I

I

The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year.  They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods.  It was as if they were eager to celebrate our departure from the little island - for at last the long-awaited message from Nessim had come, like a summons back to the Underworld.  A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me.  A memory, I told myself, which had been falsified by the desires and intuitions only as yet half-realized on paper.  Alexandria, the capital of memory!  All the writing which I had borrowed from the living and the dead, until I myself had become a sort of postscript to a letter which was never ended, never posted....

      How long had I been away?  I could hardly compute, though calendar-time gives little enough indication of the aeons which separate one self from another, one day from another; and all this time I had been living there, truly, in the Alexandria of my heart's mind.  And page by page, heartbeat by heartbeat, I had been surrendering myself to the grotesque organism of which we had all once been part, victors and vanquished alike.  An ancient city changing under the brushstrokes of thoughts which besieged meaning, clamouring for identity; somewhere there, on the black thorny promontories of Africa the aromatic truth of the place lived on, the bitter unchewable herb of the past, the pith of memory.  I had set out once to store, to codify, to annotate the past before it was utterly lost - that at least was a task I had set myself.  I had failed in it (perhaps it was hopeless?) for no sooner had I embalmed one aspect of it in words than the intrusion of new knowledge disrupted the frame of reference, everything flew asunder, only to reassemble again in unforeseen, unpredictable patterns....

      'To re-work reality,' I had written somewhere; temeritous, presumptuous words indeed - for it is reality which works and reworks us on its slow wheel.  Yet if I had been enriched by the experience of this island interlude, it was perhaps because of this total failure to record the inner truth of the city.  I had now come face to face with the nature of time, that ailment of the human psyche.  I had been forced to admit defeat on paper.  Yet curiously enough the act of writing had in itself brought me another sort of increase; by the very failure of words, which sink one by one into the measureless caverns of the imagination and gutter out.  An expensive way to begin living, yes; but then we artists are driven towards personal lives nourished in these strange techniques of self-pursuit.

      But then ... if I had changed, what of my friends - Balthazar, Nessim, Justine, Clea?  What new aspects of them would I discern after this time-lapse, when once more I had been caught up in the ambience of a new city, a city now swallowed by a way?  Here was the rub.  I could not say.  Apprehension trembled within me like a lodestar.  It was hard to renounce the hard-worn territory of my dreams in favour of new images, new cities, new dispositions, new loves.  I had come to hug my own dreams of the place like a monomaniac.... Would it not, I wondered, be wiser to stay where I was?  Perhaps.  Yet I knew I must go.  Indeed, this very night I should be gone!  The thought itself was so hard to grasp that I was forced to whisper it aloud to myself.

      We had passed the last ten days since the messenger called in a golden hush of anticipation; and the weather had matched it, turning up a succession of perfectly blue days, windless seas.  We stood between the two landscapes, unwilling to relinquish the one yet aching to encounter the other.  Poised, like gulls upon the side of a cliff.  And already the dissimilar images mixed and baulked in my dreams.  This island house, for example, its smoke-silvered olives and almonds where the red-footed partridge wandered ... silent glades where only the goat-face of Pan might emerge.  Its simple and lucent perfection of form and colour could not mix with the other premonitions crowding in upon us.  (A sky full of falling-stars, emerald wash of tides on lonely beaches, crying of gulls on the white roads of the south.)  This Grecian world was already being invaded by the odours of the forgotten city - promontories where the sweating sea-captains had boozed and eaten until their intestines cracked, had drained their bodies, like kegs, of every lust, foundering in the embrace of black slaves with spaniels' eyes.  (The mirrors, the heart-rending sweetness of the voices of blinded canaries, the bubble of narguilehs in their rosewater bowls, the smell of patchouli and joss.)  They were eating into one another, these irreconcilable dreams.  And I saw my friends once again (not as names now), irradiated anew by the knowledge of this departure.  They were no longer shadows of my own writing but refreshed anew - even the dead.  At night I walked again those curling streets with Melissa (situated now somewhere beyond regrets, for even in my dreams I knew she was dead), walking comfortably arm in arm; her narrow legs like scissors gave her a swaying walk.  The habit of pressing her thigh to mine at every step.  I could see everything with affection now - even the old cotton frock and cheap shoes which she wore on holidays.  She had not been able to powder out the faint blue lovebite on her throat.... Then she vanished and I awoke with a cry of regret.  Dawn was breaking among the olives, silvering their still leaves.

      Somewhere along the road I had recovered my peace of mind.  This handful of blue days before saying farewell - I treasured them, luxuriating in their simplicity: fires of olive-wood blazing in the old hearth whose painting of Justine would be the last item to be packed, jumping and gleaming on the battered table and chair, on the blue enamel bowl of early cyclamen.  What had the city to do with all this - an Aegean spring hanging upon a thread between winter and the first white puffs of almond blossom?  It was a word merely, and meant little, being scribbled on the margins of a dream, or being repeated in the mind to the colloquial music of time, which is only desire expressed in heartbeats.  Indeed, though I loved it so much, I was powerless to stay; the city which I now know I hated held out something different for me - a new evaluation of the experience which had marked me.  I must return to it once more in order to be able to leave it forever, to shed it.  If I have spoken of time it is because the writer I was becoming was leaning at last to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses - beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak.  The continuous present, which is the real history of that collective anecdote, the human mind; when the past is dead and the future represented only by desire and fear, what of that adventive moment which can't be measured, can't be dismissed?  For most of us the so-called Present is snatched away like some sumptuous repast, conjured up by fairies - before one can touch a mouthful.  Like the dead Pursewarden I hoped I might soon be truthfully able to say: 'I do not write for those who have never asked themselves this question: "at what point does real life begin?"'

      Idle thoughts passing through the mind as I lay on a flat rock above the sea, eating an orange, perfectly circumscribed by a solitude which would soon be engulfed by the city, the ponderous azure dream of Alexandria basking like some old reptile in the bronze Pharaonic light of the great lake.  The master-sensualists of history abandoning their bodies to mirrors, to poems, to the grazing flocks of boys and women, to the needle in the vein, to the opium-pipe, to the death-in-life kisses without appetite.  Walking those streets again in my imagination I knew once more that they spanned, not merely human history, but the whole biological scale of the heart's affections - from the painted ecstasies of Cleopatra (strange that the vine should be discovered here, near Taposiris) to the bigotry of Hypatia (withered vine-leaves, martyr's kisses).  And stranger visitors: Rimbaud, student of the Abrupt Path, walked here with a belt full of gold coins.  And all those other swarthy dream-interpreters and politicians and eunuchs were like a flock of birds of brilliant plumage.  Between pity, desire and dread, I saw the city once more spread out before me, inhabited by the faces of my friends and subjects.  I knew that I must re-experience it once more and this time forever.

      Yet it was to be a strange departure, full of small unforeseen elements - I mean the messenger being a hunchback in a silver suit, a flower in his lapel, a perfumed handkerchief in his sleeve!  And the sudden springing to life of the little village which had for so long tactfully ignored our very existence, save for an occasional gift of fish or wine or coloured eggs when Athena brought us, folded in her red shawl.  She, too, could hardly bear to see us go; her stern old wrinkled mask crumpled into tears over each item of our slender baggage.  But 'They will not let you leave without a hospitality' she repeated stubbornly.  'The village will not let you go like that.'  We were to be offered a farewell banquet!

      As for the child, I had conducted the whole rehearsal of this journey (of her whole life, in truth) in images from a fairy story.  Many repetitions had not staled it.  She would sit staring up at the painting and listening attentively.  She was more than prepared for  it all, indeed almost ravenous to take up her own place in the gallery of images I had painted for her.  She had soaked up all the confused colours of this fanciful world to which she had once belonged by right and which she would now recover - a world peopled by those presences - the father a dark pirate-prince, the stepmother a swarthy imperious queen....

      'She is like the playing-card?'

      'Yes.  The Queen of Spades.'

      'And her name is Justine.'

      'Her name is Justine.'

      'In the picture she is smoking.  Will she love me more than my father or less?'

      'She will love you both.'

      There had been no other way to explain it to her, except in terms of myth or allegory - the poetry of infant uncertainty.  I had made her word-perfect in this parable of an Egypt which was to throw up for her (enlarged to the size of gods or magi) the portraits of her family, of her ancestors.  But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow?  No matter.  She was already drunk upon the image of her father.

      'Yes, I understand everything.'  With a nod and a sigh she would store up these painted images in the treasure-box of her mind.  Of Melissa, her dead mother, she spoke less often, and when she did I answered her in the same fashion from the storybook; but she had already sunk, pale star, below the horizon into the stillness of death, leaving the foreground to those others - the playing-card characters of the living.

      The child had thrown a tangerine into the water and now leaned to watch it roll softly down to the sandy floor of the grotto.  It lay there, flickering like a small flame, nudged by the swell and fall of the currents.

      'Now watch me fetch it up.'

      'Not in this icy sea, you'll die of cold.'

      'It isn't cold today.  Watch.'

      By now she could swim like a young otter.  It was easy, sitting here on the flat rock above the water, to recognize in her the dauntless eyes of Melissa, slanted a little at the edges; and sometimes, intermittently, like a forgotten grain of sleep in the corners, the dark supposing look (pleading, uncertain) of her father Nessim.  I remembered Clea's voice saying once, in another world, long ago: 'Mark, if a girl does not like dancing and swimming she will never be able to make love.'  I smiled and wondered if the words were true as I watched the little creature turn over smoothly in the water and flow gracefully downwards to the target with the craft of a seal, toes pressed back against the sky.  The glimmer of the little white purse between her legs.  She retrieved the tangerine beautifully and spiralled to the surface with it gripped in her teeth.

      'Now run and dry quickly.'

      'It isn't cold.'

      'Do as you are told.  Be off.  Hurry.'

      'And the man with the hump?'

      'He has gone.'

      Mnemjian's unexpected appearance on the island had both started and thrilled her - for it was he who brought us Nessim's message.  It was strange to see him walking along the shingle beach with an air of grotesque perturbation, as if balancing on corkscrews.  I think he wished to show us that for years he had not walked on anything but the finest pavements.  He was literally unused to terra firma.  He radiated a precarious and overbred finesse.  He was clad in a dazzling silver suit, spats, a pearl tiepin, and his fingers were heavily ringed.  Only the smile, the infant smile was unchanged, and the oiled spitcurl was still aimed at the frontal sinus.

      'I have married Halil's widow.  I am the richest barber in all Egypt today, my dear friend.'

      He blurted this out all in one breath, leaning on a silver-knobbed walking-stick to which he was clearly as unaccustomed.  His violet eye roved somewhat disdainfully round our somewhat primitive cottage, and he refused a chair, doubtless because he did not wish to crease those formidable trousers.  'You have a hard style of life here, eh?  Not much luxe, Darley.'  Then he sighed and added, 'But now you will be coming to us again.'  He made a vague gesture with the stick intended to symbolize the hospitality we should once more enjoy from the city.  'Myself I cannot stay.  I am on my way back.  I did this purely as a favour to Hosnani.'  He spoke of Nessim with a sort of pearly grandeur, as if he were now his equal socially; then he caught sight of my smile and had the grace to giggle once before becoming serious again.  'There is no time, anyway,' he said, dusting his sleeves.

      This had the merit of being true, for the Smyrna boat stays only long enough to unload mail and occasional merchandise - a few cases of macaroni, some copper sulphate, a pump.  The wants of the islanders are few.  Together we walked back towards the village, across the olive-groves, talking as we went.  Mnemjian still trudged with that slow turtle-walk.  But I was glad, for it enabled me to ask him a few questions about the city, and from his answers to gain some inkling of what I was to find there in the matter of changed dispositions, unknown factors.

      'There are many changes since the Hosnani intrigue in Palestine?  The collapse?  The Egyptians are trying to sequestrate.  They have taken much away.  Yes, they are poor now, and still in trouble.  She is still under house-detention at Karm Abu Girg.  Nobody has seen her for an age.  He works by special permission as an ambulance driver in the docks, twice a week.  Very dangerous.  And there was a bad air-raid; he lost one eye and a finger.'

      'Nessim?'  I was startled.  The little man nodded self-importantly.  This new, this unforeseen image of my friend struck me like a bullet.  'Good God,' I said, and the barber nodded as if to approve the appropriateness of the oath.  'It was bad,' he said.  'It is the war, Darley.'  Then suddenly a happier thought came into his mind and he smiled the infant smile once more which reflected only the iron material values of the Levant.  Taking my arm he continued: 'But the war is also good business.  My shops are cutting the armies' hair day and night.  Three saloons, twelve assistants!  You will see, it is superb.  And Pombal says, as a joke, "Now you are shaving the dead while they are still alive."'  He doubled up with soundless refined laughter.

      'Is Pombal back there?'

      'Of course.  He is a high man of the Free French now.  He has conferences with Sir Mountolive.  He is also still there.  Many others too have remained from your time, Darley, you will see.'

      Mnemjian seemed delighted to have been able to astonish me so easily.  Then he said something which made my mind do a double somersault.  I stood still and asked him to repeat it, thinking that I had misheard him.  'I have just visited Capodistria.'  I stared at him.  Capodistria!  'But he died!' I exclaimed, though I had not forgotten Balthazar's enigmatic phrase about the false teeth.

      The barber leaned far back, as if on a rocking-horse, and tittered profusely.  It was a very good joke this time and lasted him a full minute.  Then at last, still sighing luxuriously at the memory of it, he slowly took from his breast-pocket a postcard such as one buys upon any Mediterranean seafront and held it out to me, saying: 'Then who is this?'

      It was a murky enough photograph with the heavy developing-marks which are a feature of hasty street-photography.  It depicted two figures walking along a seafront.  One was Mnemjian.  The other ... I stared at it in growing recognition....

      Capodistria was clad in tubular trousers of an Edwardian style and very pointed black shoes.  With this he wore a long academician's topcoat with a fur collar and cuffs.  Finally, and quite fantastically, he was sporting a chapeau melon which made him look rather like a tall rat in some animal cartoon.  He had grown a thin Rilkean moustache which drooped a little at the corner of his mouth.  A long cigarette-holder was between his teeth.  It was unmistakable Capodistria.  'What on earth ...' I began, but the smiling Mnemjian shut one eye and laid a finger across his lips.  'Always,' he said, 'there are mysteries'; and in the act of guarding them he swelled up toad-like, staring into my eyes with a mischievous content.  He would perhaps have deigned to explain but at that minute a ship's siren rang out from the direction of the village.  He was flustered.  'Quickly'; he began his trudging walk.  'I mustn't forget to give you the letter from Hosnani.'  It was carried in his breast pocket and he fished it out at last.  'And now goodbye,' he said.  'All is arranged.  We will meet again.'

      I shook his hand and stood looking after him for a moment, surprised and undecided.  Then I turned back to the edge of the olive-grove and sat down on a rock to read the letter from Nessim.  It was brief and contained the details of the travel arrangements he had made for us.  A little craft would be coming to take us off the island.  He gave approximate times and instructions as to where we should wait for it.  All this was clearly set out.  Then, as a postscript, Nessim added in his tall hand: 'It will be good to meet again, without reserves.  I gather that Balthazar has recounted all our misadventures.  You won't exact an unduly heavy repentance from people who care for you so much?  I hope not.  Let the past remain a closed book for us all.'

      That was how it fell out.

      For those last few days the island regaled us nobly with the best of its weather and those austere Cycladean simplicities which were like a fond embrace - for which I knew I should be longing when once more the miasma of Egypt had closed over my head.

      On the evening of departure the whole village turned out to give us the promised farewell dinner of lamb on the spit and gold rezina wine.  They spread the tables and chairs down the whole length of the small main street and each family brought its own offerings to the feast.  Even those two proud dignitaries were there - mayor and priest - each seated at one end of the long table.  It was cold to sit in the lamplight thus, pretending that it was really a summer evening, but even the frail spring moon collaborated, rising blindly out of the sea to shine upon the white tablecloths, polish the glasses of wine.  The old burnished faces, warmed by drink, glowed like copperware.  Ancient smiles, archaic forms of address, traditional pleasantries, courtesies of the old world which was already fading, receding from us.  The old sea-captains of the sponge-fleets sucking their bounty of wine from blue enamel cans: their warm embraces smelt like wrinkled crab-apples, their great moustaches tanned by tobacco curled towards their ears.

      At first I had been touched, thinking all this ceremony was for me; I was not the less so to find that it was for my country.  To be English when Greece had fallen was to be a target for the affection and gratitude of every Greek, and the humble peasants of this hamlet felt it no less keenly than Greeks everywhere.  The shower of toasts and pledges echoed on the night, and all the speeches flew like kites, in the high style of Greek, orotund and sonorous.  They seemed to have the cadences of immortal poetry - the poetry of a desperate hour; but of course they were only words, the wretched windy words which war so easily breeds and which the rhetoricians of peace would soon wear out of use.

      But tonight the war lit them up like tapers, the old men, giving them a burning grandeur.  Only the young men were not there to silence and shame them with their hangdog looks - for they had gone to Albania to die among the snows.  The women spoke shrilly, in voices made coarsely thrilling with unshed tears, and among the bursts of laughter and song fell their sudden silences - like so many open graves.

      It had come so softly towards us over the waters, this war; gradually, as clouds which quietly fill in a horizon from end to end.  But as yet it had not broken.  Only the rumour of it gripped the heart with conflicting hopes and fears.  At first it had seemed to portend the end of the so-called civilized world, but this hope soon proved vain.  No, it was to be as always simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways; the end of the artist's hopes, of nonchalance, of joy.  Apart from this everything else about the human condition would be confirmed and emphasized; perhaps even a certain truthfulness had already begun to emerge from behind appearances, for death heightens every tension and permits us fewer of the half-truths by which we normally live.

