for water and begged leave of half an hour's rest before they should set out once more on the homeward journey.  Nothing could finally tire that powerful body - not even the orgasm he had experienced in long savage battle.  But closing his eyes now as he felt the water pouring over his head, he saw again the dark bleeding sun which shimmered behind their lids, image of fatigue, and felt the desert glare parching and cracking the water on his very skin.  His mind was a jumble of sharp stabbing colours and apprehensions - as if the whole sensory apparatus had melted in the heat like a colour-box, fusing thought and wish and desire.  He was light-headed with joy and felt as unsubstantial as a rainbow.  Yet in less than half an hour he was ready for the journey back.

      They set off with a different escort this time across the inclining rays of sunlight which threw their rose and purple shadows into the sockets of the dunes.  They made good time to the Quasur el Atash.  Narouz had made arrangements for the white colt to be delivered him later in the week by the Chief's sons, and he rode at ease now, occasionally singing a stave or two of a song.  Darkness fell as they reached the Castles of the Thirsty and, having said goodbye to their hosts, set off once more across the desert.

      They rode slowly at ease, watching the brindled waning moon come up on a silence broken only by the sudden stammer of their horses' hooves on a shingle bed, or the far-away ululations of jackals, and now, quite suddenly, Nessim found the barrier lifted and was able to say: 'Narouz, I am going to be married.  I want you to tell Leila for me.  I don't know why but I feel shy about it.'

      For a minute Narouz felt himself turned to ice - a figure in a coat of mail; he seemed to sway in his saddle as with a delight so forced and hollow that it made his voice snap off short he crabbed out the words: 'To Clea, Nessim?  To Clea?' feeling the blood come rushing back to his ticking nerves when his brother shook his head and stared curiously at him.  'No.  Why?  To Arnauti's ex-wife,' replied Nessim with a controlled, a classical precision of utterance.  They rode on with creaking saddles and Narouz, who was now grinning to himself with relief, cried 'I am so happy, Nessim!  At last!  You will be happy and have children.'

      But here Nessim's mortal shyness overcame him again and he told Narouz all that he had learned about Justine and about the loss of her child, adding: 'She does not love me now, and does not pretend to: but who knows?  If I can get her child back and give her some peace of mind and security, anything is possible.'  He added after a moment 'Don't you think?' not because he wished for an opinion on the matter but simply to bridge the silence which poured in between them like a drifting dune.  'As for the child, it is difficult.  The Parquet have investigated as best they could - and what little evidence they have points to Magzub (the Inspired One); there was a festival in the town that evening and he was there.  He has been several times accused of kidnapping children but the case has always been dropped for lack of evidence.'  Narouz pricked up his ears and bristled like a wolf.  'You mean the hypnotist?' Nessim said thoughtfully: 'I have sent to offer him a large sum of money - very large indeed - for what I want to know.  Do you see?'  Narouz shook his head doubtfully and picked at his short beard.  'He is the one who is mad,' he said.  'He used to come to St Damiana every year.  But strange-mad.  Zein-el-Abdin.  He is holy too.'

      'That is the one,' said Nessim; and as if struck by an afterthought Narouz reined both horses and embraced him, uttering the conventional congratulations in the family tongue.  Nessim smiled and said: 'You will tell Leila?  Please, my brother.'

      'Of course.'

      'After I have gone?'

      'Of course.'

      With the release of this tension and Narouz' ready compliance Nessim suddenly felt a load lifted from his mind.  And correspondingly he suddenly felt very tired and on the point of sleep.  They travelled briskly but without haste and it was towards midnight when they came once more within sight of the desert's edge.  Here the horses put up a startled hare and Narouz made an attempt to ride it down with his whip but he missed it in the half-darkness.

      'It is very good news,' he cried on returning to Nessim's side, as if the little gallop across the moonlit dunes had given him all the time and detachment he needed to come to a considered opinion.  'Will you bring her to us next week - to Leila?  I think I must have met her but cannot remember.  Very dark?  "A firefly's light in darkness for such eyes" as the song goes?'  He laughed his downward laugh.

      Nessim yawned sleepily.  'Ach! my bones ache.  That is what I get for living in Alexandria.  Narouz, before I fall asleep there was one other thing I meant to ask you.  I have not seen Pursewarden.  The meetings?'

      Narouz drew a hissing inward breath and turned his bright eyes to his brother, saying 'Yes.  Very well.  The next one is to be at the mulid of St Damiana, in the desert.'  He flexed the great muscles of his shoulders.  'The whole ten families are coming - can you believe it?'

