4

seeing, whatever it is you do -" Her voice trailed off; she had not even the wit to specify the taken-for-granted answer, by an upward final jerk of self-conscious interrogation, "Would you?"

She could have left her body in this dim hall, even here. She could, at least, have asked him, "Did you or didn't you yourself, conjure up that Birth House or tomb there, last night?" She hadn't gained anything, was frozen to the door-sill. She turned, faced sunlight. A molten flat floor lay there for her to tread on. Considering it, she thought of that tiled space, as of a stage. Was she stepping toward some ultimate self-revelation or was she refusing some fine, distinctive role, something, she felt, Captain Rafton, waiting there in the shadow (in the wings, so to speak) still proffered. Was her "job" with Rafton, a repetition, the usual aberration, the usual laying of old ghosts? Well, she had one thing. She clutched that. "After all, Bodge paid me for this work. I suppose I have to do it." Anti-climax salved her conscience, minimised her knowledged that she was wholly cowardly; "well, Bodge paid me," was only another way of saying that she didn't yet dare face the question outright. Was or was not Rafton capable of distinguishing mind from matter?

Good habits as well as bad ones make us their slaves. She didn't dare ask herself this time, if the habit were a good one; again, she repudiated magnificence, shelter, that Theseus torse. A world ever so high, ever so cold, ever so distant was recalled as she overheard someone arguing from an upstairs bed-room window (they all opened, bungalow-like, into a common, narrow, railed-in balcony) "no, you can't get the *Hesperia*, it's been full-up, three months." She wondered vaguely if it might be that usual argument with the Thorpe-Whartons. Mary was still insistent, "You must come back with us, mama knows

people

5

people in Alex who really can't state-rooms." Margaret had put aside this question of the state-room on the Hesperia. She had said to Mary, as she had to Rafton, "I have my work."

Hesperia However, brought inevitable word-reactions, deluxe steamship appurtenances, mixed oddly with others. Hesperia was the name, wasn't it, of a mythical country, some Garden with golden apples - or was it a Star merely?

Anti-climax in the shape of Mary Page, insisted, "Well, now your good-looking Englishman's gone off, you'll just have to come with us." Mary's immediate proposition was the Rosetta, on the way to the first cataract. Margaret put aside the more serious consideration of the Hesperia, altogether. As to the Rosetta, Margaret said, "How can I?" The matter was now one of extreme indifference. She hadn't known, didn't dare face the realisation of what her casual staggering into molten sunlight had meant. Take it or leave it. That was just it. Her gesture must have seemed definitive to Captain Rafton. It would seem to him that she had "left it". left him, perhaps not a little gauchely. She hadn't even thanked him, for last night.

She had said again to Mary, "I can't come." "But surely, Mrs. Fairwood -" "Why don't you call me Margaret?" "O, I don't know. There always were so many -" So she was not to be confused, Margaret Fairwood realized, with Mary's generation. Mary will keep me in a catalogue by myself, missing-link between "mama" and those others. Well, then Margaret said to herself, I will be Mrs. Fairwood. "My dear - you know I have work."

"I've been talking with the Carletons at the Winter Palace. They

6

say Mr. Bodge-Grafton won't be back." Margaret knew that her official employer was in dire straits between the municipality of Cairo, some native faction, and the academic convention of London and the New York Metropolitan. There was this rumour, too, that Darnovan was stricken. Everything was planned, she saw now; she was "meant" to go to Assuan after all, was meant, in all vulgar panoply, to "chase" a man whom she had said good-bye to, with finality. "Well, Mary, I just won't then," she added as if to thwart with such feeble denial, her own prescience of what she knew inevitably must happen.

It was however, she later told herself, a matter of such supreme indifference that she didn't even pretend to protest further, when Mary appeared on the Luxor Hotel dining-room, flourishing her ticket. "Mama said I was just to get your ticket," Margaret was guest then, presumably, in a small way (she would let them do the extras, she could just afford the ticket) of the Whartons, Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton with her veteran fish-line and Mary the worm on it. Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton would have a better time, feel more independent, with still another woman. Mary Page since her problematical engagement to that Jerry Cope boy, would need yet more looking after. "The Rosetta leaves," Mary said, "at noon." I've already told them at the desk to keep on your room and you can leave your big bag, we'll each take a suit-case. Mama has just her trunk." Heroic action of Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton, visiting outlandish sand-swept plateaus and the Bedouin oasis with just one trunk.