      This was all we had known of it, to date, this unknown dragon whose claws had already struck elsewhere.  All?  Yes, to be sure, once or twice the upper sky had swollen with the slur of invisible bombers, but their sounds could not drown the buzzing, nearer at hand, of the island bees: for each household owned a few whitewashed hives.  What else?  Once (this seemed more real) a submarine poked up a periscope in the bay and surveyed the coastline for minutes on end.  Did it see us bathing on the point?  We waved.  But a periscope has no arms with which to wave back.  Perhaps on the beaches to the north it had discovered something more rare - an old bull seal dozing in the sun like a Moslem on his prayer-mat.  But this again could have had little to do with the war.

      Yet the whole business became a little more real when the little caique which Nessim had sent fussed into the dusk-filled harbour that night, manned by three sullen-looking sailors armed with automatics.  They were not Greek, though they spoke the tongue with waspish authority.  They had tales to tell of shattered armies and death by frostbite, but in a sense it was already too late, for the wine had fuddled the wits of the old men.  Their stories palled rapidly.  Yet they impressed me, these three leather-faced specimens from an unknown civilization called 'war'.  They sat uneasily in such good fellowship.  The flesh was stretched tight over their unshaven cheekbones as if from fatigue.  They smoked gluttonously, gushing the blue smoke from mouth and nostrils like voluptuaries.  When they yawned they seemed to fetch their yawns up from the very scrotum.  We confided ourselves to their care with misgiving, for they were the first unfriendly faces we had seen for a long time.

      At midnight we slipped out slantwise from the bay upon a high moonlight - the further darkness made more soft, more confiding, by the warm incoherent goodbyes which poured out across the white beeches towards us.  How beautiful are the Greek words of greeting and farewell!

      We shuttled for a while along the ink-shadowed line of cliffs where the engine's heartbeats were puckered up and thrown back at us in volleys.  And so at last outwards upon the main deep, feeling the soft unction of the water's rhythms begin to breast us up, cradle and release us, as if in play.  The night was superlatively warm and fine.  A dolphin broke once, twice at the bow.  A course was set.

      Exultation mixed with a profound sadness now possessed us; fatigue and happiness in one.  I could taste the good salt upon my lips.  We drank warm sage-tea without talking.  The child was struck speechless by the beauties of this journey - the quivering phosphorescence of our wake, combed out behind us like a comet's hair, flowing and reviving.  Above us, too, flowed the plumed branches of heaven, stars scattered as thick as almond-blossom on the enigmatic sky.  So at last, happy with these auguries and lulled by pulses of the water and the even vibrations of the engine, she fell asleep with a smile upon parted lips, with the olive-wood doll pressed against her cheek.

      How could I help but think of the past towards which we were returning across the dense thickets of time, across the familiar pathways of the Greek sea?  The night slid past me, an unrolling ribbon of darkness.  The warm sea-wind brushed my cheek - soft as the brush of a fox.  Between sleep and waking I lay, feeling the tug of memory's heavy plumb-line: tug of the leaf-veined city which my memory had peopled with masks, malign and beautiful at once.  I should see Alexandria again, I knew, in the elusive temporal fashion of a ghost - for once you become aware of the operation of a time which is not calendar-time you become in some sort a ghost.  In this other domain I could hear the echoes of words uttered long since in the past by other voices.  Balthazar saying: 'This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp.'  The grim mandate which the city exercised over its familiars, crippling sentiment, steeping everything in the vats off its own exhausted passions.  Kisses made more passionate by remorse.  Gestures made in the amber light of shuttered rooms.  The flocks of white doves flying upwards among the minarets.  The pictures seemed to me to represent the city as I would see it again.  But I was wrong - for each new approach is different.  Each time we deceive ourselves that it will be the same.  The Alexandria I now saw, the first vision of it from the sea, was something I could not have imagined.

      It was still dark when we lay up outside the invisible harbour with its remembered outworks of forts and anti-submarine nets.  I tried to paint the outlines on the darkness with my mind.  The boom was raised only at dawn each day.  An all-obliterating darkness reigned.  Somewhere ahead of us lay the invisible coast of Africa, with its 'kiss of thorns' as the Arabs say.  It was intolerable to be so aware of them, the towers and minarets of the city and yet to be unable to will them to appear.  I could not see my own fingers before my face.  The sea had become a vast empty anteroom, a hollow bubble of blackness.

      Then suddenly there passed a sudden breath, a whiff like a wind passing across the bed of embers, and the nearer distance glowed pink as a seashell, deepening gradually into the rose-richness of a flower.  A faint and terrible moaning came out across the water towards us, pulsing like the wing-beats of some fearful prehistoric bird - sirens which howled as the damned must howl in limbo.  One's nerves were shaken like the branches of a tree.  And as if in response to this sound lights began to prick out everywhere, sporadically at first, then in ribbons, bands, squares of crystal.  The harbour suddenly outlined itself with complete clarity upon the dark panels of heaven, while long white fingers of powder-white light began to stalk about the sky in ungainly fashion, as if they were the legs of some awkward insect struggling to gain a purchase on the slippery black.  A dense stream of coloured rockets now began to mount from the haze among the battleships, emptying on the sky their brilliant clusters of stars and diamonds and smashed pearl snuffboxes with a marvellous prodigality.  The air shook in strokes.  Clouds of pink and yellow dust arose with the maroons to shine upon the greasy buttocks of the barrage balloons which were flying everywhere.  The very sea seemed to tremble.  I had no idea that we were so near, or that the city could be so beautiful in the mere saturnalia of a war.  It had begun to swell up, to expand like some mystical rose of the darkness, and the bombardment kept it company, overflowing the mind.  To our surprise we found ourselves shouting at each other.  We were staring at the burning embers of Augustine's Carthage, I thought to myself, we are observing the fall of city man.

      It was as beautiful as it was stupefying.  In the top left-hand corner of the tableau the searchlights had begun to congregate, quivering and sliding in their ungainly fashion, like daddy-longlegs.  They intersected and collided feverishly, and it was clear that some signal had reached them which told of the struggles of some trapped insect on the outer cobweb of darkness.  Again and again they crossed, probed, merged, divided.  Then at last we saw what they were bracketing: six tiny silver moths moving down the skylanes with what seemed unbearable slowness.  The sky had gone mad around them yet they still moved with this fatal languor; and languidity too curled the curving strings of hot diamonds which spouted up from the ships, or the rank lacklustre sniffs of cloudy shrapnel which marked their progress.

      And deafening as was the roaring which now filled our ears, it was possible to isolate many of the separate sounds which orchestrated the bombardment.  The crackle of shards which fell back like a hailstorm upon the corrugated roofs of the waterside cafés: like scratchy mechanical voices of ships' signallers repeating, in the voices of ventriloquists' dummies, semi-intelligible phrases which sounded like 'Three o'clock red, Three o'clock red'.  Strangely, too, there was music somewhere at the heart of all the hubbub, jagged quartertones which stabbed; then, too, the foundering roar of buildings falling.  Patches of light which disappeared and left an aperture of darkness at which a dirty yellow flame might come and lap like a thirsty animal.  Nearer at hand (the water smacked the echo out) we could hear the rich harvest of spent cannon-shells pouring upon the decks from the Chicago Pianos: an almost continuous splashing of golden metal tumbling from the breeches of the skypointed guns.

      So it went on, feasting the eye yet making the vertebrae quail before the whirlwind of meaningless power it disclosed.  I had not realized the impersonality of war before.  There was no room for human beings or thought of them under this vast umbrella of coloured death.  Each drawn breath had become only a temporary refuge.

      Then, almost as suddenly as it had started, the spectacle died away.  The harbour vanished with theatrical suddenness, the string of precious stones was turned off, the sky emptied, the silence drenched us, only to be broken once more by that famished crying of the sirens which drilled at the nerves.  And then, nothing - a nothingness weighing tons of darkness out of which grew the smaller and more familiar sounds of water licking at the gunwales.  A faint shore-wind crept out to invest us with the alluvial smells of an invisible estuary.  Was it only in my imagination that I heard from far away the sounds of wildfowl on the lake?

      We waited thus for a long time in great indecision; but meanwhile from the east the dawn had begun to overtake the sky, the city and desert.  Human voices, weighted like lead, came softly out, stirring curiosity and compassion.  Children's voices - and in the west a sputum-coloured meniscus on the horizon.  We yawned, it was cold.  Shivering, we turned to one another, feeling suddenly orphaned in this benighted world between light and darkness.

      But gradually it grew up from the eastern marches, this familiar dawn, the first overflow of citron and rose which would set the dead waters of Mareotis aglitter; and fine as a hair, yet so indistinct that one had to stop breathing to verify it, I heard (or thought I heard) the first call to prayer from some as yet invisible minaret.

      Were there, then, still gods left to invoke?  And even as the question entered my mind I saw, shooting from the harbour-mouth, the three small fishing boats - sails of rust, liver and blue plum.  They heeled upon a freshet and stooped across our bows like hawks.  The small figures, balanced like riders, hailed us in Arabic to tell us that the boom was up, that we might enter harbour.

      This we now did with circumspection, covered by the apparently deserted batteries.  Our little craft trotted down the main channel between the long lines of ships like a vaporetto on the Grand Canal.  I gazed around me.  It was all the same, yet at the same time unbelievably different.  Yes, the main theatre (of the heart's affections, of memory, of love?) was the same; yet the differences of detail, of décor stuck out obstinately.  The liners now grotesquely dazzle-painted in cubist smears of white, khaki and North-Sea greys.  Self-conscious guns, nesting awkwardly as cranes in incongruous nests of tarpaulin and webbing.  The greasy balloons hanging in the sky as if from gibbets.  I compared them to the ancient clouds of silver pigeons which had already begun to climb in wisps and puffs among the palms, driving upwards into the white light to meet the sun.  A troubling counterpoint of the known and the unknown.  The boats, for example, drawn up along the slip at the Yacht Club, with the remembered dew thick as sweat upon their masts and cordage.  Flags and coloured awnings alike hanging stiffly, as if starched.  (How many times had we not put out from there, at this same hour, in Clea's small boat, loaded with bread and oranges and wicker-clothed wine?)  How many old sailing-days spent upon this crumbling coast, landmarks of affection now forgotten?  I was amazed to see with what affectionate emotion one's eye could travel along a line of inanimate objects tied to a mossy wharf, regaling itself with memories which it was not conscious of having stored.  Even the French warships (though now disgraced, their breech-blocks confiscated, their crews in nominal internment aboard) were exactly where I had last seen them in that vanished life, lying belly-down upon the dawn murk like malevolent tombstones: and still, as always, backed by the paper-thin mirages of the city, whose fig-shaped minarets changed colour with every lift of the sun.

      Slowly we passed down the long green aisle among the tall ships, as if taking part in some ceremonial review.  The surprises among so much that was familiar were few but choice: an iron-clad lying dumbly on its side, a  corvette whose upper works had been smeared and flattened by a direct hit - gun-barrels split like carrots, mountings twisted upon themselves in a contortion of scorched agony.  Such a large package of grey steel to be squashed at a single blow, like a paper bag.  Human remains were being hosed along the scuppers by small figures with a tremendous patience and quite impassively.  This was surprising as it might be for someone walking in a beautiful cemetery to come upon a newly dug grave.  ('It is beautiful' said the child.)  And indeed it was so - the great forests of masts and spires which rocked and inclined to the slight swell set up by water-traffic, the klaxons mewing softly, the reflections dissolving and reforming.  There was even some dog-eared jazz flowing out upon the water as if from a waste-pipe somewhere.  To her it must have seemed appropriate music for a triumphal entry into the city of childhood.  'Jamais de la vie' I caught myself humming softly in my own mind, amazed how ancient the tune sounded, how dated, how preposterously without concern for myself!  She was looking into the sky for her father, the image which would form like a benevolent cloud above us and envelop her.

      Only at the far end of the great dock were there evidences of the new world to which we were coming: long lines of trucks and ambulances, barriers, and bayonets, manned by the blue and khaki races of men like gnomes.  And here a slow but purposeful and continuous activity reigned.  Small troglodytic figures emerged from iron cages and caverns along the wharves, busy upon errands of differing sorts.  Here too there were ships split apart in geometrical sections which exposed their steaming intestines, ships laid open in Caesarian section: and into these wounds crawled an endless ant-like string of soldiers and blue-jackets humping canisters, bales, sides of oxen on blood-stained shoulders.  Oven doors opened to expose to the firelight white-capped men feverishly dragging at oven-loads of bread.  It was somehow unbelievably slow, all this activity, yet immense in compass.  It belonged to the instinct of a race rather than to its appetites.  And while silence here was only of comparative value, small sounds became concrete and imperative - sentries stamping iron-shod boots upon the cobbles, the yowl of a tug, or the buzz of a liner's siren like the sound of some giant bluebottle caught in a web.  All this was part of the newly acquired city to which I was henceforth to belong.

      We drew nearer and nearer, scouting for a berth among the small craft in the basin; the houses began to go up tall.  It was a moment of exquisite delicacy, too, and my heart was in my mouth (as the saying goes), for I had already caught sight of the figure which I knew would be there to meet us - away across the wharves there.  It was leaning against an ambulance, smoking.  Something in its attitude struck a chord and I knew it was Nessim, though I dared not as yet be sure.  It was only when the ropes went out and we berthed that I saw, with beating heart (recognizing him dimly through his disguise as I had with Capodistria), that it was indeed my friend.  Nessim!

      He wore an unfamiliar black patch over one eye.  He was dressed in a blue service greatcoat with clumsy padded shoulders and very long in the knee.  A peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes.  He seemed much taller and slimmer than I remembered - perhaps it was this uniform which was half a chauffeur's livery, half airman's rig.  I think he must have felt the force of my recognition pressing upon him, for he suddenly stood upright and, after peering briefly about him, spotted us.  He threw the cigarette away and walked along the quay with his swift and graceful walk, smiling nervously.  I waved but he did not respond, though he half nodded as he moved towards us.  'Look,' I said, not without apprehension.  'Here he comes at last, your father.'  She watched with wide and frozen eyes following the tall figure until it stood smiling at us, not six feet away.  Sailors were busy with ropes.  A gangplank went down with a bang.  I could not decide whether that ominous black patch over his eye added to or subtracted from the old distinction.  He took off his cap and still smiling, shyly and somewhat ruefully, stroked his hair into place before putting it on again.  'Nessim,' I called, and he nodded, though he did not respond.  A silence seemed to fall upon my mind as the child stepped out upon the plank.  She walked with an air of bemused rapture, spellbound by the image rather than the reality.  (Is poetry, then, more real than observed truth?)  And putting out her arms like a sleepwalker, she walked chuckling into his embrace.  I came hard on her heels and, as he still laughed and hugged her, Nessim handed me the hand with the missing finger.  It had become a claw, digging into mine.  He uttered a short dry sob disguised as a cough.  That was all.  And now the child crawled up like a sloth into a tree-trunk and wound her legs about his hips.  I did not quite know what to say, gazing into that one all-comprehending dark eye.  His hair was quite white at the temples.  You cannot squeeze a hand with a missing finger as hard as you would like.

      'And so we meet again.'

      He backed away briskly and sat down upon a bollard, groping for his cigarette case to offer me the unfamiliar delicacy of a French cigarette.  We were both dumb.  The matches were damp and only struck with difficulty.  'Clea was to have come,' he said at last, 'but she turned tail at the last moment.  She has gone to Cairo.  Justine is out at Karm!'  Then ducking his head he said under his breath 'You know about it, eh?'  I nodded and he looked relieved.  'So much the less to explain.  I came off duty half an hour ago and waited for you to take you out.  But perhaps....'

      But at this moment a flock of soldiers closed on us, verifying our identities and checking on our destinations.  Nessim was busy with the child.  I unpacked my papers for the soldiers.  They studied them gravely, with a certain detached sympathy even, and hunted for my name upon a long sheet of paper before informing me that I should have to report to the Consulate, for I was a 'refugee national'.  I returned to Nessim with the clearance slips and told him of this.  'As a matter of fact it does not fall badly.  I had to go there anyway to fetch a suitcase I left with all my respectable suits in it ... how long ago, I wonder?'

      'A lifetime,' he smiled.

      'How shall we arrange it?'

      We sat side by side smoking and reflecting.  It was strange and moving to hear around us all the accents of the English shires.  A kindly corporal came over with a tray full of tin mugs, steaming with that singular brew, Army tea, and decorated with slabs of white bread smeared with margarine.  In the middle distance a stretcher-party walked apathetically offstage with a sagging load from a bombed building.  We ate hungrily and became suddenly aware of our swimming knees.  At last I said: 'Why don't you go on and take her with you?  I can get a tram at the dock-gate and visit the Consul.  Have a shave.  Some lunch.  Come out this evening to Karm if you will send a horse to the ford.'