      'You will be careful,' said his brother, 'to see that everything is done privately and there are no leaks.'

      'Of course!' he cried.

      'I mean,' said Nessim, 'that in the early stages this should not leave a political character.  It must grow slowly with the understanding of the matter.  Eh?  I do not think, for example, it is necessary for you to actually speak to them, but rather to discuss.  We can't risk.  You see, it is not only the British.'

      Narouz jaunted a leg impatiently and picked his teeth.  He thought of Mountolive and sighed.

      'It is also the French - and they are at cross-purposes.  If we are to use them both....'

      'I know, I know,' said Narouz impatiently.  Nessim looked at him keenly.  'Attend,' he said sharply, 'for much depends on your understanding just how far we can go at this stage.'

      His reproof crushed Narouz.  He flushed and joined his hands together as he looked at his brother.  'I do,' he said in a low hoarse voice.  Nessim at once felt ashamed of himself and took his arm.  He went on in his low confiding tone.

      'You see, there are mysterious leaks from time to time.  Old Cohen, for example, the furrier who died last month.  He was working for the French in Syria.  On his return, the Egyptians knew all about his mission.  How?  Nobody knows.  Among our friends we certainly have enemies - in Alexandria itself.  Do you see?'

      'I see.'

      The next morning it was time for Nessim to return and the two brothers rode out across the fields at a leisurely pace to the point of rendezvous at the ferry.  'Why do you never come into the town?' said Nessim.  'Come with me today.  There's a ball at the Randidis'.  You'd enjoy it as a change.'  Narouz as always wore a hangdog expression when anyone suggested an excursion into the city.  'I shall come at Carnival,' he said slowly, looking at the ground, and his brother laughed and touched his arm.  'I knew you'd say that!  Always, once a year at Carnival.  I wonder why!'

      But he knew; Narouz' mortal shyness about his harelip had driven him into a seclusion almost as unbroken as that of his mother.  Only the black domino of the carnival balls permitted him to disguise the face he had come to loathe so much that he could no longer bear to see it even in a shaving-mirror.  At the carnival ball he felt free.  And yet there was another and indeed unexpected reason - a passion for Clea which had lasted for years now; for a Clea to whom he had never spoken, and indeed only twice seen when she came down with Nessim to ride on the estate.  This was a secret which could not have been dragged out of him under torture, but to every carnival dance he came and drifted about in the crowd hoping vaguely that he might by accident meet this young woman whose name he had never uttered aloud to anyone until that day.

      (He did not know that Clea loathed the carnival season and spent the time quietly drawing and reading in her studio.)

      They parted now with a warm embrace and Nessim's car scribbled its pennants of dust across the warm air of the fields, eager to regain the coast road once more.  A battleship in the basin was firing a twenty-one gun salute, in honour perhaps of some Egyptian dignitary, and the explosions appeared to make the clouds of pearl which always overhung the harbour in spring, tremble and change colour.  The sea was high today, and four fishing-boats tacked furiously towards the town harbour with their catch.  Nessim stopped only once, to buy himself a carnation for his buttonhole from the flower-vendor on the corner of Saad Zagloul.  Then he went to his office, pausing to have his shoeshine on the way up.  The city had never seemed more beautiful to him.  Sitting at his desk he thought of Leila and then of Justine.  What would his mother have to say about his decision?

      Narouz walked out to the summerhouse that morning to discharge his mission; but first he picked a mass of blooms from the red and yellow roses with which to refill the two great vases which stood on either side of his father's portrait.  His mother was asleep at her desk but the noise he made lifting the latch woke her at once.  The snake hissed drowsily and then lowered its head to the ground once more.

      'Bless you, Narouz,' she said as she saw the flowers and rose at once to empty her vases.  As they started to trim and arrange the new blooms, Narouz broke the news of his brother's marriage.  His mother stood quite still for a long time, undisturbed but serious as if she were consulting her own inmost thoughts and emotions.  At last she said, more to herself than anyone, 'Why not?' repeating the phrase once or twice as if testing its pitch.

      Then she bit her thumb and, turning to her younger son, said 'But if she is an adventuress, after his money, I won't have it.  I shall take steps to have her done away with.  He needs my permission anyhow.'

      Narouz found this overwhelmingly funny and gave an appreciative laugh.  She took his hairy arm between her fingers.  'I will,' she said.