"Anyhow," Mary flung triumphant from the doorway, "there is no use trying to work things out in this place -look at Lord Darnovan."

7

Already past Kom Ombo on the Nile boat, Rosetta, Captain Rafton lost identity, anyone of these well-groomed Englishmen and even more suave Continental-like Americans might have been his double. Man, man man, it was just man I wanted. Her head was lulled by the churning of the water, of the great side-wheels of the flat boat. The boat was a sort of dahabiyeh, the passengers for the most part, had come all the way downstream from Cairo, they, the Thorpe-Whartons and Margaret picking them up at Luxor, were, so to speak, now members of an already formulated house-party, or to be exact, house-boat party.

Her room suggested little of the ordinary state-room; the Rosetta was a flat, two-decked, three-tiered platform, floating (that was all there was to it) on a static river. The river was static, was problematically, suddenly full of shallows. The river behaved, on a larger scale, like the huge rivers she had known only in America. This river was sister to the Mississippi, to the Missouri, to the Susquennah. It bore, she felt, no relationship to the Seine or Thames or Danube.

This side of the slow river, palms were scattered or grouped in clusters, or were fantastically fringed like a careless gamin "bang". This side of the river from Kom Ombo, they could hear the squeeking water-wheels, the eternal monotony of the shadoof. From the opposite bank, the scene altered; another stage set, huts of a low-set squalid village, surrounded a walled temple like a battered fortress. The river, she concluded, was too wide to be termed properly a river. It was an inland lake - she faltered to define it.

It was the river, she concluded weakly, upon which Cleopatra stretched her purple sails, but that, at the moment, failed to conjure any picture of either Cleopatra or of purple. Images fell stagnant,

8

like this river. It is the river, she murmured to herself, out of which
Moses was fished - a dark baby, like any other of these great-eyed
Mohammedans, from whose fringed lashes, the mothers refuse to sweep the
blue-bottled horse-flies. Allah had ordained their settling there (and the
after-effects of blindness) or else, obviously, they wouldn't be there.

Allah is Allah, was all that could be said (perhaps the mothers
were right) to this river.

A combination of febrile weakness and inertia held her to this
room. Her mind, after her decision to leave Bodge-Grafton's notes, for
the moment anyhow, unfinished, left nothing now to cling to. She had
clung to that, her importance to Bodge-Grafton. She wasn't now important.
She had flung "my work" at Mary, to escape Mary and her tiresome mother,
to escape everything they stood for. But to be practical, they might
prove as useful to her, as she had to them. What had she now, in
Egypt? Hallucinations and temples - and Darnovan was stricken. Grafton
wouldn't have any more use for her on the spot, since the last decision
of the group at Cairo. She could stay. Equally, she could creep back
to Bloomsbury and work through her notes there. Well, this trip would
decide it. She didn't in cold-blood say, Rafton will decide it, if I meet
him.

Her mind had been a spar to which her somewhat jangled body had been
tethered. Now there was nothing; mind, body alike were over-borne
by sullen heat-waves. They said there was a sand-storm inland and already
bits of underbrush clogged their rudder. The river was strewn with under-
brush, torn leaves, water-logged branches and the fibrous peeled bark
of some tree.

Perhaps this sand-storm accounted for lead weight.

9

Margaret's eyes felt sand-glint against sensitive-plate of apprehensive eyelids. Against that ground-glass, there were images of the temples, Kom Ombo and Esne, Pharoah and Isis with moon over eternal forehead, static, with side-posture. The impression of these later temples was as intense as her first impression of Karnak. Here however, there were no moonlight excursions and except, that all things seemed related to some other sphere of sun and shadow, there were no "dimensional" (or should she say "dêmented"?) super-series of impressions. Temple and statue stood out against the somewhat irritated surface of her underlids, formal drawing, art-school design, Isis on a sheet of drawing-paper, the pylons, draughtsmen's samples in History of Art or History of Architecture.