      'Very well,' he said, with a certain relief and, hugging the child,  suggested this plan to her, whispering in her ear.  She offered no objection, indeed seemed eager to accompany him - for which I felt thankful.  And so we walked, with a feeling of unreality, across the slimy cobbles to where the little ambulance was parked, and Nessim climbed into the driver's seat with the child.  She smiled and clapped her hands, and I waved them away, delighted that the transition was working so smoothly.  Nevertheless it was strange to find myself thus, alone with the city, like a castaway on a familiar reef.  'Familiar' - yes!  For once one had left the semi-circle of the harbour nothing had changed whatsoever.  The little tin tram groaned and wiggled along its rusty rails, curving down those familiar streets which spread on either side of me images which were absolute in their fidelity to my memories.  The barbers' shops with their fly-nets drawn across the door, tingling with coloured beads: the cafés with their idlers squatting at the tin tables (by El Bab, still the crumbling wall and the very table where we had sat motionless, weighed down by the blue dusk.)  Just as he let in the clutch Nessim had peered at me sharply and said: 'Darley, you have changed very much,' though whether in reproof or commendation I could not tell.  Yes, I had: seeing the old crumbled arch of El Bab I smiled, remembering a now pre-historic kiss upon my fingers.  I remembered the slight flinch of the dark eyes as she uttered the sad brave truth: 'One learns nothing from those who return our love.'  Words which burnt like surgical spirit on an open wound, but which cleansed, as all truth does.  And busy with these memories as I was, I saw with another part of my mind the whole of Alexandria unrolling once more on either side of me - its captivating detail, its insolence of colouring, its crushing poverty and beauty.  The little shops, protected from the sun by bits of ragged awning in whose darkness was piled up every kind of merchandise, from live quail to honeycombs and lucky mirrors.  The fruit-stalls with their brilliant stock made doubly brilliant by being displayed upon brighter papers; the warm gold of oranges lying on brilliant slips of magenta and crimson-lake.  The smoky glitter of the coppersmiths' caves.  Gaily tasselled camel-saddlery.  Pottery and blue jade beads against the Evil Eye.  All this given a sharp prismatic brilliance by the crowds milling back and forth, the blare of the café radios, the hawkers; long sobbing cries, the imprecations of street-arabs, and the demented ululations of distant mourners setting forth at a jogtrot behind the corpse of some notable sheik.  And here, strolling in the foreground of the painting with the insolence of full possession, came plum-blue Ethiopians in snowy turbans, bronze Sudanese with puffy charcoal lips, pewter-skinned Lebanese and Bedouin with the profiles of kestrels, woven like brilliant threads upon the monotonous blackness of the veiled women, the dark Moslem dream of the hidden Paradise which may only be glimpsed through the keyhole of the human eye.  And lurching down these narrow streets with their packs scraping the mud walls plunged the sumpter camels with cargoes of green clover, putting down their huge soft pads with infinite delicacy.  I suddenly remembered Scobie giving me a lesson on the priority of salutation: 'You must realize that it's a question of form.  They're regular Britishers for politeness, my boy.  No good throwing your Salaam Aleikum around just anyhow.  It must be given first by a camel-rider to a man on a horse, by a horseman to a man on a donkey, by a donkey-rider to a man on foot, by a man on foot to a man seated, by a small party to a large one, by the younger to the older.... It's only in the great schools at home they teach such things.  But here every nipper has it at his fingers' ends.  Now repeat the order of battle after me!'  It was easier to repeat the phrase than to remember the order at this remove in time.  Smiling at the thought, I strove to re-establish those forgotten priorities from memory, while I gazed about me.  The whole toybox of Egyptian life was still there, every figure in place - street-sprinkler, scribe, mourner, harlot, clerk, priest - untouched, it seemed, by time or by war.  A sudden melancholy invaded me as I watched them, for they had now become a part of the past.  My sympathy had discovered a new element inside itself - detachment.  (Scobie used to say, in an expansive moment: 'Cheer up, me boyo, it takes a lifetime to grow.  People haven't the patience any more.  My mother waited nine months for me!'  A singular thought.)

      Jolting past the Goharri Mosque I remembered finding one-eyed Hamid there one afternoon rubbing a slice of lemon on a pilaster before sucking it.  This, he had said, was an infallible specific against the stone.  He used to live somewhere in this quarter with its humble cafés full of native splendours like rose-scented drinking water and whole sheep turning on spits, stuffed with pigeons, rice, nuts.  All the paunch-beguiling meals which delighted the ventripotent pashas of the city!

      Somewhere up here, skirting the edge of the Arab quarter the tram gives a leap and grinds round abruptly.  You can for one moment look down through the frieze of shattered buildings into the corner of the harbour reserved for craft of shallow draught.  The hazards of the war at sea had swollen their numbers to overflowing.  Framed by the coloured domes there lay feluccas and lateen-rig giasses, wine-caiques, schooners, and brigantines of every shape and size, from all over the Levant.  An anthology of masts and spars and haunting Aegean eyes; of names and rigs and destinations.  They lay there coupled to their reflections with the sunlight on them in a deep water-trance.  Then abruptly they were snatched away and the Grande Corniche began to unroll, the magnificent long sea-parade which frames the modern city, the Hellenistic capital of the bankers and cotton-visionaries - all those European bagmen whose enterprise had re-ignited and ratified Alexander's dream of conquest after the centuries of dust and silence which Amr had imposed upon it.

      Here, too, it was all relatively unchanged save for the full khaki clouds of soldiers moving everywhere and the rash of new bars which had sprung up everywhere to feed them.  Outside the Cecil long lines of transport-trucks had overflowed the taxi-ranks.  Outside the Consulate an unfamiliar naval sentry with rifle and bayonet.  I could not say it was all irremediably changed, for these visitors had a shiftless and temporary look, like countrymen visiting a capital for a fair.  Soon a sluicegate would open and they would be drawn off into the great reservoir of the desert battles.  But there were surprises.  At the Consulate, for example, a very fat man who sat like a king prawn at his desk, pressing white hands together whose long filbert nails had been carefully polished that morning, and who addressed me with familiarity.  'My task may seem invidious,' he fluted, 'yet it is necessary.  We are trying to grab anyone who has a special aptitude before the Army gets them.  I have been sent your name by the Ambassador who had designated you for the censorship department which we have just opened, and which is grotesquely understaffed.'

      'The Ambassador?'  It was bewildering.

      'He's a friend of yours, is he not?'

      'I hardly know him.'

      'Nevertheless I am bound to accept his direction, even though I am in charge of this operation.'

      There were forms to be filled in.  The fat man, who was not unamiable, and whose name was Kenilworth, obliged by helping me.  'It is a bit of a mystery,' I said.  He shrugged his shoulders and spread his white hands.  'I suggest you discuss it with him when you meet.'

      'But I had no intention ...' I said.  But it seemed pointless to discuss the matter further until I discovered what lay behind it.  How could Mountolive...?  But Kenilworth was talking again.  'I suppose you might need a week to find yourself lodgings here before you settle in.  Shall I tell the department so?'

      'If you wish,' I said in bewilderment.  I was dismissed and spent some time in the cellars unearthing my battered cabin-trunk and selecting from it a few respectable city-clothes.  With these in a brown paper parcel I walked slowly along the Corniche towards the Cecil, where I purposed to take a room, have a bath and shave, and prepare myself for the visit to the country house.  This had begun to loom up rather in my mind, not exactly with anxiety but with the disquiet which suspense always brings.  I stood for a while staring down at the still sea, and it was while I was standing thus that the silver Rolls with the daffodil hubcaps drew up and a large bearded personage jumped out and came galloping towards me with hands outstretched.  It was only when I felt his arms hugging my shoulders and the beard brushing my cheek in a Gallic greeting that I was able to gasp 'Pombal!'

      'Darley'.  Still holding my hands as tenderly, and with tears in his eyes, he drew me to one side and sat down heavily on one of the stone benches bordering the marine parade.  Pombal was in the most elegant tenue.  His starched cuffs rattled crisply.  The dark beard and moustache gave him an imposing yet somehow forlorn air.  Inside all these trappings he seemed quite unchanged.  He peered through them, like a Tiberius in fancy-dress.  We gazed at each other for a long moment of silence, with emotion.  Both knew that the silence we observed was one of pain for the fall of France, an event which symbolized all too clearly the psychic collapse of Europe itself.  We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes' silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will.  I felt in his handclasp all the shame and despair of this graceless tragedy and I sought desperately for the phrase which might console him, might reassure him that France itself could never truly die so long as artists were being born into the world.  But this world of armies and battles was too intense and too concrete to make the thought seem more than of secondary importance - for art really means freedom, and it was this which was at stake.  At last the words came.  'Never mind.  Today I've seen the little blue cross of Lorraine flowering everywhere.'

      'You understand,' he murmured and squeezed my hand again.  'I knew you would understand.  Even when you most criticized her you knew that she meant as much to you as to us.'  He blew his nose suddenly, with startling loudness, in a clean handkerchief and leaned back on the stone bench.  With amazing suddenness he had become his old self again, the timid, fat, irrepressible Pombal of the past.  'There is so much to tell you.  You will come with me now.  At once.  Not a word.  Yes, it is Nessim's car.  I bought it to save it from the Egyptians.  Mountolive has fixed you an excellent post.  I am still in the old flat, but now we have taken the building.  You can have the whole top floor.  It will be like old times again.'  I was carried off my feet by his volubility and by the bewildering variety of prospects he described so rapidly and confidently, without apparently expecting comment.  His English had become practically perfect.

      'Old times,' I stammered.

      But here an expression of pain crossed his fat countenance and he groaned, pressing his hands between his knees as he uttered the word: 'Fosca!'  He screwed up his face comically and stared at me.  'You do not know.'  He looked almost terrified.  'I am in love with her.'

      I laughed.  He shook his head rapidly.  'No.  Don't laugh.'

      'I must, Pombal.'

      'I beseech you.'  And leaning forward with a look of despair on his countenance he lowered his voice and prepared to confide something to me.  His lips moved.  It was clearly something of tragic importance.  At last he brought it out, and the tears came into his eyes as he spoke the words: 'You don't understand.  Je suis fidèle malgré moi.'  He gasped like a fish and repeated 'Malgré moi.  It has never happened before, never.'  And then abruptly he broke into a despairing whinny with the same look of awed bewilderment on his face.  How could I forbear to laugh?  At a blow he had restored Alexandria to me, complete and intact - for no memory of it could be complete without the thought of Pombal in love.  My laughter infected him.  He was shaking like a jelly.  'Stop,' he pleaded at last with comic pathos, interjecting into the forest of bearded chuckles the words: 'And I have never slept with her, not once.  That is the insane thing.'  This made us laugh more than ever.

      But the chauffeur softly sounded the horn, recalling him to himself abruptly, reminding him that he had duties to perform.  'Come,' he cried.  'I have to take a letter to Pordre before nine.  Then I'll have you dropped at the flat.  We can lunch together.  Hamid is with me, by the way; he'll be delighted.  Hurry up.'  Once more my doubts were not given time to formulate themselves.  Clutching my parcel I accompanied him to the familiar car, noticing with a pang that its upholstery now smelt of expensive cigars and metal-polish.  My friend talked rapidly all the way to the French Consulate, and I was surprised to find that his whole attitude to the Chief had changed.  All the old bitterness and resentment had vanished.  They had both, it seemed, abandoned their posts in different capitals (Pombal in Rome) in order to join the Free French in Egypt.  He spoke of Pordre now with tender affection.  'He is like a father to me.  He has been marvellous,' said my friend, rolling his expressive dark eye.  This somewhat puzzled me until I saw them both together and understood in a flash that the fall of their country had created this new bond.  Pordre had become quite white-haired; his frail and absent-minded gentleness had given place to the calm resolution of someone grappling with responsibilities which left no room for affectation.  The two men treated each other with a courtesy and affection which in truth made them seem like father and son rather than colleagues.  The hand that Pordre placed so lovingly on Pombal's shoulder, the face he turned to him, expressed a wistful and lonely pride.

      But the situation of their new Chancery was a somewhat unhappy one.  The broad windows looked out over the harbour, over the French Fleet which lay there at anchor like a symbol of all that was malefic in the stars which governed the destiny of France.  I could see that the very sight of it lying there was a perpetual reproach to them.  And there was no escaping it.  At every turn taken between the high old-fashioned desks and the white wall their eyes fell upon this repellent array of ships.  It was like a splinter lodged in the optic nerve.  Pordre's eye kindled with self-reproach and the zealot's hot desire to reform these cowardly followers of the personage whom Pombal (in his less diplomatic moments) was henceforward to refer to as 'ce vieux Putain'.  It was a relief to vent feelings so intense by the simple substitution of a letter.  The three of us stood there, looking down into the harbour at this provoking sight, and suddenly the old man burst out: 'Why don't you British intern them?  Send them to India with the Italians.  I shall never understand it.  Forgive me.  But do you realize that they are allowed to keep their small arms, mount sentries, take shore leave, just as if they were a neutral fleet?  The admirals wine and dine in the town, all intriguing for Vichy.  There are endless bagarres in the cafés between our boys and the sailors.'  I could see that it was a subject which was capable of making them quite beside themselves with fury.  I tried to change it, since there was little consolation I could offer.

      I turned instead to Pombal's desk on which stood a large framed photograph of a French soldier.  I asked who it was and both men replied simultaneously: 'He saved us.'  Later of course I would come to recognize this proud, sad Labrador's head as that of de Gaulle himself.

      Pombal's car dropped me at the flat.  Forgotten whispers stirred in me as I rang the bell.  One-eyed Hamid opened to me, and after a moment of surprise he performed a curious little jump in the air.  The original impulse of this jump must have been an embrace which he repressed just in time.  But he put two fingers on my wrist and jumped like a solitary penguin on an ice-floe before retreating to give himself room for the more elaborate and formal greeting.  'Ya Hamid!' I cried, as delighted as he was.  We crossed ourselves ceremonially at each other.

      The whole place had been transformed once more, repainted and papered and furnished in massive official fashion.  Hamid led me gloatingly from room to room while I mentally tried to reconstruct its original appearance from memories which had by now become faded and transposed.  It was hard to see Melissa shrieking, for example.  On the exact spot now stood a handsome sideboard crowded with bottles.  (Pursewarden had once gesticulated from the far corner.)  Bits of old furniture came back to mind.  'Those old things must be knocking about somewhere,' I thought in quotation from the poet of the city. [C.P. Cavafy] The only recognizable item was Pombal's old gout-chair which had mysteriously reappeared in its old place under the window.  Had he perhaps flown back with it from Rome?  That would be like him.  The little box-room where Melissa and I.... It was now Hamid's own room.  He slept on the same uncomfortable bed which I looked at with a kind of shrinking feeling, trying to recapture the flavour and ambience of those long enchanted afternoons when.... But the little man was talking.  He must prepare lunch.  And then he rummaged in a corner and thrust into my hand a crumpled snapshot which he must at some time have stolen from Melissa.  It was a street-photograph and very faded.  Melissa and I walked arm in arm talking down Rue Fuad.  Her face was half turned away from me, smiling - dividing her attention between what I was saying so earnestly and the lighted shop-windows we passed.  It must have been taken, this snapshot, on a winter afternoon around the hour of four.  What on earth could I have been telling her with such earnestness?  For the life of me I could not recall the time and place; yet there it was, in black and white, as they say.  Perhaps the words I was uttering were momentous, significant - or perhaps they were meaningless!  I had a pile of books under my arm and was wearing the dirty old mackintosh which I finally gave to Zoltan.  It was in need of a dry-clean.  My hair, too, seemed to need cutting at the back.  Impossible to restore this vanished afternoon to mind!  I gazed carefully at the circumstantial detail of the picture like someone bent upon restoring an irremediably faded fresco.  Yes, it was winter, at four o'clock.  She was wearing her tatty sealskin and carried a handbag which I had never seen in her possession.  'Sometime in August - was it August?'  I mentally quoted to myself again. [Cavafy]

      Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly.  With surprise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished.  The waters had simply closed over her head.  It was as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (I had always told myself) would live on, transmitted into other forms perhaps - but live triumphantly on forever.  I had worn her out like an old pair of socks, and the utterness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me.  Could 'love' simply wear out like this?  'Melissa' I said again, hearing the lovely word echo in the silence.  Name of a sad herb, name of a pilgrim to Eleusis.  Was she less now than a scent or a flavour?  Was she simply a nexus of literary cross-references scribbled in the margins of a minor poem?  And had my love dissolved her in this strange fashion, or was it simply the literature I had tried to make out of her?  Words, the acid-bath of words!  I felt guilty.  I even tried (with that lying self-deception so natural to sentimentalists) to force her to appear by an act of will, to re-evoke a single one of those afternoon kisses which had once been for me the sum of the city's many meanings.  I even tried deliberately to squeeze the tears into my eyes, to hypnotize memory by repeating her name like a charm.  The experiment yielded nothing.  Her name had been utterly worn out of use!  It was truly shameful not to be able to evoke the faintest tribute to so all-engulfing an unhappiness.  Then like the chime of a distant bell I heard the tart voice of the dead Pursewarden saying: 'But our unhappiness was sent to regale us.  We were intended to revel in it, enjoy it to the full.'  Melissa had been simply one of the many costumes of love!

      I was bathed and changed by the time Pombal hurried in to an early lunch, full of the incoherent rapture of his new and remarkable state of mind.  Fosca, the cause of it, was, he told me, a refugee married to a British officer.  'How could it have come about, this sudden passionate understanding?'  He did not know.  He got up to look at his own face in the hanging mirror.  'I who believed so many things about love,' he went on moodily, half addressing his own reflection and combing his beard with his fingers, 'but never something like this.  Even a year ago had you said what I am just saying I would have answered: "Pouagh!  It is simply a Petrarchian obscenity.  Medieval rubbish!"  I even used to think that continence was medically unhealthy, that the damned thing would atrophy or fall off if it were not frequently used.  Now look at your unhappy - no happy friend!  I feel bound and gagged by Fosca's very existence.  Listen, the last time Keats came in from the desert we went out and got drunk.  He took me to Golfo's tavern.  I had a sneaking desire - sort of experimental - to ramoner une poule.  Don't laugh.  Just to see what had gone wrong with my feelings.  I drank five Armagnacs to liven them up.  I began to feel quite like it theoretically.  Good, I said to myself, I will crack this virginity.  I will dépuceler this romantic image once and for all lest people begin to talk and say that the great Pombal is unmanned.  But what happened?  I became panic-stricken!  My feelings were quite blindés like a bloody tank.  The sight of all those girls made me memorize Fosca in detail.  Everything, even her hands in her lap with her knitting! I was cooled as if by an ice cream down my collar.  I emptied my pockets on the table and fled in a hail of slippers and a torrent of catcalls from my old friends.  I was swearing, of course.  Not that Fosca expects it, no.  She tells me to go ahead and have a girl if I must.  Perhaps this very freedom keeps me in prison?  Who knows?  It is a complete mystery to me.  It is strange that this girl should drag me by the hair down the paths of honour like this - an unfamiliar place.'

      Here he struck himself softly on the chest with a gesture of reproof mixed with a certain doubtful self-commendation.  He came and sat down once more saying moodily: 'You see, she is pregnant by her husband and her sense of honour would not permit her to trick a man on active service, who may be killed at any time.  Specially when she is bearing his child.  Ça se conceit.’

