HESPERIA

He or circumstances or whatever it was, standing beside her
in the hall of the Luxor Hotel, did not, in the very least, confound
the issue. The thing was to get them both together, to see Captain
Rafton as one person, not as two, daylight and 4th dimension,
separate entities, seen separately and distorted, like two images
in a badly adjusted field-glass.

As Margaret Fairwood waited for an answer, it occurred to her
for one intolerable moment, that Captain Rafton was just the thing
he now seemed. It seemed to her, for one intolerable second, that
he was neither of these images, that the fault was with her and her
psychic focus, that he was this exact presentation of himself,
standing there beside her, the exact image of a post-war Englishman
who had laboured procrastinated a little with a "girl" (he would have
called her) on his way up to Assuan on a job.

She might, of course, take his words literally, say, somewhat
reluctant to commit herself, "I _will_ meet you at Assuan, I _have_
riding-breeches, I _would_ like to sleep out, as you suggest, near
that Bedouin camp," all the world like a nurse-maid novelette.

Or she might, of course, mistress of the situation, have flared
incandescent eyes at him, struck him with incandescence, "You or
something in you or something to do with you or around you, made me
'see' things in the temple last might." That would have advantages,
was all the same, a little risky; the Sekmet temple was entirely out-
of-bounds because of the hysteria of certain visitors.

The recent outbreak of hysteria, now made that sort of statement
quite untenable. The thing had been too commonly discussed, the

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digressions were too obvious. Margaret Fairwood, for all that, could
rationalize her own case. She still had the choice. She could yet say,
"It's all right. I believed in it. I went to the temple this morning
actually to photograph it."

The vision had been so simply presented last night, so exactly
"right" in all its detail, so little slurred over with what might
theoretically have been expected, that this morning, in all simplicity
and good faith she had actually been in the very act of adjusting her
camera, at the door of the outer Gateway of the second temple-chamber,
before she realized there was nothing to photograph.

Now was the moment for it. "Captain Rafton, did you see the Birth
House? Did you have anything to do with its projection? Are you aware
you not, simply Captain Rafton, an ordinary Englishman, on his way up
to Assuan on a job?" She didn't say it.

He twisted his mouth in that peculiar way that served to shift,
from one corner to the other, his just lighted cigarette. His mouth,
his lips curled over, his tongue reminded her (curious throw-back) of
one of those Dionysic bulls in processional frieze-relief. He was bull
rather than horse or lion. This was perhaps throw-back again to
earlier affiliation. Something in her had been tapped, Margaret
realized, last night; she hadn't known how near he had been. This
morning, she could say quite sanely, "This Rafton reminded me of Fairwood
(or some other) but inhibition didn't allow me, then, to realize it."
Some door had opened, not so very subtly. Rationalistic explanation
would, after all, best serve.

This morning his shoulders were grey. She wanted to drop her
note-books, drop secretarial affinities by the same token (Bodge-
Grafton and the Bodge-Grafton lot), reach up, simply, in the soft-

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shaded verandah, watch her own hands crawl out into that luminous
morning, like star-fish in green water. The shoulders were
uncompromising, under-sea, grey rock.

She noted irreverantly, that nothing grew there, Mollusc hands,
star-fish should so grow. She looked at her hands, brought back to
specific consciousness - they were not star-fish. Her hands were burnt,
brown. Now she wanted hands of iron to break his knees, like iron slave-
fingers tearing down outgrown effigies from temples.

She became perversely angry; belated appraisement. It wasn't only
that he was so tall. It was the stopp forward, the condescension of his
slight stopp. It was that physical peculiarity. The hollow of his
chest was a sea-whorl that drew one - irresponsible sea- creature. Here
inland, perverse forces decreed that sand, lying so sifted and so clean,
should suggest by sheer contrary definition, not so much the inner
continent but the very surface of the sea-shelves. No Indian ocean
could wash over fronds of more delicate growth than this summer
sunlight did over the surface of palms, and sea-anemone hybiscus. She
said, "It's going to be hot, isn't it?" Captain Rafton answered that you
couldn't tell so early.

She said, "How could I possibly come to Assuan?" She indicated
note-books that rested precariously, on the flat huge volume in the crotch
of the elbow, heavy as a millstone. She laughed, jerky monosyllable
laughter, different (so she made it) from that ripple of entire
effacement in the moonlit tombs last night. "How could I? Could you
give up - your -your - whatever it is, dam or road or engineering, over-