      'Please.'

      'I swear it.'

      He laughed now until he showed the pink of his mouth.  But she remained abstracted, still listening to an inner monologue.  Absently she patted his arm as he laughed and whispered 'Hush'; and then after a long pause she said, as if surprised by her own thoughts, 'The strange thing is, I mean it.'

      'And you can't count on me, eh?' he said, still laughing but with the germ of seriousness in his words.  'You can't trust me to watch over my own brother's honour.'  He was still swollen up toad-like by the laughter, though his expression had now become serious.  'My God,' she thought, 'how ugly he is.'  And her fingers went to the black veil, pressing through it to the rough cicatrices in her own complexion, touching them fiercely as if to smooth them out.

      'My good Narouz,' she said, almost tearfully, and ran her fingers through his hair; the wonderful poetry of the Arabic stirred and soothed him in one.  'My honeycomb, my dove, my good Narouz.  Tell him yes, with my embrace.  Tell him yes.'

      He stood still, trembling like a colt, and drinking in the music of her voice and the rare caresses of that warm and capable hand.

      'But tell him he must bring her here to us.'

      'I will.'

      'Tell him today.'

      And he walked with his queer jerky sawing stride to the telephone in the old house.  His mother sat at her dusty table and repeated twice in a low puzzled tone: 'Why should Nessim choose a Jewess?'

V

So much have I reconstructed from the labyrinth of notes which Balthazar has left me.  'To imagine is not necessarily to invent,' he says elsewhere, 'nor dares one make a claim for omniscience in interpreting people's actions.  One assumes that they have grown out of their feelings as leaves grow out of a branch.  But can one work backwards, deducing the one form from the other?  Perhaps a writer could if he were sufficiently brave to cement these apparent gaps in our actions with interpretations of his own to bind them together?  What was going on in Nessim's mind?  This is really a question for you to put to yourself.

      'Or in Justine's for that matter?  One really doesn't know; all I can say is that their esteem for each other grew in inverse ration to their regard - for there never by common consent was any love between them as I have shown you.  Perhaps it is as well.  But in all the long discussions I had with them separately, I could not find the key to a relationship which failed signally - one could see it daily sinking as land sinks, as the level of a lake might sink, and not know why.  The surface colouring was brilliantly executed and so perfect as to deceive most observers like yourself, for example.  Nor do I share Leila's view - who never liked Justine.  I sat beside her at the presentation which Narouz organized at the great mulid of Abu Girg which falls towards Easter every year.  Justine had by then renounced Judaism to become a Copt in obedience to Nessim's wish, and as he could only marry her privately since she had already been married, Narouz had to be content with a party which would present her to the great house and its dependants whose lives he was always anxious to cement into the family pattern.

      'For four days then a huge encampment of tents and marquees grew up around the house - carpets and chandeliers and brilliant decorations.  Alexandria was stripped bare of hothouse flowers and not less of its great social figures who made the somewhat mocking journey down to Abu Girg (nothing excites so much mocking amusement in the city as a fashionable wedding) to pay their respects and congratulate Leila.  Local mudirs and sheiks, peasants innumerable, dignitaries from near and far had flocked in to be entertained - while the Bedouin, whose tribal grounds fringed the estate, gave magnificent displays of horsemanship, galloping round and round the house firing their guns - for all the world as if Justine were a young bride - a virgin.  Imagine the smiles of Athena Trasha, of the Cervonis!  And old Abu Kar himself rode up the steps of the house on his white Arab and into the very reception-rooms with a bowl of flowers.

      'As for Leila, she never for one moment took those clever eyes off Justine.  She followed her with care like someone studying a historical figure.  "Is she not lovely?" I asked as I followed her glance and she turned a quick bird-like glance in my direction before turning back to the subject of her absorbed study.  "We are old friends, Balthazar, and I can talk to you.  I was telling myself that she looked something like I did once, and that she is an adventuress; like a small dark snake coiled up at the centre of Nessim's life."  I protested in a formal manner at this; she stared into my eyes for a moment and then gave a slow chuckle.  I was surprised by what she said next.  "Yes, she is just like me - merciless in the pursuit of pleasure and yet arid - all her milk has turned into power-love.  Yet she is also like me in that she is tender and kindly and a real man's woman.  I hate her because she is like me, do you understand?  And I fear her because she can read my mind."  She began to laugh.  "My darling," she called out to Justine, "come over here and sit by me."  And she thrust upon her the one sort of confectionary she herself most loathed - crystallized violets - which I saw Justine accept with reserve - for she loathed them too.  And so the two of them sat there, the veiled sphinx and the unveiled, eating sugar violets which neither could bear.  I was delighted to be able to see women at their most primitive like this.  Nor can I tell you very much about the validity of such judgements.  We all make them about each other.