      We ate in silence for a few moments, and then he burst out: 'But what have I to do with such ideas?  Tell me please.  We only talk, yet it is enough.'  He spoke with a touch of self-contempt.

      'And he?'

      Pombal sighed: 'He is an extremely good and kind man, with that national kindliness which Pursewarden used to say was a kind of compulsion neurosis brought on by the almost suicidal boredom of English life!  He is handsome, gay, speaks three languages.  And yet ... it is not that he is froid, exactly, but he is tiède - I mean somewhere in his inner nature.  I am not sure if he is typical or not.  At any rate he seems to embody notions of honour which would do credit to a troubadour.  It isn't that we Europeans lack honour, of course, but we don't stress things unnaturally.  I mean self-discipline should be more than a concession to a behaviour-pattern.  I sound confused.  Yes, I am a little confused in thinking of their relationship.  I mean something like this: in the depths of his national conceit he really believes foreigners incapable of fidelity in love.  Yet in being so truthful and so faithful she is only doing what comes naturally to her, without a false straining after a form.  She acts as she feels.  I think if he really loved her in the sense I mean he would not appear always to have merely condescended to rescue her from an intolerable situation.  I think somewhere inside herself, though she is not aware of it, the sense of injustice rankles a little bit; she is faithful to him ... how to say?  Slightly contemptuously?  I don't know.  But she does love him in this peculiar fashion, the only one he permits.  She is a girl of delicate feelings.  But what is strange is that our own love - which neither doubts, and which we have confessed and accepted - has been coloured in a curious way by these circumstances.  If it has made me happy it has also made me a little uncertain of myself; at times I get rebellious.  I feel that our love is beginning to wear a penitential air - this glorious adventure.  It gets coloured by his own grim attitude which is like one of atonement.  I wonder if love for a femme galante should be quite like this.  As for him he also is a chevalier of the middle class, as incapable of inflicting pain as of giving physical pleasure I should say.  Yet withal gentle and quite overwhelming in his kindness and uprightness.  But merde, one cannot love judicially, out of a sense of justice, can one?  Somewhere along the line he fails her without being conscious of the fact.  Nor do I think she knows this, at any rate in her conscious mind.  But when they are together you feel in the presence of something incomplete, something which is not cemented but just soldered together by good manners and convention.  I am aware that I sound unkind, but I am only trying to describe exactly what I see.  For the rest we are good friends and indeed I really admire him; when he comes on leave we all go out to dinner and talk politics!  Ouf!'

      He lay back in his chair, exhausted by this exposition, and yawned heavily before consulting his watch.  'I suppose,' he went on with resignation, 'that you will find it all very strange, these new aspects of people; but then everything sounds strange here, eh?  Pursewarden's sister, Liza, for example - you don't know her?  She is stone blind.  It seems to us all that Mountolive is madly in love with her.  She came out originally to collect his papers and also to find materials for a book about him.  Allegedly.  Anyway she has stayed on at the Embassy ever since.  When he is in Cairo on duty he visits her every weekend!  He looks somehow unhappy now - perhaps I do too?'  He once more consulted the mirror and shook his head decisively.  Apparently he did not.  'Well, anyway,' he conceded, 'I am probably wrong.'

      The clock on the mantelpiece struck and he started up.  'I must get back to the office for a conference,' he said.  'What about you?'  I told him of my projected trip to Karm Abu Girg.  He whistled and looked at me keenly.  'You will see Justine again, eh?'  He thought for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders doubtfully.  'A recluse now, isn't she?  Put under house arrest by Memlik.  Nobody has seen her for ages.  I don't know what's going on with Nessim either.  They've quite broken with Mountolive and as an official I have to take his line, so we would never even try to meet: even if it were allowed, I mean.  Clea sees him sometimes.  I'm sorry for Nessim.  When he was in hospital she could not get permission to visit him.  It is all a merry-go-round, isn't it?  Like a Paul Jones.  New partners until the music stops!  But you'll come back, won't you, and share this place?  Good.  Then I'll tell Hamid.  I must be off.  Good luck.'

      I had only intended to lie down for a brief siesta before the car came, but such was my fatigue that I plunged into a heavy sleep the moment my head touched the pillow; perhaps I should have slept the clock round had not the chauffeur awakened me.  Half-dazed as yet I sat in the familiar car and watched the unreal lakelands grow up around with their palms and waterwheels - the Egypt which lives outside the cities, ancient, pastoral and veiled by mists and mirages.  Old memories stirred now, some bland and pleasing, others rough as old cicatrices.  Scar-tissue of old emotions which I should be shedding.  The first momentous step would be to encounter Justine again.  Would she help or hinder me in the task of controlling and evaluating these precious 'reliques of sensation' as Coleridge calls them?  It was hard to know.  With every succeeding mile I felt anxiety and expectation running neck and neck.  The Past!

*    *    *    *    *

II

Ancient lands, in all their prehistoric intactness: lake-solitudes hardly brushed by the hurrying feet of the centuries where the uninterrupted pedigrees of pelican and ibis and heron evolve their slow destinies in complete seclusion.  Clover-patches of green baize swarming with snakes and clouds of mosquitoes.  A landscape devoid of songbirds yet full of owls, hoopoes and kingfishers hunting by day, pluming themselves on the banks of the tawny waterways.  The packs of half-wild dogs foraging, the blindfolded water-buffaloes circling the waterwheels in an eternity of darkness.  The little wayside chancels built of dry mud and floored with fresh straw where the pious traveller might say a prayer as he journeyed.  Egypt!  The goose-winged sails scurrying among the freshets with perhaps a human voice singing a trailing snatch of a song.  The click-click of the wind in the Indian corn, plucking at the coarse leaves, shumbling them.  Liquid mud exploded by rainstorms in the dust-laden air throwing up mirages everywhere, despoiling perspectives.  A lump of mud swells to the size of a man, a man to the size of a church.  Whole segments of the sky and land displace, open like a lid, or heel over on their side to turn upside down.  Flocks of sheep walk in and out of these twisted mirrors, appearing and disappearing, goaded by the quivering nasal cries of invisible shepherds.  A great confluence of pastoral images from the forgotten history of the old world which still lives on side by side with the one we have inherited.  The clouds of silver-winged ants floating up to meet and incandesce in the sunlight.  The clap of a horse's hoofs on the mud floors of this lost world echo like a pulse and the brain swims among these veils and melting rainbows.

      And so at last, following the curves of the green embankments, you come upon an old house built sideways upon an intersection of violet canals, its cracked and faded shutters tightly fastened, its rooms hung with dervish trophies, hide shields, bloodstained spears and magnificent carpets.  The gardens desolate and untended.  Only the little figures on the wall move their celluloid wings - scarecrows which guard against the Evil Eye.  The silence of complete desuetude.  But then the whole countryside of Egypt shares this melancholy feeling of having been abandoned, allowed to run to seed, to bake and crack and moulder under the brazen sun.

      Turn under an arch and clatter over the cobbles of a dark courtyard.  Will this be a new point of departure or a return to the starting-point?

      It is hard to know.

*    *    *    *    *

III

She stood at the very top of the long outer staircase looking down into the dark courtyard like a sentinel and holding in her right hand a branch of candles which threw a frail circle of light around her.  Very still, as if taking part in a tableau vivant.  It seemed to me that the tone in which she first uttered my name had been deliberately made flat and unemphatic, copied perhaps from some queer state of mind which she had imposed upon herself.  Or perhaps, uncertain that it was I, she was merely interrogating the darkness, trying to unearth me from it like some obstinate and troublesome memory which had slipped out of place.  But the familiar voice was to me like the breaking of a seal.  I felt like someone at last awakened from a sleep which had lasted centuries and as I walked slowly and circumspectly up the creaking wooden stairway I felt, hovering over me, the breath of a new self-possession.  I was halfway up when she spoke again, sharply this time, with something almost comminatory in her tone.  'I heard the horses and went all-overish suddenly.  I've spilt scent all over my dress.  I stink, Darley.  You will have to forgive me.'

      She seemed to have become very much thinner.  Holding the candle high she advanced a step to the stairhead, and after gazing anxiously into my eyes placed a small cold kiss upon my right cheek.  It was as cold as an obituary, dry as leather.  As she did so I smelt the spilt perfume.  She did indeed give off overpowering waves of it.  Something in the enforced stillness of her attitude suggested an inner unsteadiness and the idea crossed my mind that perhaps she had been drinking.  I was a trifle shocked too to see that she had placed a bright patch of rouge on each cheekbone which showed up sharply against a dead white, overpowdered face.  If she was beautiful still it was the passive beauty of some Propertian mummy which had been clumsily painted to give the illusion of life, or a photograph carelessly colour-tinted.  'You must not look at my eye,' she next said, sharply, imperatively: and I saw that her left eyelid drooped slightly, threatening to transform her expression into something like a leer - and most particularly the welcoming smile which she was trying to adopt at this moment.  'Do you understand?'  I nodded.  Was the rouge, I wondered, designed to distract attention from the drooping eyelid?  'I had a small stroke,' she added under her breath, as if explaining to herself.  And as she still stood before me with the raised branch of candles she seemed to be listening to some other sound.  I took her hand and we stood together for a long moment thus, staring at one another.

      'Have I changed very much?'

      'Not at all.'

      'Of course I have.  We all have.'  She spoke now with a contemptuous shrillness.  She raised my hand briefly and put it to her cheek.  Then nodding with a puzzled air she turned and drew me towards the balcony, walking with a stiff proud step.  She was clad in a dress of dark taffeta which whispered loudly at every movement.  The candlelight jumped and danced upon the walls.  We stopped before a dark doorway and she called out 'Nessim' in a sharp tone which shocked me, for it was the tone in which one would call a servant.  After a moment Nessim appeared from the shadowy bedroom, obedient as a djinn.

      'Darley's here,' she said, with the air of someone handing over a parcel, and placing the candles on a low table reclined swiftly in a long wicker chair and placed her hand over her eyes.

      Nessim had changed into a suit of a more familiar cut, and he came nodding and smiling towards me with the accustomed expression of affection and solicitude.  Yet it was somehow different again; he wore a faintly cowed air, shooting little glances sideways and downwards towards the figure of Justine, and speaking softly as one might in the presence of someone asleep.  A constraint had suddenly fallen upon us as we seated ourselves on that shadowy balcony and lit cigarettes.  The silence locked like a gear which would not engage.

      'The child is in bed, delighted with the palace as she calls it, and the promise of a pony of her own.  I think she will be happy.'

      Justine suddenly sighed deeply and without uncovering her eyes said slowly: 'He says we have not changed.'

      Nessim swallowed and continued as if he had not heard the interruption in the same low voice: 'She wanted to stay awake till you came but she was too tired.'

      Once again the reclining figure in the shadowy corner interrupted to say: 'She found Narouz' little circumcision cap in the cupboard.  I found her trying it on.'  She gave a short sharp laugh like a bark, and I saw Nessim wince suddenly and turn away his face.

      'We are short of servants,' he said in a low voice, hastily as if to cement up the holes made in the silence by her last remark.

      His air of relief was quite patent when Ali appeared and bade us to dinner.  He picked up the candles and led us into the house.  It had a somewhat funereal flavour - the white-robed servant with his scarlet belt leading, holding aloft the candles in order to light Justine's way.  She walked with an air of preoccupation, of remoteness.  I followed next with Nessim close behind me.  So we went in Indian file down the unlighted corridors, across high-ceilinged rooms with their walls covered in dusty carpets, their floors of rude planks creaking under our feet.  And so we came at last to a supper-room, long and narrow, and suggesting a forgotten sophistication which was Ottoman perhaps; say, a room in a forgotten winter palace of Abdul Hamid, its highly carved window-screens of filigree looking out upon a neglected rose-garden.  Here the candlelight with its luminous shadows was ideal as an adjunct to furnishings which were, in themselves, strident.  The golds and the reds and the violets would in full light have seemed unbearable.  By candlelight they had a subdued magnificence.

      We seated ourselves at the supper-table and once more I became conscious of the almost cowed expression of Nessim as he gazed around him.  It is perhaps not the word.  It was as if he expected some sudden explosion, expected some unforeseen reproach to break from her lips.  He was mentally prepared to parry it, to fend it off with a tender politeness.  But Justine ignored us.  Her first act was to pour out a glass of red wine.  This she raised to the light as if to verify its colour.  Then she dipped it ironically to each of us in turn like a flag and drank it off all in one motion before replacing the glass on the table.  The touches of rouge gave her an enflamed look which hardly matched the half-drowsy stupefaction of her glance.  She was wearing no jewellery.  Her nails were painted with gold polish.  Putting her elbows on the table she propped her chin for a long moment as she studied us keenly, first one and then the other.  Then she sighed, as if replete, and said: 'Yes, we have all changed', and turning swiftly like an accuser she stabbed her finger at her husband and said: 'He has lost an eye.'

      Nessim pointedly ignored this, passing some item of table fare towards her as if to distract her from so distressing a topic.  She sighed again and said: 'Darley, you look much better, but your hands are cracked and calloused.  I felt it on my cheek.'

      'Wood-cutting, I expect.'

      'Ah.  So!  But you look well, very well.'

      (A week later she would telephone Clea and said: 'Dear God, how coarse he has become.  What little trace of sensibility he had has been swamped by the peasant.')

      In the silence Nessim coughed nervously and fingered the black patch over his eye.  Clearly he disliked the tone of her voice, distrusted the weight of the atmosphere under which one could feel, building up slowly like a wave, the pressure of a hate which was the newest element among so many novelties of speech and manner.  Had she really turned into a shrew?  Was she ill?  It was difficult to disinter the memory of that magical dark mistress of the past whose every gesture, however ill-advised and ill-considered, rang with the memory of that magical splendour of complete generosity.  ('So you come back,' she was saying harshly, 'and find us all locked up in Karm.  Like old figures in a forgotten account book.  Bad debts, Darley.  Fugitives from justice, eh Nessim?')

      There was nothing to be said in answer to such bitter sallies.  We ate in silence under the quiet ministration of the Arab servant.  Nessim addressed an occasional hurried remark to me on some neutral topic, brief, monosyllabic.  Unhappily we felt the silence draining out around us, emptying like some great reservoir.  Soon we should be left there, planted in our chairs like effigies.  Presently the servant came in with two charged thermos flasks and a package of food which he placed at the end of the table.  Justine's voice kindled with a kind of insolence as she said: 'So you are going back tonight?'

      Nessim nodded shyly and said: 'Yes, I'm on duty again.'  Clearing his throat he added to me: 'It is only four times a week.  It gives me something to do.'

      'Something to do,' she cried clearly, derisively.  'To lose his eye and his finger gives him something to do.  Tell the truth, my dear, you would do anything to get away from this house.'  Then leaning forward towards me she said: 'To get away from me, Darley.  I drive him nearly mad with my scenes.  That is what he says.'  It was horribly embarrassing in its vulgarity.

      The servant came in with his duty clothes carefully pressed and ironed, and Nessim rose, excusing himself with a word and a wry smile.  We were left alone.  Justine poured out a glass of wine.  Then, in the act of raising it to her lips she surprised me with a wink and the words: 'Truth will out.'

      'How long have you been locked up here?' I asked.

      'Don't speak of it.'

      'But is there no way....?'

      'He has managed to partly escape.  Not me.  Drink, Darley, drink you wine.'

      I drank in silence, and in a few minutes Nessim appeared once more, in uniform and evidently ready for his night journey.  As if by common consent we all rose, the servant took up the candles and once more conducted us back to the balcony in lugubrious procession.  During our absence one corner had been spread with carpets and divans while extra candlesticks and smoking materials stood upon inlaid side-tables.  The night was still, and almost tepid.  The candle-flames hardly moved.  Sounds of the great lake came ebbing in upon us from the outer darkness.  Nessim said a hurried goodbye and we heard the diminishing clip of his horse's hoofs gradually fade as he took the road to the ford.  I turned my head to look at Justine.  She was holding up her wrists at me, her face carved into a grimace.  She held them joined together as if by invisible manacles.  She exhibited these imaginary handcuffs for a long moment before dropping her hands back into her lap, and then, abruptly, swift as a snake, she crossed to the divan where I lay and sat down at my feet, uttering as she did so, in a voice vibrating with remorseful resentment, the words: 'Why, Darley?  Oh why?'  It was as if she were interrogating not merely destiny or fate but the very workings of the universe itself in these thrilling poignant tones.  Some of the old beauty almost flashed out in this ardour to trouble me like an echo.  But the perfume!  At such close quarters the spilled perfume was overpowering, almost nauseating.

      Yet suddenly now all our constraint vanished and we were at last able to talk.  It was as if this outburst had exploded the bubble of listlessness in which we had been enveloped all evening.  'You see a different me,' she cried in a voice almost of triumph.  'But once again the difference lies in you, in what you imagine you see!'  Her words rattled down like a hail of sods on an empty coffin.  'How is it that you can feel no resentment against me?  To forgive such treachery so easily - why, it is unmanly.  Not to hate such a vampire?  It is unnatural.  Nor could you ever understand my sense of humiliation at not being able to regale, yes regale you, my dear, with the treasures of my inner nature as a mistress.  And yet, in truth, I enjoyed deceiving you, I must not deny it.  But also there was regret in only offering you the pitiful simulacrum of a love (Ha! that word again!) which was sapped by deceit.  I suppose this betrays the bottomless female vanity again: to desire the worst of two worlds, of both worlds - love and deceit.  Yet it is strange that now, when you know the truth, and I am free to offer you affection, I feel only increased self-contempt.  Am I enough of a woman to feel that the real sin against the Holy Ghost is dishonesty in love?  But what pretentious rubbish - for love admits of no honesty by its very nature.'

      So she went on, hardly heeding me, arguing my life away, moving obsessively up and down the cobweb of her own devising, creating images and beheading them instantly before my eyes.  What could she hope to prove?  Then she placed her head briefly against my knee and said: 'Now that I am free to hate or love it is comical to feel only fury at this new self-possession of yours!  You have escaped me somewhere.  But what else was I to expect?'