We have become too crudely familiar with these things. At least, to-day, some three days up the river, it seemed, with the ominous weight of that sand-storm, as if this, like Captain Rafton that last mornong, had eluded her - no, not so much eluded her as crassly cheated. It was terrible to weigh possible with impossible, to adjust her psychic lenses, those days past. Here, it was even more terrible to realise that Kom Ombo was a temple, out of a series of architectural drawings.

It was the heat, the river, the crawling of the flat-bottomed boat, down stream. Memory and occasional interlude of miniature cataract, did little to alleviate this growing depression; they were going inland. A boat, properly speaking, makes for the open spaces; they are dragged down, down into the heart of Africa, an alien continent. Africa, on school-maps, seemed an approachable design, one of the easiest maps to draw, with its plant and bird and animal life. Africa was, in fact, the least approachable. Margaret, stifling in her cabin, thought only

10

of elephants and a giraffe, sizes too big, that she had pasted,
as a child, on a cut-out map of Africa,

Africa, she recalled, had been the easiest, the first map, to
attract her. Because Africa had palm-trees to cut out and paste on, and
Africa had an oasis, that odd anomaly, and Africa had sand like any summer
sea-shore.

Africa had sand, it was blowing inward, would obliterate the
river.

The sand-storm, in fact, was nothing. So they said, at dihner.
The cloud, they said, had lifted. The same care, Margaret noted,
made demarcation between the tables, here as on land; the Baltimore
Steven Brownes were, if anything, a little more meticulous than
their London cousins. Mary had managed to make her little cherry
coloured spangled frock look new. Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton never wore
anything that wasn't. Margaret fumbled for the menu. "I don't think I
want boullion, even if it is cold." Above stars orchestra was
tuning contemptuous! strings in the face of, she presumed, innumerable
stars.

Margaret wondered if the stars bore any relation to the ones she
had left at Karnak. Had she been dependent on that raw ex-officer for
all that? There were more suave gentlemen here from Europe and
America - and others, more virile and none the less attractive, for
all they were "below the salt", as you might say. One of these strident,
familiar voices made things come clear, again presented Horus at Kom
Ombo. "It was true in the old days, Sadie. They did - I told you - keep
a live hawk tied up, with a gold chain, to that altar." A live hawk
on a gold chain!

11

Margaret thought now wistfully of the Hesperia, ploughing out
toward Sicily, into the open breakers. It seemed that this floating
platform would shake her nerves to pieces. People didn't seem to
notice the click-click, the curtain-rings that, shaking on their poles,
drove into her, her terrible inertia. She was being nailed to
this situation. " ...not a goldchain, papa."

Easy argument, Allah is Allah, how other would I be here?

Standing in the garden of the Cataract Hotel, at the first break in
this same river, she would have wondered what had brought her, but
for the uneasy remembrance of the sluggish nosing-forward of a great
flat boat, like a board floating on a lily-pond. The night, shining
through and into the diminished daylight, gave effect of smoked
glass, such as we devise amateurishly, for casual eclipse in school-days.
Casual eclipse of mind and sense, alike, had caught her at Assuan.

This was the end of the ponderous journey, and she wondered what
had brought her. There was, had been, here and there along that slothful
journey, answers, repeated in the high whine of a beggar, one of the
native dragomen or from shore. There was one cry, it neither summoned
nor repudiated.

Here, at Assuan at last, the idea of so decisive a figure as that former
Captain or any of his like, became not so much repugnant, as clearly in-
credible. Snow and sand had met here; in the Cataract Hotel garden, the
snow was white sand that had drifted, like any snow-drift, against dark
garden loam, that was as carefully gathered as precious grain. Sand
and earth here, as nowhere in the world, have value like wheat and
chaff.

12

The chaff, the valueless garden-sand, was, as is so often noticeable, the more beautiful the barren substance, even in this half-light, had living quality, like sleeping or even dead electrons. The other, the dark loam, she knew, was used to line the irrigation-ditches.

Violets, no longer lined this ditch. It was late February, roses drooped on dead stems; it was already too dry. Season and change of season and this strip of season and the irrational mixing of months, winter, spring and already arid summer, must in the end work havoc with the mind. That and the light, day and night, neither divisible, here at the moment. That sort of love, she thought, disjointedly, is neither happy nor unhappy, neither awake nor asleep, meticulous unyielding of day to night, slumberous, not yet awakened - her sort of simile.