      'The curious thing was, that despite this antipathy between the two women - the antipathy of affinity, you might say - there sprang up side by side with it a strange sympathy, a sense of identification with each other.  For example, when Leila at last dared to meet Mountolive it was done secretly and arranged by Justine.  It was Justine who brought them together, both masked, during the carnival ball.  Or so I heard.

      'As for Nessim, I would, at the risk of over-simplification, say something like this: he was so innocent that he had not realized that you cannot live with a woman without in some degree falling in love with her - that possession is nine points of the jealousy?  He was dismayed and terrified by the extent of his own jealousy for Justine and was honestly trying to practise something new for him - indifference.  True or false?  I don't know.

      'And then, turning the coin round, I would say that what irked Justine herself unexpectedly was to find that the contrast of wife undertaken so rationally, and at the level of a financial bargain, was somehow more binding than a wedding ring.  One does not, as a woman (if passion seems to sanction it) think twice about being unfaithful to a husband; but to be unfaithful to Nessim seemed like stealing money from the till.  What would you say?'

      My own feeling (pace Balthazar) is that Justine became slowly aware of something hidden in the character of this solitary endearing long-suffering man; namely a jealousy all the more terrible and indeed dangerous for never allowing itself any outlet.  Sometimes ... but here I am in danger of revealing confidences which Justine made to me during the period of the so-called love affair which so much wounded me and in which, as I learn now, she was only using me as a cover for other activities.  I have described the progress of it all elsewhere; but if I were now to reveal all she told me of Nessim in her own words I should be in danger, primo, of setting down material perhaps distasteful to the reader and indeed unfair to Nessim himself.  Secundo: I am not sure any more of its relative truth since it might have been part of the whole grand design of deception!  In my own mind even those feelings ('important lessons learned' etc.) are all coloured by the central doubt which the Interlinear has raised in my mind.  'Truth is what most contradicts itself ...'!  What a farce it all is!

      But what he says of the jealousy of Nessim must be true, however, for I lived for a while in its shadow, and there is no doubt about the effect it had on Justine.  Almost from the beginning she had found herself followed, kept under surveillance, and very naturally this gave her a feeling of uncertainty: uncertainty made terrible by the fact that Nessim never openly spoke of it.  It rested, an invisible weight of suspicion dogging and discolouring her commonest remarks, the most innocent of after-dinner walks.  He would sit between the tall candles smiling at her while a whole silent inquisition unrolled reverberating in his mind.  So at least she said.

      The simplest and most sincere actions - a visit to a public library, a shopping list, a message on a place-card - became baffling to the eye of a jealousy founded in emotional impotence.  Nessim was torn to rags by her demands; she was torn to rags by the doubts she saw reflected in his eyes - by the very tenderness with which he put a wrap around her shoulders.  It felt as if he were slipping a noose over her neck.  In a queer sort of way this relationship echoed the psycho-analytic relationship described in Moeurs by her first husband - where Justine became for them all a Case rather than a person, chased almost out of her right mind by the tiresome inquisitions of those who never know when to leave ill alone.  Yes, she had fallen into a trap, there is no doubt.  The thought echoed in her mind like mad laughter.  I hear it echo still.

      So they went on side by side, like runners perfectly matched, offering to Alexandria what seemed the perfect pattern of a relationship all envied and none could copy.  Nessim the indulgent, the uxorious, Justine the lovely and contented wife.

      'In his own way,' notes Balthazar, 'I suppose he was only hunting for the truth.  Isn't this becoming rather a ridiculous remark?  We should drop it by common consent!  It is after all such an odd business.  Shall I give you yet another example from another quarter?  Your account of Capodistria's death on the lake is the version which we all of us accepted at the time as likely to be true: in our minds, of course.

      'But in the Police depositions, everyone concerned mentioned one particular thing - namely that when they raised his body from the lake in which it was floating, with the black patch beside it in the water, his false teeth fell into the boat with a clatter, and startled them all.  Now listen to this: three months later I was having dinner with Pierre Balbz who was his dentist.  He assured me that Da Capo had an almost perfect set of teeth and certainly no false teeth which could possibly have fallen out.  Who then was it?  I don't know.  And if Da Capo simply disappeared and arranged for some decoy to take his place, he had every reason: leaving behind him debts of over two million.  Do you see what I mean?