      In a curious sort of way this was true.  To my surprise I now felt the power to wound her for the first time, even to subjugate her purely by my indifference!  'Yet the truth,' I said, 'is that I feel no resentment for the past.  On the contrary, I am full of gratitude because an experience which was perhaps banal in itself (even disgusting for you) was for me immeasurably enriching!'  She turned away saying harshly: 'Then we should both be laughing now.'

      Together we sat staring out into the darkness and resumed the thread of her interior monologue.  'The post-mortems of the undone!  What could you have seen in it all, I wonder?  We are after all totally ignorant of one another, presenting selected fictions to each other!  I suppose we all observe each other with the same immense ignorance.  I used, in my moments of guilt long afterwards, to try and imagine that we might one day become lovers again, on a new basis.  What a farce!  I pictured myself making it up to you, expiating my deceit, repaying my debt.  But ... I knew that you would always prefer your own mythical picture, framed by the five senses, to anything more truthful.  But now, then, tell me - which of us was the greater liar?  I cheated you, you cheated yourself.'

      These observations, which at another time, in another context, might have had the power to reduce me to ashes, were now vitally important to me in a new way.  'However hard the road, one is forced to come to terms with truth at last', wrote Pursewarden somewhere.  Yes, but unexpectedly I was discovering that truth was nourishing - the cold spray of a wave which carried one always a little further towards self-realization.  I saw now that my own Justine had indeed been an illusionist's creation, raised upon the faulty armature of misinterpreted words, actions, gestures.  Truly, there was no blame here; the real culprit was my love which had invented an image on which to feed.  Nor was there any question of dishonesty, for the picture was coloured after the necessities of the love which invented it.  Lovers, like doctors, colouring an unpalatable medicine to make it easier for the unwary to swallow!  No, this could not have been otherwise, I fully realized.

      Something more, fully as engrossing: I also saw that lover and loved, observer and observed, throw down a field about each other ('Perception is shaped like an embrace - the poison enters with the embrace', as Pursewarden writes).  They then infer the properties of their love, judging it from this narrow field with its huge margins of unknown ('the refraction'), and proceed to refer it to a generalized conception of something constant in its qualities and universal in its operation.  How valuable a lesson this was, both to art and to life!  I had only been attesting, in all I had written, to the power of an image which I had created involuntarily by the mere act of seeing Justine.  There was no question of true or false.  Nymph?  Goddess?  Vampire?  Yes, she was all of these and none of them.  She was, like every woman, everything that the mind of a man (let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself) - that the mind of man wished to imagine.  She was there forever, and she had never existed!  Under all these masks there was only another woman, every woman, like a lay figure in a dressmaker's shop, waiting for the poet to clothe her, breathe life into her.  In understanding all this for the first time I began to realize with awe the enormous reflexive power of woman - the fecund passivity with which, like the moon, she borrows her second-hand light from the male sun.  How could I help but be grateful for such vital information?  What did they matter, the lies, deceptions, follies, in comparison to this truth?

      Yet while this new knowledge compelled my admiration for her more than ever - as symbol of woman, so to speak - I was puzzled to explain the new element which had crept in here: a flavour of disgust for her personality and its attributes.  The scent!  Its cloying richness half sickened me.  The touch of the dark head against my knee stirred dim feelings of revulsion in me.  I was almost tempted to embrace her once more in order to explore this engrossing and inexplicable novelty of feeling further!  Could it be that a few items of information merely, facts like sand trickling into the hourglass of the mind, had irrevocably altered the image's qualities - turning it from something once desirable to something which now stirred disgust?  Yes, the same process, the very same love-process, I told myself.  This was the grim metamorphosis brought about by the acid-bath of truth - as Pursewarden might say.

      Still we sat together on that shadowy balcony, prisoners of memory, still we talked on: and still it remained unchanged, this new disposition of selves, the opposition of new facts of mind.

      At last she took a lantern and a velvet cloak and we walked about for a while in that tideless night, coming at last to a great nubk tree whose branches were loaded with votive offerings.  Here Nessim's brother had been found dead.  She held the lantern high to light the tree, reminding me that the 'nubk' forms the great circular palisade of trees which encircles the Moslem Paradise.  'As for Narouz, his death hangs heavy on Nessim because people say that he ordered it himself - the Copts say so.  It has become like a family curse to him.  His mother is ill, but she will never return to this house, she says.  Nor does he wish her to.  He gets quite cold with rage when I speak of her.  He says he wishes she would die!  So here we are cooped up together.  I sit all night reading - guess what? - a big bundle of love-letters to her which she left behind!  Mountolive's love-letters!  More confusion, more unexplored corners!'  She raised the lantern and looked closely into my eyes: 'Ah, but this unhappiness is not just ennui, spleen.  There is also a desire to swallow the world.  I have been experimenting with drugs of late, the sleep-givers!'

      And so back in silence to the great rustling house with its dusty smells.

      'He says we will escape one day and go to Switzerland where at least he still has money.  But when, but when?  And now this war!  Pursewarden said that my sense of guilt was atrophied.  It is simply that I have no power to decide things now, any more.  I feel as if my will had snapped.  But it will pass.'  Then suddenly, greedily she grasped my hand and said: 'But thank God, you are here.  Just to talk is a soulagement.  We spend whole weeks together without exchanging a word.'

      We were seated once more on the clumsy divans by the light of candles.  She lit a silver-tipped cigarette and smoked with short decisive inspirations as the monologue went on, unrolling on the night, winding away in the darkness like a river.

      'When everything collapsed in Palestine, all our dumps discovered and captured, the Jews at once turned on Nessim accusing him of treachery, because he was friendly with Mountolive.  We were between Memlik and the hostile Jews, in disgrace with both.  The Jews expelled me.  This was when I saw Clea again; I so badly needed news and yet I couldn't confide in her.  Then Nessim came over the border to get me.  He found me like a mad woman.  I was in despair!  And he thought it was because of the failure of our plans.  It was, of course, it was; but there was another and deeper reason.  While we were conspirators, joined by our work and its dangers, I could feel truly passionate about him.  But to be under house-arrest, compelled to idle away my time alone with him, in his company.... I knew I should die of boredom.  My tears, my lamentations were those of a woman forced against her will to take the veil.  Ah, but you will not understand, being a northerner.  How could you?  To be able to love a man fully, but only in a single posture, so to speak.  You see, when he does not act, Nessim is nothing; he is completely flavourless, not in touch with himself at any point.  Then he has no real self to interest a woman, to grip her.  In a word he is really a pure idealist.  When a sense of destiny consumes him he becomes truly splendid.  It was as an actor that he magnetized me, illuminated me for myself.  But as a fellow prisoner, in defeat - he predisposes to ennui, migraine, thoughts of utter banality like suicide!  That is why from time to time I drive my claws into his flesh.  In despair!'

      'And Pursewarden?'

      'Ah! Pursewarden.  This is something different again.  I cannot think of him without smiling.  There my failure was of a totally different order.  My feeling for him was - how shall I say? - almost incestuous, if you like; like one's love for a beloved, an incorrigible elder brother.  I tried so hard to penetrate into his confidences.  He was too clever, or perhaps too egotistical.  He defended himself against loving me by making me laugh!  Yet I achieved with him, even so very briefly, a tantalizing inkling that there might be other ways of living open to me if only I could find them.  But he was a tricky one.  He used to say "An artist saddled with a woman is like a spaniel with a tick in its ear; it itches, it draws blood, one cannot reach it.  Will some kindly grown-up please....?"  Perhaps he was utterly loveable because quite out of reach?  It is hard to say these things.  One word "love" has to do service for so many different kinds of the same animal.  It was he, too, who reconciled me to that whole business of the rape, remember?  All that nonsense of Arnauti's in Moeurs, all these psychologists!  Hiss single observation stuck like a thorn.  He said: "Clearly you enjoyed it, as any child would, and probably even invited it.  You have wasted all this time trying to come to terms with an imaginary conception of damage done to you.  Try dropping this invented guilt and telling yourself that the thing was both pleasurable and meaningless.  Every neurosis is made to measure!"  It was curious that a few words like this, and an ironic chuckle, could do what all the others could not do for me.  Suddenly everything seemed to lift, get lighter, move about.  Like cargo shifting in a vessel.  I felt faint and rather sick, which puzzled me.  Then later on a space slowly cleared.  It was like feeling creeping back into a paralysed hand again.'

      She was silent for a moment before going on.  'I still do not quite know how he saw us.  Perhaps with contempt as the fabricators of our own misfortunes.  One can hardly blame him for clinging to his own secrets like a limpet.  Yet he hardly kept them, for he had a so-called Check hardly less formidable than mine, something which had plucked and gutted all sensation for him; so really in a way perhaps his strength was really a great weakness!  You are silent, have I wounded you?  I hope not, I hope your self-esteem is strong enough  to face these truths of our old relationship.  I should like to get it all off my chest, to come to terms with you - can you understand?  To confess everything and wipe the slate clean.  Look, even that first, that very first afternoon when I came to you - remember?  You told me once how momentous it was.  When you were ill in bed with sunburn, remember?  Well, I had just been kicked out of his hotel-room against my will and was quite beside myself with fury.  Strange to think that every word I then addressed to you was spoken mentally to him, to Pursewarden!  In your bed it was he I embraced and subjugated in my mind.  And yet again, in another dimension, everything I felt and did then was really for Nessim.  At the bottom of my rubbish heap of a heart there was really Nessim, and the plan.  My innermost life was rooted in this crazy adventure.  Laugh now, Darley!  Let me see you laugh for a change.  You look rueful, but why should you?  We are all in the grip of the emotional field which we throw down about one another - you yourself have said it.  Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.'

      She suddenly uttered a short ironic laugh and walked to the balcony's edge to drop the smouldering stub of her cigarette out into the darkness.  Then she turned, and standing in front of me with a serious face, as if playing a game with a child, she softly patted her palms together, intoning the names, 'Pursewarden and Liza, Darley and Melissa, Mountolive and Leila, Nessim and Justine, Narouz and Clea.... Here comes a candle to light them to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off their heads.  The sort of pattern we make should be of interest to someone; or is it just a meaningless display of coloured fireworks, the actions of human beings or of a set of dusty puppets which could be hung up in the corner of a writer's mind?  I suppose you ask yourself the question.'

      'Why did you mention Narouz?'

      'After he died I discovered some letters to Clea; in his cupboard along with the old circumcision cap there was a huge nosegay of wax flowers and a candle the height of a man.  As you know a Copt proposes with these.  But he never had the courage to send them!  How I laughed!'

      'You laughed?'

      'Yes, laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.  But I was really laughing at myself, at you, at all of us.  One stumbles over it at every turn of the road, doesn't one; under every sofa the same corpse, in every cupboard the same skeleton?  What can on do but laugh?'

      It was late by now, and she lighted my way to the gaunt guest-bedroom where I found a bed made up for me, and placed the candles on the old-fashioned chest of drawers.  I slept almost at once.

      It must have been at some time not far off dawn when I awoke to find her standing beside the bed naked, with her hands joined in supplication like an Arab mendicant, like some beggar-woman of the streets.  I started up.  'I ask nothing of you,' she said, 'nothing at all but only to lie in your arms for the comfort of it.  My head is bursting tonight and the medicines won't bring sleep.  I do not want to be left to the mercies of my own imagination.  Only for the comfort, Darley.  A few strokes and endearments, that is all I beg you.'

      I made room for her listlessly, still half asleep.  She wept and trembled and muttered for a long time before I was able to quieten her.  But at last she fell asleep with her dark head on the pillow beside me. 

      I lay awake for a long time to taste, with perplexity and wonder, the disgust that had now surged up in me, blotting out every other feeling.  From where had it come?  The perfume!  The unbearable perfume and the smell of her body.  Some lines from a poem of Pursewarden's drifted through my mind.

                       Delivered by her to what drunken caresses,

                       Of mouths half eaten like soft rank fruit,

                       From which one takes a single bite

                       A mouthful of the darkness where we bleed.

      The once magnificent image of my love lay now in the hollow of my arm, defenceless as a patient on an operating table, hardly breathing.  It was useless even to repeat her name which once held so much fearful magic that it had the power to slow the blood in my veins.  She had become a woman at last, lying there, soiled and tattered, like a dead bird in a gutter, her hands crumpled into claws.  It was as if some huge iron door had closed forever in my heart.

      I could hardly wait for that slow dawn to bring me release.  I could hardly wait to be gone.

*    *    *    *    *

IV

Walking about the streets of the summer capital once more, walking by spring sunlight, and a cloudless skirmishing blue sea - half-asleep and half-awake - I felt like the Adam of the medieval legends: the world-compounded body of a man whose flesh was soil, whose bones were stones, whose blood water, whose hair was grass, whose eyesight sunlight, whose breath was wind, and whose thoughts were clouds.  And weightless now, as if after some long wasting illness, I found myself turned adrift again to float upon the shallows of Mareotis with its old tidemarks of appetites and desires refunded into the history of the place: an ancient city with all its cruelties intact, pitched upon a desert and a lake.  Walking down the remembered grooves of streets which extended on every side, radiating out like the arms of a starfish from the axis of its founder's tomb.  Footfalls echoing in the memory, forgotten scenes and conversations springing up at me from the walls, the café tables, the shuttered rooms with cracked and peeling ceilings.  Alexandria, princess and whore.  The royal city and the anus mundi.  She would never change so long as the races continued to seethe here like must in a vat; so long as the streets and squares still gushed and spouted with the fermentation of these diverse passions and spites, rages and sudden calms.  A fecund desert of human loves littered with the whitening bones of its exiles.  Tall palms and minarets marrying in the sky.  A hive of white mansions flanking those narrow and abandoned streets of mud which were racked all night by Arab music and the cries of girls who so easily disposed of their body's wearisome baggage (which galled them) and offered to the night the passionate kisses which money could not disflavour.  The sadness and beatitude of this human conjunction which perpetuated itself to eternity, an endless cycle of rebirth and annihilation which alone could teach and reform by its destructive power.  ('One makes love only to confirm one's loneliness' said Pursewarden, and at another time Justine added like a coda 'A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying' as she turned an immemorial head on a high balcony, hanging above a lighted city where the leaves of the trees seemed painted by the electric signs, where the pigeons tumbled as if from shelves....)  A great honeycomb of faces and gestures.

      'We become what we dream,' said Balthazar, still hunting among these grey paving stones for the key to a watch which is Time.  'We achieve in reality, in substance, only the pictures of the imagination.'  The city makes no answer to such propositions.  Unheeding it coils about the sleeping lives like some great anaconda digesting a meal.  Among those shining coils the pitiable human world goes its way, unaware and unbelieving, repeating to infinity its gestures of despair, repentance, and love.  Demonax the philosopher said: 'Nobody wishes to be evil', and was called a cynic for his pains.  And Pursewarden in another age, in another tongue replied: 'Even to be half-awake among sleepwalkers is frightening at first.  Later one learns to dissimulate!'

      I could feel the ambience of the city in me one more, its etiolated beauties spreading their tentacles out to grasp at my sleeve.  I felt more summers coming, summers with fresh despairs, fresh onslaughts of the 'bayonets of time'.  My life would rot away afresh in stifling offices to the tepid whirl of electric fans, by the light of dusty unshaded bulbs hanging from the cracked ceilings of renovated tenements.  At the Café Al Aktar, seated before a green menthe, listening to the sulky bubbles in the narguilehs, I would have time to catechize the silences which followed the cries of the hawkers and the clatter of backgammon-boards.  Still the same phantoms would pass and repass in the Nebi Daniel, the gleaming limousines of the bankers would bear their choice freight of painted ladies to distant bridge-tables, to the synagogue, the fortune-teller, the smart café.  Once all this had power to wound.  And now?  Snatches of the quartet squirted from a café with scarlet awnings reminded me of Clea once saying: 'Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.'  But if I walked here with attention and even a certain tenderness it was because for me the city was something which I myself had deflowered, at whose hands I had learned to ascribe some particular meaning to fortune.  These patched and faded walls, the limewash cracking into a million oyster-coloured patches, only imitated the skins of the lepers who whined here on the edge of the Arab quarter; it was simply the hide of the place itself, peeling and caking away under the sun.

      Even the war had come to terms with the city, had indeed stimulated its trade with its bands of aimless soldiers walking about with that grim air of unflinching desperation with which Anglo-Saxons embark upon their pleasures; their own demagnetized women were all in uniform now which gave them a ravenous air - as if they could drink the blood of the innocents while it was still warm.  The brothels had overflowed and gloriously engulfed a whole quarter of the town around the old square.  If anything, the war had brought an air of tipsy carnival rather than anything else; even the nightly bombardments of the harbour were brushed aside by day, shrugged away like nightmares, hardly remembered as more than an inconvenience.  For the rest, nothing had fundamentally changed.  The brokers still sat on the steps of the Mohammed Ali club sipping their newspapers.  The old horse-drawn gharries still clopped about upon their listless errands.  The crowds still thronged the white Corniche to take the frail spring sunlight.  Balconies crowded with wet linen and tittering girls.  The Alexandrians still moved inside the murex-tinted cyclorama of the life they imagined.  ('Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine'.)  Voices of girls, stabbing of Arab quartertones, and from the synagogue a metallic drone punctuated by the jingle of a systrum.  On the floor of the Bourse they were screaming like one huge animal in pain.  The money-changers were arranging their currencies like sweets upon the big squared boards.  Pashas in scarlet flowerpots reclining in immense cars like gleaming sarcophagi.  A dwarf playing a mandolin.  An immense eunuch with a carbuncle the size of a brooch eating pastry.  A legless man propped on a trolley, dribbling.  In all this furious acceleration of the mind I thought suddenly of Clea - her thick eyelashes fragmenting every glance of the magnificent eyes - and wondered vaguely when she would appear.  But in the meantime my straying footsteps had led me back to the narrow opening of the Rue Lepsius, to the worm-eaten room with the cane chair which creaked all night, and where once the old poet of the city had recited 'The Barbarians'.  I felt the stairs creak again under my tread.  On the door was a notice in Arabic which said 'Silence'.  The latch was hooked back.