Apparently, there would soon be dinner, another little ceremony, though every evening, Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton seemed ready for one. Last night was the last night on the boat, tonight by the same logic, would be the first night on shore, then there would be tomorrow, the last night on shore and following, the next first night on board. So it went, the little pin-wheel of excitement - but why not, said Margaret, herself lost for a reason - for coming here exactly.

She would clutch back at straws, "I came here with Mary, for across the river, the island Elephantium, by that miracle that is met to that extent, nowhere but in Egypt, in just a second, refused the langorous situation (half-awake, half-asleep), turned its scorn, so to speak, upon the slumberous garden, incohate eucalyptus, dried irrigation-trenches and dead violets. Facing her, across a stretch of water now

13.

turned silver, Elephantium became, in just one second, Elephantium, that Island of Enchantment, where Caesar pitched (or might have pitched) silk pavilions, where Antony might, presumably, have awakened the ripple of presumptuous gladness, in the bodies of home-sick Greeks.

The home-sick and alien, new and old alike, must say, in one moment of repudiation, "the past is nothing, the future is nothing, there is only the eternal," while Elephantium, ivory island, became in just one second, emerald shot with silver, in shadow, translucent opal. The moon didn't rise, it sent heralds, silver that spread across the half-sky. Its veil was no longer traditionally, metephorically, "veil of light" or "veil", if it happens, "of darkness". It was that actually.

The day, instead of remaining a jumbled syncopated sort of torture of jaded memories was, by the same token, resuscitated, became alive; the dead day, became one with all eternal days.

---

The day was resuscitated, a flower-stem in water. To watch this sweep of moonlight, was to become alive, herself resurrected, realizing as she did suddenly, that the far-past vibrated, in tune with this day; women then as now bartered for woven scarves and ivory and jade ornaments, at Assuan. In that light, foregoing fatigue (dead flower resuscitated) she called the jumbled bazaars, this morning's shopping, the poppy-red embroidered marriage-garments, the piled-up wares. Then, they had meant vulgar display; they fell into shape, took individual form now; cornelian combs and ear-drops, seemed authentically to matter. The broken rhythm, past and present have merged, become the more harmonious, for the jangled syncopation of the contracted chords, false qualities of present day appraisement. There was, there no such thing as "trash"

14.

in the bazaars.

Magic of Elephantium, river-island at the foot of the first Nile cataract, presumed other.

For life went on here, thanks to the casual tourist, as it had always done. Soldiers who had seemed antipathetical, engineers, the horde of Captain Raftons, capitalists who had built this great-dam, had contributed to this. The great-dam itself, seemed no longer an atrocity, submerging Isis and the island, Philae.

The dam was responsible for people, for the Cataract Hotel, for the music going on, indoors, tail-end of thé -dansant.

---

The shawl, Mary had brought, kept them talking for some time. It would do, Margaret was gratefully aware, for a topic, all through dinner. They would spread out, they did spread out, the glamorous folds; they would say, they did say, "It's really better than the other." They would recall the other, appraise this by comparison, still with regret for that other, as one regrets roses, after choosing lilies.

The shawl was one of those brought in from China, that copies slavishly even slight defect in texture. The tea-leaf tinted, simulated old colour of this, made it possible for the three of them to agree, in one breath, "But no one could tell the difference." They agreed further that to wear a shawl, worth some thousands of dollars, some hundreds of pounds (those really old ones) wasn't well, comfortable. This, anyhow, had been quite (they agreed) expensive, it wouldn't have done to have paid less, however. They still gloated; they had bargained

15.

they concluded, shrewdly, over the second cup (the Arab had insisted)
of that coffee.

Again over coffee, in the Cataract Hotel lounge (coffee that wasn't quite so "Turkish", as that other) they agreed that it was rather fun buying things to the accompaniment of conversation, the flash of black eyes flattering, appraising, at the same time cajoling, as if one were European (almost) royalty, received ~~by~~ from African ambassadors.

Well, so they might be, they agreed, saying it was such a comfort to have a place, theirs, on the house-boat, <u>Rosetta</u> being equal to the private dahabiyehs, and anyhow, they agreed, it must be an awful responsibility, running one's own boat, trouble with various officials and never knowing, at the last, exactly what might happen, what with feast-days and fast-days and Ramadan and what-not, those Tony Repliers (you remember) who were rash enough as to order, "forward" outside Heliopolis, found, just above the Cataract, their boat water-logged and actually sinking, some servants, Arabs, had plugged holes, some thought, because of fast-day, feast-day, <u>something</u> Ramadan.