      'Fact is unstable by its very nature.  Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there "the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle-flames".  So it seems to me does reality.  How then can we hunt for the truth?'

*    *    *    *    *

      Pombal was hovering between diplomatic tact and the low cunning of a provincial public prosecutor; the conflicting emotions played upon his fat face as he sat in his gout-chair with his fingers joined.  He had the air of a man in complete agreement with himself.  'They say,' he said, watching me keenly, 'that you are now in the British Deuxième.  Eh?  Don't tell me, I know you can't speak.  Nor can I if you ask me about myself.  You think you know that I am in the French - but I deny the whole thing most strenuously.  What I am asking is whether I should have you living in the flat.  It seems somehow ... how do you say? ... Box and Cos.  No?  I mean, why don't we sell each other ideas, eh?  I know you won't.  Neither will I.  Our sense of honour ... I mean only if we are in the ... ahem.  But, of course, you deny it and I deny it.  So we are not.  But you are not too proud to share my women, eh?  Autre chose.  Have a drink, eh?  The gin bottle is over there.  I hid it from Hamid.  Of course.  I know that something is going on.  I don't despair of finding out.  Something ... I wish I knew ... Nessim, Capodistria ... Well!'

      'What have you done to your face?'  I say to change the subject.  He has recently started to grow a moustache.  He holds on to it defensively as if my question constituted a threat to shave it off forcibly.  'My moustache, at that!  Well, recently I have had so many reproofs about work, not attending to it, that I analysed myself deeply, au fond.  Do you know how many man-hours I am losing through women?  You will never guess.  I thought a moustache (isn't it hideous?) would put them off a bit, but no.  It is just the same.  It is a tribute, dear boy, not to my charm but to the low standards here.  They seem to love me because there is nothing better.  They love a well-hung diplomat - how do you say, faisandé?  Why do you laugh?  You are losing a lot of woman-hours too.  But then you have the British Government behind you - the pound, eh?  That girl was here again today.  Mon Dieu, so thin and so uncared for!  I offered her some lunch but she would not stay.  And the mess in your room!  She takes hashish, doesn't she?  Well, when I go to Syria on leave you can have the whole place.  Provided you respect my firescreen - isn't it good as for art, hein?'

      He has had an immense and vivid firescreen made for the flat which bears the legend 'LEGERETE, FATALITE, MATERNITE' in pokerwork.

      'Ah well,' he continues, 'so much for art in Alexandria.  But as for that Justine, that is a better barbarian for you, no?  I bet she - eh?  Don't tell.  Why are you not happier about it?  You Englishmen, always gloomy and full of politics.  Pas de remords, mon cher.  Two women in tandem - who would want better?  And one Left-Handed - as Da Capo calls Lesbians.  You know Justine's reputation?  Well, for my part, I am renouncing the whole ----'

      So Pombal flows in great good humour over the shallow riverbed of his experience and, standing on the balcony, I watch the sky darkening over the harbour and hear the sullen hooting of ships' sirens, emphasizing our loneliness here, our isolation from the warm Gulf Stream of European feelings and ideas.  All the currents slide away towards Mecca or to the incomprehensible desert and the only foothold in this side of the Mediterranean is the city we have come to inhabit and hate, to infect with our own self-contempts.

      And then I see Melissa walk down the street and my heart contracts with pity and joy as I turn to open the flat door.

*    *    *    *    *

      These quiet bemused island days are a fitting commentary to the thoughts and feelings of one walking alone on deserted beaches, or doing the simple duties of a household which lacks a mother.  But I carry now the great Interlinear in my hand wherever I go, whether cooking or teaching the child to swim, or cutting wood for the fireplace.  But these fictions all live on as a projection of the white city itself whose pearly skies are broken in spring only by the white stalks of the minarets and the flocks of pigeons turning in clouds of silver and amethyst; whose veridian and black marble harbour-water reflects the snouts of foreign men-of-war turning through their slow arcs, depicting the prevailing wind; or swallowing their own inky reflections, touching and overlapping like the very tongues and sects and races over which they keep their uneasy patrol: symbolizing the western consciousness whose power is exemplified in steel - those sullen preaching guns against the yellow metal of the lake and the town which breaks open at sunset like a rose.

*    *    *    *    *