      Balthazar's voice sounded strangely thin and far away as he bade me enter.  The shutters were drawn and the room was shrouded in half-darkness.  He was lying in bed.  I saw with a considerable shock that his hair was quite white, which made him look like an ancient version of himself.  It took me a moment or two to realize that it was not dyed.  But how he had changed!  One cannot exclaim to a friend: 'My God, how much you have aged!'  Yet this is what I almost did, quite involuntarily.

      'Darley!' he said feebly, and held up in welcome hands swollen to the size of boxing-gloves by the bandages which swathed them.

      'What on earth have you been doing to yourself?'

      He drew a long sad sigh of vexation and nodded towards a chair.  The room was in great disorder.  A mountain of books and papers on the floor by the window.  An unemptied chamberpot.  A chessboard with the pieces all lying in confusion.  A newspaper.  A cheese-roll on a plate with an apple.  The washbasin full of dirty plates.  Beside him in a glass of some cloudy fluid stood a glittering pair of false teeth on which his feverish eye dwelt from time to time with confused perplexity.  'You have heard nothing?  That surprises me.  Bad news, news of a scandal, travels so fast and so far I should have thought that by now you had heard.  It is a long story.  Shall I tell you and provoke the look of tactful commiseration with which Mountolive sits down to play chess with me every afternoon?'

      'But you hands....'

      'I shall come to those in due course.  It was a little idea I got from your manuscript.  But the real culprits are these, I think, these false teeth in the glass.  Don't they glitter bewitchingly?  I am sure it was the teeth which set me off.  When I found that I was about to lose my teeth I suddenly began to behave like a woman at the change of life.  How else can I explain falling in love like a youth?'  He cauterized the question with a dazed laugh.

      'First the Cabal - which is now disbanded; it went the way of all words.  Mystagogues arose, theologians, all the resourceful bigotry that heaps up around a sect and spells dogma!  But the thing had to me a special meaning, a mistaken and unconscious meaning, but nevertheless a clear one.  I thought that slowly, by degrees, I should be released from the bondage of my appetites, of the flesh.  I should at last, I felt, find a philosophic calm and balance which would expunge the passional nature, sterilize my actions.  I thought of course that I had no such préjugés at the time; that my quest for truth was quite pure.  But unconsciously I was using the Cabal to this precise end - instead of letting it use me.  First miscalculation!  Pass me some water from the pitcher over there.'  He drank thirstily through his new pink gums.  'Now comes the absurdity.  I found I must lose my teeth.  That caused the most frightful upheaval.  It seemed to me like a death-sentence, like a confirmation of growing old, of getting beyond the reach of life itself.  I have always been fastidious about mouths, always hated rank breath and coated tongues; but most of all false teeth!  Unconsciously, then, I must have somehow pushed myself to this ridiculous thing - as if it were a last desperate fling before old age settled over me.  Don't laugh.  I fell in love in a way that I have never done before, at least not since I was eighteen.  "Kisses sharp as quills" says the proverb; or as Pursewarden might say "Once more the cunning gonads on the prowl, the dragnet of the seed, the old biological terror".  But my dear Darley this was no joke.  I still had my own teeth!  But the object of my choice, a Greek actor, was the most disastrous that anyone could hit upon.  To look like a god, to have a charm like a shower of silver arrows - and yet to be simply a small-spirited, dirty, venal and empty personage: that was Panagiotis!  I knew it.  It seemed to make no difference whatsoever.  I saw in him the personage of Seleucia on whom Cavafy based his poem. [ONE OF THEIR GODS] I cursed myself in the mirror.  But I was powerless to behave otherwise.  And, in truth, all this might have passed off as so much else had he not pushed me to outrageous jealousies, terrific scenes of recrimination.  I remember that old Pursewarden used to say: "Ah! you Jews, you have the knack of suffering", and I used to reply with a quotation from Mommsen about the bloody Celts: "They have shaken all states and founded none.  They nowhere created a great state or developed a distinctive culture of their own."  No, this was not simply an expression of minority-fever: this was the sort of murderous passion of which one has read, and for which our city is famous!  Within a matter of months I became a hopeless drunkard.  I was always found hanging about the brothels he frequented.  I obtained drugs under prescription for him to sell.  Anything, lest he should leave me.  I became as weak as a woman.  A terrific scandal, rather a series of them, made my practice dwindle until it is now non-existent.  Amaril is keeping the clinic going out of kindness until I can pick myself off the floor.  I was dragged across the floor of the club, holding on to his coat and imploring him not to leave me!  I was knocked down in Rue Fuad, thrashed with a cane outside the French Consulate.  I found myself surrounded by long-faced and concerned friends who did everything they could to avert disaster.  Useless.  I had become quite impossible!  All this went on, this ferocious life - and really I enjoyed being debased in a queer way, being whipped and scorned, reduced to a wreck!  It was as if I wanted to swallow the world, to drain the sore of love until it healed.  I was pushed to the very extremity of myself, yet I myself was doing the pushing: or was it the teeth?'  He cast a sulky furious look in their direction and sighed, moving his head about as if with inner anguish at the memory of these misdeeds.

      'It is strange to what extent small inanimate objects can sometimes be responsible for the complete breakdown of an affective field; a love based on an eye-tooth, a disgust fathered by short sight, a passion founded on hairy wrists.  It was the green finger-stall that disgusted him finally.  He could not bear to feel a hand moving on his body whose index finger was sheathed in a finger-stall.  Yet I had to wear it, for my finger had begun to suppurate again; you know I have a little patch of eczema which plays me up from time to time, usually when I am run down or over-excited.  It even manages to burst through the thick scab of methylene blue.  I tried everything, but without avail.  Perhaps unconsciously I was courting his disgust as an adolescent might with an acne?  Who can say?

      'Then of course it came to an end, as everything does, even presumably life!  There is no merit in suffering as I did, dumbly like a pack animal, galled by intolerable sores it cannot reach with its tongue.  It was then that I remembered a remark in your manuscript about the ugliness of my hands.  Why did I not cut them off and throw them in the sea as you had so thoughtfully recommended?  This was the question that arose in my mind.  At the time I was so numb with drugs and drink that I did not imagine I would feel anything.  However, I made an attempt, but it is hardly than you imagine, all that gristle!  I was like those fools who cut their throats and come bang up against the oesophagus.  They always live.  But when I desisted with pain I thought of another writer, Petronius.  (The part that literature plays in our lives!)  I lay down in a hot bath.  But the blood wouldn't run, or perhaps I had no more.  The colour of bitumen it seemed, the few coarse drops I persuaded to trickle.  I was about to try other ways of alleviating the pain when Amaril appeared at his most abusive and brought me to my senses by giving me a deep sedation of some twenty hours during which he tidied up my corpse as well as my room.  Then I was very ill, with shame I believe.  Yes, it was chiefly shame, though of course I was much weakened by the absurd excess to which I had been pushed.  I submitted to Pierre Balbz who removed the teeth and provided me with this set of glittering snappers - art nouveau!  Amaril tried in his clumsy way to analyse me - but what is one to say of this very approximate science which has carelessly overflowed into anthropology on one side, theology on the other?  There is much they do not know as yet: for instance, that one knees in church because one kneels to enter a woman, or that circumcision is derived from the clipping of the vine, without which it will run to leaf and produce no fruit!  I had no philosophic system on which to lean as even Da Capo did.  Do you remember Capodistria's exposition of the nature of the universe?  "The world is a biological phenomenon which will only come to an end when every single man has had all the women, every woman all the men.  Clearly this will take some time.  Meanwhile there is nothing to do but to help forward the forces of nature by treading the grapes as hard as we can.  As for an afterlife - what will it consist of but satiety?  The play of shadows in Paradise - pretty hanoums flitting across the screens of memory, no longer desired, no longer desiring to be desired.  Both at rest at last.  But clearly it cannot be done all at once.  Patience!  Avanti!"  Yes, I did a lot of slow and careful thinking as I lay here, listening to the creak of the cane chair and the noises from the street.  My friends were very good and often visited me with gifts and conversations that left me headaches.  So I gradually began to swim up to the surface again, with infinite slowness.  I said to myself "Life is the master.  We have been living against the grain of our intellects.  The real teacher is endurance."  I had learned something, but at what a cost!

      'If only I had had the courage to tackle my love wholeheartedly I would have served the ideas of the Cabal better.  A paradox, you think?  Perhaps.  Instead of letting my love poison my intellect and my intellectual reservations my love.  Yet though I am rehabilitated and ready once more to enter the world, everything in nature seems to have disappeared!  I still lie awake crying out: "He has gone away forever.  True lovers exist for the sake of love."'

      He gave a croaky sob and crawled out from between the sheets, looking ridiculous in his long woollen combinations, to hunt for a handkerchief in the chest of drawers.  To the mirror he said: 'The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.'  Then he shook his head gloomily and returned to his bed, settling the pillows at his back and adding: 'And that fat brute Father Paul talks of acceptance!  Acceptance of the world can only come from a full recognition of its measureless extents of good and evil; and to really inhabit it, explore it to the full uninhibited extent of this finite human understanding - that is all that is necessary in order to accept it.  But what a task!  One lies here with time passing and wonders about it.  Every sort of time trickling through the hourglass, "time immemorial" and "for the time being" and "time out of mind"; the time of the poet, the philosopher, the pregnant woman, the calendar.... Even "time is money" comes into the picture; and then, if you think that money is excrement for the Freudian, you understand that time must be also!  Darley, you have come at the right moment, for I am to be rehabilitated tomorrow by my friends.  It was a touching thought which Clea first had.  The shame of having to put in a public appearance again after all my misdeeds has been weighing on me very heavily.  How to face the city again - that is the problem.  It is only in moments like this that you realize who your friends are.  Tomorrow a little group is coming here to find me dressed, my hands less conspicuously bandaged, my new teeth in place.  I shall of course weak dark glasses.  Mountolive, Amaril, Pombal and Clea, two on each arm.  We will walk the whole length of Rue Fuad thus and take a length public coffee on the pavement outside Pastroudi.  Mountolive has booked the largest lunch table at the Mohammed Ali and proposes to offer me a lunch of twenty people to celebrate my resurrection from the dead.  It is a wonderful gesture of solidarity, and will certainly quell spiteful tongues and sneers.  In the evening the Cervonis have asked me to dinner.  With such lucky help I feel I may be able in the long run to repair my damaged confidence and that of my old patients.  Is it not fine of them - and in the traditions of the city?  I may live to smile again, if not to love - a fixed and glittering smile which only Pierre will gaze at with affection - the affection of the artificer for his handiwork.'  He raised his white boxing-gloves like a champion entering the ring and grimly saluted an imaginary crowd.  Then he flopped back on his pillows once more and gazed at me with an air of benign sorrow.

      'Where has Clea gone?' I asked.

      'Nowhere.  She was here yesterday afternoon asking for you.'

      'Nessim said she had gone somewhere.'

      'Perhaps to Cairo for the afternoon; where have you been?'

      'Out to Karm for the night.'

      There was a long silence during which we eyed each other.  There were clearly questions in his mind which he tactfully did not wish to inflict on me; and for my part there was little that I felt I could explain.  I picked up an apple and took a bite from it.

      'And the writing?' he said after a long silence.

      'It has stopped.  I don't seem to be able to carry it any further for the moment.  I somehow can't match the truth to the illusions which are necessary to art without the gap showing - you know, like an unbasted seam.  I was thinking of it at Karm, confronted again by Justine.  Thinking how, despite the factual falsities of the manuscript which I sent you, the portrait was somehow poetically true - psychographically if you like.  But an artist who can't solder the elements together falls short somewhere.  I'm on the wrong track.'

      'I don't see why.  In fact this very discovery should encourage rather than hamper you.  I mean about the mutability of all truth.  Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces.  So many truths which have little to do with fact!  Your duty is to hunt them down.  At each moment of time all multiplicity waits at your elbow.  Why, Darley, this should thrill you and give your writing the curves of a pregnant woman.'

      'On the contrary, it has faulted me.  For the moment anyway.  And now that I am back here in the real Alexandria from which I drew so many of my illustrations, I don't feel the need for more writing - or at any rate writing which doesn't fulfil the difficult criteria I see lurking behind art.  You remember Pursewarden writing: "A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!"'

      'Yes.'

      'And so indeed it should.  But now I am confronted once more with my models I am ashamed to have botched them up.  If I start again it will be from another angle.  But there is still so much I don't know, and presumably never will, about all of you.  Capodistria, for example, where does he fit in?'

      'You sound as if you knew he was alive!'

      'Mnemjian told me so.'

      'Yes.  The mystery isn't a very complicated one.  He was working for Nessim and compromised himself by a serious slip.  It was necessary to clear out.  Conveniently it happened at a time when he was all but bankrupt financially.  The insurance money was most necessary!  Nessim provided the setting and I provided the corpse.  You know we get quite a lot of corpses of one sort or another.  Paupers.  People who donate their bodies, or actually sell them in advance for a fixed sum.  The medical schools need them.  It wasn't hard to obtain a private one, relatively fresh.  I tried to hint at the truth to you once but you did not take my meaning.  Anyway, the thing's worked smoothly.  Da Capo now lives in a handsomely converted Martello tower, dividing his time between studying black magic and working on certain schemes of Nessim's about which I know nothing.  Indeed, I see Nessim only rarely, and Justine not at all.  Though guests are permitted by special police order, they never invite anyone out to Karm.  Justine telephones people from time to time for a chat, that is all.  You have been privileged, Darley.  They must have got you a permit.  But I am relieved to see you cheerful and undersponding.  You have made a step forward somewhere, haven't you?'

      'I don't know.  I worry less.'

      'But you will be happy this time, I feel it; much has changed but much has remained the same.  Mountolive tells me he has recommended you for a censorship post, and that you will probably live with Pombal, until you have had a chance to look round a bit.'

      'Another mystery!  I hardly know Mountolive.  Why has he suddenly constituted himself my benefactor?'

      'I don't know, possibly because of Liza.'

      'Pursewarden's sister?'

      'They are up at the summer legation for a few weeks.  I gather you will be hearing from him, from them both.'

      There was a tap at the door and a servant entered to tidy the flat; Balthazar propped himself up and issued his orders.  I stood up to take my leave.

      'There is only one problem,' he said, 'which occupies me.  Shall I leave my hair as it is?  I look about two hundred and seventy when it isn't dyed.  But I think on the whole it would be better to leave it to symbolize my return from the dead with a vanity chastened by experience, eh?  Yes, I shall leave it.  I think I shall definitely leave it.'

      'Toss a coin.'

      'Perhaps I will.  This evening I must get up for a couple of hours and practise walking about; extraordinary how weak one feels simply from lack of practice.  After a fortnight in bed one loses the power of one's legs.  And I mustn't fall down tomorrow or the people will think I am drunk again and that would never do.  As for you, you must find Clea.'

      'I'll go round to the studio and see if she is working.'

      'I'm glad you are back.'

      'In a strange way so am I.'

      And in the desultory brilliant life of the open street it was hard not to feel like an ancient inhabitant of the city, returning from the other side of the grave to visit it.  Where would I find Clea?

*    *    *    *    *

V

She was not at the flat, though her letterbox was empty, which suggested that she had already collected her mail and gone out to read it over a café crème, as had been her wont in the past.  There was nobody at the studio either.  It fitted in with my mood to try and track her down in one of the familiar cafés, and so I dutifully walked down Rue Fuad at a leisurely pace towards Baudrot, the Café Zoltan and the Coquin.  But there was no sign of her.  There was one elderly waiter at the Coquin who remembered me however, and he had seen her walking down Rue Fuad earlier in the morning with a portfolio.  I continued my circuit, peering into the shop-windows, examining the stalls of second-hand books, until I reached  the Select on the seafront.  But she was not there.  I turned back to the flat and found a note from her saying that she would not be able to make contact before the later afternoon, but that she would call there for me; it was annoying, for it meant that I should have to pass the greater part of the day alone, yet it was also useful, for it enabled me to visit Mnemjian's redecorated emporium and indulge in a post-Pharaonic haircut and shave.  ('The natron-bath' Pursewarden used to call it.)  It also gave me time to unpack my belongings.

      But we met by chance, not design.  I had gone out to buy some stationary, and had taken a short cut through the little square called Bab El Fedan.  My heart heeled half-seas over for a moment, for she was sitting where once (that first day) Melissa had been sitting, gazing at a coffee cup with a wry reflective air of amusement, with her hands supporting her chin.  The exact station in place and time where I had once found Melissa, and with such difficulty mustered enough courage at last to enter the place and speak to her.  It gave me a strange sense of unreality to repeat this forgotten action at such a great remove of time, like unlocking a door which had remained closed and bolted for a generation.  Yet it was in truth Clea and not Melissa, and her blonde head was bent with an air of childish concentration over her coffee cup.  She was in the act of shaking the dregs three times and emptying them into the saucer to study them as they dried into the contours from which fortune-tellers 'scry' - a familiar gesture.'

      'So you haven't changed.  Still telling fortunes.'

      'Darley.'  She sprang up with a cry of pleasure and we embraced warmly.  It was with a queer interior shock, almost like a new recognition, that I felt her warm laughing mouth on mine, her hands upon my shoulders.  As though somewhere a window had been smashed, and the fresh air allowed to pour into a long-sealed room.  We stood thus embracing and smiling for a moment.  'You startled me!  I was just coming on to the flat to find you.'

      'You've had me chasing my tail all day.'

      'I had work to do.  But Darley, how you've changed!  You don't stoop any more.  And your spectacles....'

      'I broke them by accident ages ago, and then found I didn't really need them.'

      'I'm delighted for you.  Bravo!  Tell me, do you notice my wrinkles?  I'm getting some, I fear.  Have I changed very much, would you say?'

      She was more beautiful than I could remember her to have been, slimmer, and with a subtle range of new gestures and expressions suggesting a new and troubling maturity.

      'You've grown a new laugh.'

      'Have I?'

      'Yes.  It's deeper and more melodious.  But I must not flatter you!  A nightingale's laugh - if they do laugh.'

      'Don't make me self-conscious because I so much want to laugh with you.  You'll turn it into a croak.'

      'Clea, why didn't you come and meet me?'

      She wrinkled up her nose for a moment, and putting her hand on my arm, bent her head once more to the coffee grounds which were dying fast into little whorls and curves like sand-dunes.  'Light me a cigarette,' she said pleadingly.

      'Nessim said you turned tail at the last moment.'

      'Yes, I did, my dear.'

      'Why?'

      'I suddenly felt it might be inopportune.  It might have been a complication somehow.  You had old accounts to render, old scores to settle, new relationships to explore.  I really felt powerless to do anything about you until ... well, until you had seen Justine.  I don't know why.  Yes, I do, though.  I wasn't sure that the cycle would really change, I didn't know how much you had or hadn't changed yourself.  You are such a bloody correspondent I hadn't any way of judging about your inside state of mind.  Such a long time since you wrote, isn't it?'  And then the child and all that.  After all, people sometimes get stuck like an old disc and can't move out of a groove.  That might have been your fate with Justine.  So it wasn't for me to intrude, since my side of you.... Do you see?  I had to give you air.'

      'And supposing I have stuck like some old disc?'

      'No, it hasn't turned out like that.'

      'How can you tell?'

      'From your face, Darley.  I could tell in a flash!'

      'I don't know quite how to explain....'

      'You don't need to,' her voice curved upwards with elation and her bright eyes smiled.  'We have such totally different claims upon each other.  We are free to forget!  You men are the strangest creatures.  Listen, I have arranged this first day together like a tableau, like a charade.  Come first and see the queer immortality one of us has gained.  Will you put yourself in my hands?  I have been so looking forward to acting as dragoman on ... but no, I won't tell you.  Just let me pay for this coffee.'

      'What does your fortune say in the grounds?'

      'Chance meetings!'

      'I think you invent.'

      The afternoon had been overcast and dusk fell early.  Already the sunset violets had begun to tamper with the perspectives of the streets along the seafront.  We took an old horse-drawn gharry which was standing forlornly in a taxi rank by Ramleh Station.  The ancient jarvey with his badly cicatriced face asked hopefully if we wished for a 'carriage of love' or an 'ordinary carriage', and Clea, giggling, selected the latter variety of the same carriage as being cheaper.  'O son of truth!' she said.  'What woman would take a lusty husband in such a thing when she has a good bed at home which costs nothing.'

      'Merciful is God,' said the old man with sublime resignation.

      So we set off down the white curving Esplanade with its fluttering awnings, the quiet sea spreading away to the right of us to a blank horizon.  In the past we had so often come this way to visit the old pirate in his shabby rooms in Tatwig Street.

      'Clea, where the devil are we going?'

      'Wait and see.'

      I could see him so clearly, the old man.  I wondered for a moment if his shabby ghost still wandered about those dismal rooms, whistling to the green parrot and reciting: 'Taisez-vous, petit babouin.'  I felt Clea's arm squeeze mine as we sheered off left and entered the smoking ant-heap of the Arab town, the streets choked with smoke from the burning refuge-heaps, or richly spiced with cooking meat and whiffs of baking bread from the bakeries.

      'Why on earth are you taking me to Scobie's rooms?' I said again as we started to clip-clop down the length of the familiar street.  Her eyes shone with a mischievous delight as, putting her lips to my ears, she whispered: 'Patience.  You shall see.'

      It was the same house all right.  We entered the tall gloomy archway as we had so often in the past.  In the deepening dusk it looked like some old faded daguerreotype, the little courtyard, and I could see that it had been much enlarged.  Several supporting walls of neighbouring tenements had been razed or had fallen down and increased its mean size by about two hundred square feet.  It was just a shattered and pockmarked no-man's-land of red earth littered with refuse.  In one corner stood a small shrine which I did not remember having remarked before.  It was surrounded by a huge ugly modern grille of steel.  It boasted a small white dome and a withered tree, both very much the worse for wear.  I recognized in it one of the many maquams with which Egypt is studded, spots made sacred by the death of a hermit or a holy man and where the faithful repair to pray or solicit his help by leaving ex-votos.  This little shrine looked as many do, utterly shabby and forlorn, as if its existence had been overlooked and forgotten for centuries.  I stood looking around me, and heard Clea's clear voice call: 'Ya Abdul!'  There was a note in it which suggested suppressed amusement, but I could not for the life of me tell why.  A man advanced towards us through the shadows peering.  'He is almost blind.  I doubt if he'll recognize you.'

      'But who is it?' I said, almost with exasperation at all this mystery.  'Scobie's Abdul,' she whispered briefly and turned away to say: 'Abdul, have you the key to the Maquam of El Scob?'

      He greeted her in recognition making elaborate passes over his breast, and produced a clutch of tall keys saying in a deep voice: 'At once O lady,' rattling the keys together as all guardians of shrines must do to scare the djinns which hang about the entrances to holy places.

      'Abdul!' I exclaimed with amazement in a whisper.  'But he was a youth.'  It was quite impossible to identify him with this crooked and hunched anatomy with its stooping centenarian's gait and cracked voice.  'Come,' said Clea hurriedly, 'explanations later.  Just come and look at the shrine.'  Still bemused I followed in the guardian's footsteps.  After a very thorough rattling and banging to scare the djinns he unlocked the rusty portals and led the way inside.  It was suffocatingly hot in that little airless tomb.  A single wick somewhere in a recess had been lighted and gave a wan and trembling yellow light.  In the centre lay what I presumed must be the tomb of the saint.  It was covered with a green cloth with an elaborate design in gold.  This Abdul reverently removed for my inspection, revealing an object under it which was so surprising that I uttered an involuntary explanation.  It was a galvanized iron bathtub on one leg of which was engraved in high relief the words: '"The Dinky Tub" Crabbe's.  Luton.'  It had been filled with clean sand and its four hideous crocodile-feet heavily painted with the customary anti-djinn blue colour.  It was an astonishing object of reverence to stumble upon in such surroundings, and it was with a mixture of amusement and dismay that I heard the now completely unrecognizable Abdul, who was the object's janitor, muttering the conventional prayers in the name of El Scob, touching as he did the ex-votos which hung down from every corner of the wall like little white tassels.  These were, of course, the slips of cloth which women tear from their underclothes and hang up as offerings to a saint who, they believe, will cure sterility and enable them to conceive!  The devil!  Here was old Scobie's bathtub apparently being invoked to confer fertility upon the childless - and with success, too, if one could judge by the great number of the offerings.

      'El Scob was a holy one?' I said in my halting Arabic.

      The tired, crooked bundle of humanity with its head encircled in a tattered shawl nodded and bowed as he croaked: 'From far away in Syria he came.  Here he found his rest.  His name enlightens the just.  He was a student of harmlessness!'

      I felt as if I were dreaming.  I could almost hear Scobie's voice say: 'Yes, it's a flourishing little shrine as shrines go.  Mind you, I don't make a fortune, but I do give service!'  The laughter began to pile up inside me as I felt the trigger of Clea's fingers on my elbow.  We exchanged delighted squeezes as we retired from that fuggy little hole into the dusky courtyard, while Abdul reverently replaced the cloth over the bathtub, attended to the oil wick, and then joined us.  Carefully he locked the iron grille and, accepting a tip from Clea with many hoarse gratitudes, shuffled away into the shadows, leaving us to sit down upon a heap of tumbled masonry.

      'I didn't come right in,' she said.  'I was afraid we'd start laughing and didn't want to risk upsetting Abdul.'

      'Clea!  Scobie's bathtub!'

      'I know.'

      'How the devil did this happen?'

      Clea's soft laughter!

      'You must tell me.'

      'It is a wonderful story.  Balthazar unearthed it.  Scobie is now officially El Yacoub.  At least that is how the shrine is registered on the Coptic Church's books.  But as you have just heard he is really El Scob!  You know how these saints' maquams get forgotten, overlooked.  They die, and in time people completely forget who the original saint was; sometimes a sand-dune buries the shrine.  But they also spring alive again.  Suddenly one day an epileptic is cured there, or a prophecy is given by the shrine to some mad woman - and presto! the saint wakes up, revives.  Well, all the time our old pirate was living in this house El Yacoub was there, at the end of the garden, though nobody knew it.  He had been bricked in, surrounded by haphazard walls - you know how crazily they build here.  He was utterly forgotten.  Meanwhile Scobie, after his death, had become a figure of affectionate memory in the neighbourhood.  Tales began to circulate about his great gifts.  He was clever at magic potions (like Mock Whisky?).  A cult began to blossom around him.  They said he was a necromancer.  Gamblers swore by his name.  "El Scob spit on this card" became quite a proverb in the quarter.  They also said that he had been able to change himself into a woman at will (!) and by sleeping with impotent men regenerate their forces.  He could also make the barren conceive.  Some women even called their children after him.  Well, in a little while he had already joined the legendary of Alexandrian saints, but of course he had no actual shrine - because everybody knew with one half of his mind that Father Paul had stolen his body, wrapped it in a flag, and buried it in the Catholic cemetery.  They knew because many of them had been there for the service and much enjoyed the dreadful music of the police band of which I believe Scobie had once been a member.  I often wonder whether he played any instrument and if so what.  A slide trombone?  Anyway, it was during this time, while his sainthood was only, so to speak, awaiting a Sign, a Portent, a Confirmation, that that wall obligingly fell down and revealed the (perhaps indignant?) Yacoub.  Yes, but there was no tomb in the shrine.  Even the Coptic Church which has at last reluctantly taken Yacoub on their books knows nothing of him except that he came from Syria.  They are not even sure whether he was a Moslem or not!  He sounds distinctly Jewish to me.  However, they diligently questioned the oldest inhabitants of the quarter and at least established his name.  But nothing more.  And so one fine day the neighbourhood found that it had an empty shrine free for Scobie.  He must have a local habitation to match the power of his name.  A spontaneous festival broke out at which his bathtub which had been responsible for so many deaths (great is Allah!) was solemnly enshrined and consecrated after being carefully filled with holy sand from the Jordan.  Officially the Cops could not concede Scob and insisted on sticking to Yacoub for official purposes; but Scob he remained to the faithful.  It might have been something of a dilemma, but being magnificent diplomats the clergy turned a blind eye to El Scob's reincarnation; they behave as if they thought it was really El Yacoub in a local pronunciation.  So everyone's face is saved.  They have, in fact, even - and here is that marvellous tolerance which exists nowhere else on earth - formally registered Scobie's birthday, I suppose because they do not know Yacoub's.  Do you know that he is even to have a yearly mulid in his honour on St George's Day?  Abdul must have remembered his birthday because Scobie always hung up from each corner of his bed a string of coloured flags-of-all-nations which he borrowed from the newsagent.  And he used to get rather drunk, you told me once, and sing sea-chanties and recite "The Old Red Duster" until the tears flowed!  What a marvellous immortality to enjoy.'

      'How happy the old pirate must be.'

      'How happy!  To be the patron saint of his own quartier!  Oh, Darley, I knew you'd enjoy it.  I often come here at this time in the dusk and sit on a stone and laugh inwardly, rejoicing for the old man.'

      So we sat together for a long time as the shadows grew up around the shrine, quietly laughing and talking as people should at the shrine of a saint!  Reviving the memory of the old pirate with the glass eye whose shade still walked about those mouldering rooms on the second floor.  Vaguely glimmered the lights of Tatwig Street.  They shone, not with their old accustomed brilliance, but darkly - for the whole harbour quarter had been placed under blackout and one sector of it included the famous street.  My thoughts were wandering.

      'And Abdul,' I said suddenly.  'What of him?'

      'Yes, I promised to tell you; Scobie set him up in a barber's shop, you remember.  Well, he was warned for not keeping his razors clean, and for spreading syphilis.  He didn't heed the warnings perhaps because he believed that Scobie would never report him officially.  But the old man did, with terrible results.  Abdul was nearly beaten to death by the police, lost an eye.  Amaril spent nearly a year trying to tidy him up.  Then he got some wasting disease on top of it and had to abandon his shop.  Poor man.  But I'm not sure that he isn't the appropriate guardian for the shrine of his master.'

      'El Scob!  Poor Abdul!'

      'But he has taken consolation in religion and does some mild preaching and reciting of the Suras as well as this job.  Do you know I believe that he has forgotten the real Scobie.  I asked him one evening if he remembered the old gentleman on the upper floor and he looked at me vaguely and muttered something; as if he were reaching far back in his memory for something too remote to grasp.  The real Scobie had disappeared just like Yacoub, and El Scob had taken his place.'

      'I feel rather as one of the apostles must have - I mean to be in on the birth of a saint, a legend; think, we actually knew the real El Scob!  We heard his voice....'

      To my delight Clea now began to mimic the old man quite admirably, copying the desultory scattered manner of his conversation to the life; perhaps she was only repeating the words from memory?

      'Yes, mind you, on St George's Day I always get a bit carried away for England's sake as well as my own.  Always have a sip or two of the blushful, as Toby would say, even bubbly if it comes my way.  But, bless you, I'm no horse-drawn conveyance - always stay on my two pins.  It's the cup that cheers and not in ... in ... inebriates for me.  Another of Toby's expressions.  He was full of literary illustrations.  As well he might be - for why?  Bercorse he was never without a book under his arm.  In the Navy he was considered quite queer, and several times had rows.  "What yer got there?" they used to shout, and Toby who could be pert at times used to huff up and answer quite spontaneous: "What d'yer think, Puffy?  Why me marriages lines of course."  But it was always some heavy book which made my head swim though I love reading.  One year it was Strindbag's Plays, a Swedish author as I understand it.  Another year it was Goitre's "Frowst".  Toby said it was a liberal education.  My education just wasn't up to his.  The school of life, as you might say.  But then my mum and dad were killed off early on and we were left, three perishing little orphans.  They had destined us for high things, my father had; one for the church, one for the army, one for the navy.  Quite shortly after this my two brothers were run over by the Prince Regent's private train near Sidcup.  That was the end of them.  But it was all in the papers and the Prince sent a wreath.  But there I was left quite alone.  I had to make my own way without influence - otherwise I should have been an Admiral I expect by now....'

      The fidelity of her rendering was absolutely impeccable.  The little old man stepped straight out of his tomb and began to stalk about in front of us with his lopsided walk, now toying with his telescope on the cake-stand, now opening and shutting his battered Bible, or getting down on one creaking knee to blow up his fire with the tiny pair of bellows.  His birthday!  I recalled finding him one birthday evening rather the worse for brandy, but dancing around completely naked to music of his own manufacture on a comb and paper.

      Recalling this celebration of his Name Day I began, as it were, to mimic him back to Clea, in order to hear once more this thrilling new laugh she had acquired.  'Oh! it's you, Darley!  You gave me quite a turn with your knock.  Come in, I'm just having a bit of a dance in my tou tou to recall old times.  It's my birthday, yes.  I always dwell a bit on the past.  In my youth I was a proper spark, I don't mind admitting.  I was a real dab at the Velouta.  Want to watch me?  Don't laugh, just bercorse I'm in puris.  Sit on the chair over there and watch.  Now, advance, take your partners, shimmy, bow, reverse!  It looks easy but it isn't.  The smoothness is deceptive.  I could do them all once, my boy, Lancers, Caledonians, Circassian Circle.  Never seen a demi-chaine Anglais I suppose?  Before your time I think.  Mind you, I loved dancing and for years I kept up to date.  I got as far as the Hootchi-Kootchi - have you ever seen that?  Yes, the haitch is haspirated as in 'otel.  It's some fetching little movements they call oriental allurements.  Undulations, like.  You take off one veil after another until all is revealed.  The suspense is terrific, but you have to waggle as you glide, see?'  Here he took up a posture of quite preposterous oriental allurement and began to revolve slowly, wagging his behind and humming a suitable air which quite faithfully copied the lag and fall of Arab quartertones.  Round and round the room he went until he began to feel dizzy and flopped back triumphantly on his bed, chuckling and nodding with self-approval and self-congratulation, and reaching out for a swig of arak, the manufacture of which was also among his secrets.  He must have found the recipe in the pages of Postlethwaite's Vade Mercum For Travellers in Foreign Lands, a book which he kept under lock and key in his trunk and by which he absolutely swore.  It contained, he said, everything that a man in Robinson Crusoe's position ought to know - even how to make fire by rubbing sticks  together; it was a mine of marvellous information.  ('To achieve Bombay arrack dissolve two scruples of flowers of benjamin in a quart of good rum and it will impart to the spirit the fragrance of arrack.')  That was the sort of thing.  'Yes,' he would add gravely, 'old Postlethwaite can't be bettered.  There's something in him for every sort of mind and every sort of situation.  He's a genius I might say.'

      Only once had Postlethwaite failed to live up to his reputation, and that was when Toby said that there was fortune to be made in Spanish fly if only Scobie could source a large quantity of it for export.  'But the perisher didn't explain what it was or how, and it was the only time Postlethwaite had me beat.  D'you know what he says about it, under Cantharides?  I found it so mysterious I memorized the passage to repeat to Toby when next he came through.  Old Postle says this: "Cantharides when used internally are diuretic and stimulant; when applied externally they are epispastic and rubefacient."  Now what the devil can he mean, eh?  And how does this fit in with Toby's idea of a flourishing trade in the things?  Sort of worms, they must be.  I asked Abdul but I don't know the Arabic word.'

      Refreshed by the interlude he once more advanced to the mirror to admire his wrinkled old tortoise-frame.  A sudden thought cast a gloom over his countenance.  He pointed at a portion of his own wrinkled anatomy and said: 'And to think that that is what old Postlethwaite describes as "merely erectile tissue".  Why the merely, I always ask myself.  Sometimes these medical men are a puzzle in their language.  Just a sprig of erectile tissue indeed!  And think of all the trouble it causes.  Ah me; if you'd seen what I've seen you wouldn't have half the nervous energy I've got today.'

      And so the saint prolonged his birthday celebrations by putting on pyjamas and indulging in a short song-cycle which included many old favourites and one curious little ditty which he sang only on birthdays.  It was called 'The Cruel Cruel Skipper' and had a chorus which ended:

                              So he was an old sky plant, tum tum,

                              So he was an old meat loaf, tum tum,

                              So he was an old cantankeroo.

      And now, having virtually exhausted his legs by dancing and his singing-voice with song, there remained a few brief conundrums which he enunciated to the ceiling, his arms behind his head.

      'Where did King Charles's executioner dine, and what did he order?'

      'I don't know.'

      'Give in?'

      'Yes.'

      'Well, he took a chop at the King's Head.'

      Delighted clucks and chuckles!

      'When may a gentleman's property be described as feathers?'

      'I don't know.'

      'Give in?'

      'Yes.'

      'When his estates are all entails (hen-tails, see?)'

      The voice gradually fading, the clock running down, the eyes closing, the chuckles trailing away languorously into sleep.  And it was thus that the saint slept at last, with his mouth open, upon St. George's Day.

      So we walked back, arm in arm, through the shadowy archway, laughing the compassionate laughter which the old man's image deserved - laughter which in a way regilded the ikon, refuelled the lamps about the shrine.  Our footfalls hardly echoed on the street's floor of tamped soil.  The partial blackout of the area had cut off the electric light which so brilliantly illuminated it under normal conditions, and had been replaced by the oil lamps which flickered wanly everywhere, so that we walked in a dark forest by glow-worm light which made more than ever mysterious the voices and the activities in the buildings around us.  And at the end of the street, where the rickety gharry stood awaiting us, came the stirring cool breath of the night-sea which would gradually infiltrate the town and disperse the heavy breathless damps from the lake.  We climbed aboard, the evening settling itself about us cool as the veined leaves of a fig.

      'And now I must dine you, Clea, to celebrate the new laughter!'

      'No.  I haven't finished yet.  There is another tableau I want you to see, of a different kind.  You see, Darley, I wanted to sort of recompose the city for you so that you could walk back into the painting from another angle and feel quite at home - though that is hardly the word for a city of exiles, is it?  Anyhow....'  And leaning forward (I felt her breath on my cheek) she said to the jarvey, 'Take us to the Auberge Bleu!'

      'More mysteries.'

      'No.  Tonight the Virtuous Semira makes her first appearance on the public stage.  It is rather like a vernissage for me - you know, don't you, that Amaril and I are the authors of her lovely nose?  It has been a tremendous adventure, these long months; and she has been very patient and brave under the bandages and grafts.  Now it's complete.  Yesterday they were married.  Tonight all Alexandria will be there to see her.  We shouldn't absent ourselves, should we?  It characterizes something which is all too rare in the city and which you, as an earnest student of the matter, will appreciate.  Il s'agit de Romantic Love with capital letters.  My share in it had been a large one so let me be a bit boastful; I have been part duenna, part nurse, part artist, all for the good of Amaril's sake.  You see, she isn't very clever, Semira, and I have had to spend hours with her sort of preparing her for the world.  Also brushing up her reading and writing.  In short, trying to educate her a bit.  It is curious in a way that Amaril does not regard this huge gap in their different educations as an obstacle.  He loves her the more for it.  He says: "I know she is rather simple-minded.  That is what makes her so exquisite."

      'This is the purest flower of romantic logic, no?  And he has gone about her rehabilitation with immense inventiveness.  I should have thought it somewhat dangerous to play at Pygmalion, but only now I begin to understand the power of the image.  Do you know, for example, what he has devised for her in the way of a profession, a skill of her own?  It shows brilliance.  She would be too simple-minded to undertake anything very specialized so he has trained her, with my help, to be a doll's surgeon.  His wedding-present to her is a smart little surgery for children's dolls which has already become tremendously fashionable though it won't officially open until they come back from the honeymoon.  But this new job Semira has really grasped with both hands.  For months we have been cutting up and repairing dolls together in preparation for this!  No medical student could have studied harder.  "It is the only way," says Amaril, "to hold a really stupid woman you adore.  Give her something of her own to do."'

      So we swayed down the long curving Corniche and back into the lighted area of the city where the blue street-lamps came up one by one to peer into the gharry at us as we talked; and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited - a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.  Romantic Love!  Pursewarden used to call it 'The Comic Demon'.

      The Auberge had not changed at all.  It remained a lasting part of the furniture of my dreams, and here (like faces in a dream) were the Alexandrians themselves seated at flower-decked tables while a band softly punctuated their idleness with the Blues.  The cries of welcome recalled vanished generosities of the old city.  Athena Trasha with the silver crickets in her ears, droning Pierre Balbz who drank opium because it made the 'bones blossom', the stately Cervonis and the rash dextrous Martinengo girls, they were all there.  All save Nessim and Justine.  Even the good Pombal was there in full evening-dress so firmly ironed and starched as to give him the air of a monumental relief executed for the tomb of François Premier.  With him was Fosca, warm and dark of colouring, whom I had not met before.  They sat with their knuckles touching in a curious stiff rapture.  Pombal was perched quite upright, attentive as a rabbit, as he gazed into her eyes - the eyes of this handsome young matron.  He looked absurd.  ('She calls him "George-Gaston" which for some reason quite delights him' said Clea.)

      So we made our slow way from table to table, greeting old friends as we had often done in the past until we came to the little alcove table with its scarlet celluloid reservation card marked in Clea's name, where to my surprise Zoltan the waiter materialized out of nothing to shake my hand with warmth.  He was now the resplendent maitre d'hôtel and was in full fig, his hair cut en brosse.  It seemed also that he was fully in the secret for he remarked under his breath to Clea that everything had been prepared in complete secrecy, and even when so far as to wink.  'I have Anselm outside watching.  As soon as he sees Dr Amaril's car he will signal.  Then the music will play - Madama Trasha has asked for the old "Blue Danube".'  He clasped his hands together like a toad.  'Oh what a good idea of Athena's.  Bravo!' cried Clea.  It was indeed a gesture of affection, for Amaril was the best Viennese waltzer in Alexandria, and though not a vain man was always absurdly delighted by his own prowess as a dancer.  It could not fail to please him.

      Neither had we long to wait; anticipation and suspense had hardly had time to become wearying when the band, which had been softly playing with one ear cocked for the sound of a car, so to speak, fell silent.  Anselm appeared at the corner of the vestibule waving his napkin.  They were coming!  The musicians struck out one long quivering arpeggio such as normally brings a tzigane melody to a close, and then, as the beautiful figure of Semira appeared among the palms, they swung softly and gravely into the waltz measure of "The Blue Danube".  I was suddenly quite touched to see the shy way that Semira hesitated on the threshold of that crowded ballroom; despite the magnificence of her dress and grooming those watching eyes intimidated her, made her lose her self-possession.  She hovered with a soft indecision which reminded me of the way a sailing boat hangs pouting when the painter is loosed, the jib shaken out - as if slowly meditating for a long moment before she turns, with an almost audible sigh, to take the wind upon her cheek.  But in this moment of charming irresolution Amaril came up behind her and took her arm.  He himself looked, I thought, rather white and nervous despite the customary foppishness of his attire.  Caught like this, in a moment of almost panic, he looked indeed absurdly young.  Then he registered the waltz and stammered something to her with trembling lips, at the same time leading her down gravely among the tables to the edge of the floor where with a slow and perfectly turned movement they began to dance.  With the first full figure of the waltz the confidence poured into them both - one could almost see it happening.  They calmed, became still as leaves, and Semira closed her eyes while Amaril recovered his usual gay, self-confident smile.  And everywhere the soft clapping welled up around them from every corner of the ballroom.  Even the waiter seemed moved and the good Zoltan groped for a handkerchief, for Amaril was much-beloved.

      Clea too looked quite shaken with emotion.  'Oh quick, let's have a drink,' she said, 'for I've a huge lump in my throat and if I cry my make-up will run.'

      The batteries of champagne-bottles opened up from every corner of the ballroom now, and the floor filled with waltzers, the lights changed colour.  Now blue now red now green I saw the smiling face of Clea over the edge of her champagne glass turned towards me with an expression of happy mockery.  'Do you mind if I get a little tipsy tonight to celebrate her successful nose?  I think we can drink to their future without reserve, for they will never leave each other; they are drunk with the knightly love one reads about in the Arthurian legends - knight and rescued lady.  And pretty soon there will be children all bearing my lovely nose.'

      'Of that you can't be sure.'

      'Well, let me believe it.'

      'Let's dance a while.'

      And so we joined the thronging dancers in the great circle which blazed with spinning prismatic light hearing the soft drumbeats punctuate our blood, moving to the slow grave rhythms like the great wreaths of coloured seaweed swinging in some underwater lagoon, one with the dancers and with each other.

      We did not stay late.  As we came out into the cold damp air she shivered and half-fell against me, catching my arm.

      'What is it?'

      'I felt faint all of a sudden.  It's passed.'

      So back into the city along the windless seafront, drugged by the clop of the horse's hoofs on the macadam, the jingle of harness, the smell of straw, and the dying strains of music which flowed out of the ballroom and dwindled away among the stars.  We paid off the cab at the Cecil and walked up the winding deserted street towards her flat arm-in-arm, hearing our own slow steps magnified by the silence.  In a bookshop window there were a few novels, one by Pursewarden.  We stopped for a moment to peer into the darkened shop and then resumed our leisurely way to the flat.  'You'll come in for a moment?' she said.

      Here, too, the air of celebration was apparent, in the flowers and the small supper-table on which stood a champagne-bucket.  'I did not know we'd stay to dine at the Auberge, and prepared to feed you here if necessary,' said Clea, dipping her fingers in the ice-water; she sighed with relief.  'At least we can have a nightcap together.'

      Here at least there was nothing to disorient or disfigure memory, for everything was exactly as I remembered it; I had stepped back into this beloved room as one might step into some favourite painting.  Here it all was, the crowded bookshelves, heavy drawing-boards, small cottage piano, and the corner with the tennis racquet and fencing foils; on the writing desk, with its disorderly jumble of letters, drawings and bills, stood the candlesticks which she was now in the act of lighting.  A bundle of paintings stood against the wall.  I turned one or two round and stared at them curiously.

      'My God!  You've gone abstract, Clea.'

      'I know!  Balthazar hates them.  It's just a phase I expect, so don't regard it as irrevocable or final.  It's a different way of mobilizing one's feelings about paint.  Do you loathe them?'

      'No, they are stronger I think.'

      'Hum.  Candlelight flatters them with false chiaroscuro.'

      'Perhaps.'

      'Come, sit down; I've poured us a drink.'

      As if by common consent we sat facing each other on the carpet as we had so often done in the past, cross-legged like 'Armenian tailors', as she had once remarked.  We toasted each other in the rosy light of the scarlet candles which stood unwinking in the still air defining with their ghostly radiance the smiling mouth and candid features of Clea.  Here, too, at last, on this memorable spot on the faded carpet, we embraced each other with - how to say it? - a momentous smiling calm, as if the cup of language had silently overflowed into these eloquent kisses which replaced words like the rewards of silence itself, perfecting thought and gesture.  They were like soft cloud-formations which had distilled themselves out of a novel innocence, the veritable ache of desirelessness.  My steps had led me back again, I realized, remembering the night so long ago when we had slept dreamlessly in each other's arms, to the locked door which had once refused me admission to her.  Led me back once more to that point in time, that threshold, behind which the shade of Clea moved, smiling and irresponsible as a flower, after a huge arid detour in a desert of my own imaginings.  I had not known then how to find the key to that door.  Now of its own accord it was slowly opening.  Whereas the other door which had once given me access to Justine had now locked irrevocably.  Did not Pursewarden say something once about 'sliding-panels'?  But he was talking of books, not of the human heart.  In her face now there was neither guild nor premeditation mirrored, but only a sort of magnificent mischief which had captured the fine eyes, expressed itself in the firm and thoughtful way she drew my hands up inside her sleeves to offer herself to their embrace with the uxorious gesture of a woman offering her body to some priceless cloak.  Or else to catch my hand, place it upon her heart and whisper 'Feel!  It has stopped beating!'  So we lingered, so we might have stayed, like rapt figures in some forgotten painting, unhurriedly savouring the happiness given to those who set out to enjoy each other without reservations or self-contempts, without the premeditated costumes of selfishness - the invented limitations of human love: but that suddenly the dark air of the night outside grew darker, swelled up with the ghastly tumescence of a sound which, like the frantic wing-beats of some prehistoric bird, swallowed the whole room, the candles, the figures.  She shivered at the first terrible howl of the sirens but did not move; and all around us the city stirred to life like an ants' nest.  Those streets which had been so dark and silent now began to echo with the sound of feet as people made their way to the air-raid shelters, rustling like a gust of dry autumn leaves whirled by the wind.  Snatches of sleepy conversations, screams, laughter, rose to the silent window of the little room.  The street had filled as suddenly as the dry riverbed when the spring rains fall.

      'Clea, you should shelter.'

      But she only pressed closer, shaking her head like someone drugged with sleep, or perhaps by the soft explosion of kisses which burst like bubbles of oxygen in the patient blood.  I shook her softly, and she whispered: 'I am too fastidious to die with a lot of people like an old rats' nest.  Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.'

      So it was that love-making itself became a kind of challenge to the whirlwind outside which beat and pounded like a thunderstorm of guns and sirens, igniting the pale skies of the city with the magnificence of its lightning-flashes.  And kisses themselves became charged with the deliberate affirmation which can come only from the foreknowledge and presence of death.  It would have been good to die at any moment then, for love and death had somewhere joined hands.  It was an expression of her pride, too, to sleep there in the crook of my arm like a wild bird exhausted by its struggles with a limed twig, for all the world as if it were an ordinary summer night of peace.  And lying awake at her side, listening to the infernal racket of gunfire and watching the stabbing and jumping of light behind the blinds I remembered how once in the remote past she had reminded me of the limitations which love illuminated in us: saying something about its capacity being limited to an iron ration for each soul and adding gravely: 'The love you feel for Melissa, the same love, is trying to work itself out through Justine.'  Would I, by extension, find this to be true also of Clea?  I did not like to think so - for these fresh and spontaneous embraces were as pristine as invention, and not like ill-drawn copies of past actions.  They were the very improvisations of the heart itself - or so I told myself as I lay there trying so hard to recapture the elements of the feelings I had once woven around those other faces.  Yes, improvisations upon reality itself, and for once devoid of the bitter impulses of the will.  We had sailed into this calm water completely without premeditation, all canvas crowded on; and for the first time it felt natural to be where I was, drifting into sleep with her calm body lying beside me.  Even the long rolling cannonades which shook the houses so, even the hail of shards which swept the streets, could not disturb the dreaming silence we harvested together.  And when we awoke to find everything silent once more she lit a single candle and we lay by its flickering light, looking at each other, and talking in whispers.

      'I am always so bad the first time, why is it?'

      'So am I.'

      'Are you afraid of me?'

      'No.  Nor of myself.'

      'Did you ever imagine this?'

      'We must both have done.  Otherwise it would not have happened.'

      'Hush!  Listen.'

      Rain was now falling in sheets as it so often did before dawn in Alexandria, chilling the air, washing down the stiffly clicking leaves of the palms in the Municipal Gardens, washing the iron grilles of the banks and the pavements.  In the Arab town the earthen streets would be smelling like freshly dug graveyard.  The flower-sellers would be putting out their stocks to catch the freshness.  I remembered their cry of 'Carnations, sweet as the breath of a girl!'  From the harbour the smells of tar, fish and briny nets flowing up along the deserted streets to meet the scentless pools of desert air which would later, with the first sunlight, enter the town from the east and dry its damp façades.  Somewhere, briefly, the hushing of the rain was pricked by the sleepy pang of a mandoline, inscribing on it a thoughtful and melancholy little air.  I feared the intrusion of a single thought or idea which, inserting itself between these moments of smiling peace, might inhibit them, turn them to instruments of sadness.  I thought too of the long journey we made from this very bed, since last we lay here together, through so many climates and countries, only to return once more to our starting-point, again captured once more by the gravitational field of the city.  A new cycle which was opening upon the promise of such kisses and dazed endearments as we could now exchange - where would it carry us?  I thought of some words of Arnauti, written about another woman, in another context: 'You tell yourself that it is a woman you hold in your arms, but watching the sleeper you see all her growth in time, the unerring unfolding of cells which group and dispose themselves into the beloved face which remains always and for ever mysterious - repeating to infinity the soft boss of the human nose, an ear borrowed from a seashell's helix, an eyebrow thought-patterned from ferns, or lips invented by bivalves in their dreaming union.  All this process is human, bears a name which pierces your heart, and offers the mad dream of an eternity which time disproves in every drawn breath.  And if human personality is an illusion?  And if, as biology tells us, every single cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years by another?  At the most I hold in my arms something like a fountain of flesh, continuously playing, and in my mind a rainbow of dust.'  And like an echo from another point of the compass I heard the sharp voice of Pursewarden saying: 'There is not Other; there is only oneself facing forever the problem of one's self-discovery!'

      I had drifted into sleep again; and when I woke with a start the bed was empty and the candle had guttered away and gone out.  She was standing at the drawn curtains to watch the dawn break over the tumbled roofs of the Arab town, naked and slender as an Easter lily.  In the spring sunrise, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed - a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria.  'I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing; the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme; the perfection of God, the One, the Sole'.... The great prayer wound itself in shining coils across the city as I watched the grave and passionate intensity of her turned head where she stood to observe the climbing sun touch the minarets and palms with light: rapt and awake.  And listening I smelt the warm odour of her hair upon the pillow beside me.  The buoyancy of a new freedom possessed me like a draught from what the Cabal once called 'The Fountain of All Existing Things'.  I called 'Clea' softly, but she did not heed me; and so once more I slept.  I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing - not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors.

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