"Allah is Allah," Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton sighed, the only answer, leaning forward while the elder of the Browne trio flicked a cigarette-lighter; a stone-age man couldn't have done it better. Spark and steel, steel and flint, repeated the gesture again, then Margaret jangled the low table, as she made to get up. She waited for the filagree cup-holders to settle.

Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton was tired. Thank you, no, she would let Mary do the dancing. The shawl, as Mary circled now before them, took changeable attribute, seen this way, a tree in blossom, turned with the slight a-symmetrical bit of flaming colour, triangulated on the shoulders, a <u>Versailles</u> bed of tulips.

16.

Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton, now grown listless in the corner, agreed (no longer interested) for the twentieth time, that the shawl was lovely. Voices repeated conversations, themes repeated themselves, said backward, "It's the only temple where light was worshipped equally with darkness."

Light equally with darkness recalled - something. Margaret excused herself, this time avoiding the precarious coffee-table. "I'll be in the writing-room, if Mary wants me," she said. She stepped from a window-ledge onto a parapet.

The concrete floor disclosed equal lozenges, light, dark. Light was, here and there, jagged across by irregular shadow-shapes of dancers. The parapet was a raised platform, set stolid above the water. The roar of the cataclysm reminded her of banal excursion to the Falls of the Rhine, pre-pre-pre- something. Again, she realized the NIle as the living river, not just a crooked twist, across school-maps, or the shaded diagram in the back of the old Bible.

The NIle - light worshipped equally with darkness.

Here, there was wind, actually lifting hair from temples, fluttering garments, woven fine as white-moth cocoon. Such fleece and veils, clothing slim, almost disembodied Greeks (from Cos), Etruscans (from Alexandria), their own native Gypsies, had floated not long since, under the palms of that opposite sand-bank, Elephantium. Above her, as she neared the side-rail, eucalyptus leaves made miniature castenet clatter. The palms, across the water were dark jade, no longer outlined in silver.

The moon had gone somewhere. There was light enough, however, to show a great bird, a pelican, immobile like a garden-ornament.

17.

She had been cut out in that garden to find something and she
hadn't found it. That much she could confess. She stepped indoors, went strau
straight to one of the writing desks, sat down decisively. She drew her
paper toward her, poised pen, noted the letter-head, Cataract Hotel and
a tiny seal of scarab, papyrus and lotus-bud. Cataract Hotel: I am at Assuan.
She didn't dare lift her head, wrote casually as if this were a
perfectly usual letter. Anyone watching her would have said the
usual sort of letter.

"My dear, you may be about here anywhere, under any tree. I haven't
seen you dancing, there are plenty of real 'girls' everywhere. Where are
you? Under the trees, there is a fragrance as if you were there. You see,
I was frozen simply.

"I loved you so much. But it wasn't love exactly. All my life,
I waited for that moment. I was sitting on the wall, the wall of King
Tothmes' banquet-chamber. I looked down the aisle. At the end, there was
the square symmetrical Birth House. I did not know it was not there. When
I said good-bye, the next morning, I was frozen. You thought, I was crude;
if you were a man, I owed you simply thanks for that night - always and
always the most beautiful night of my whole life.

"The stars were so near. I think you brought them nearer. You knew
everything. You had staged this. You took this shape. You waited for me,
you came to me, you found me. If I went to you how, I would die. I don't
know how I know this, but I would die. You could, so easily, come to me,
to my room; I can see you in my room, but if you came to me,
I would die; for you are a god and in any case (god or man) I would be
frightened. Not crude awkwardness, but fright of the super-natural. But
if only I had thanked you.

18.

"All my life, I will regret that I didn't thank you for the most beautiful night of all the nights of the world, with everyone gone to the Winter Palace for that dance and the temple empty. How did you know your way in the darkness? You walked up the rampart, you went down narrow steps into the shadow. Wasn't that miracle enough? How did we get rid of Mary and her young man of the moment? All my life, all my life, my fingers will their way, like one blind, reading Braille, along the outline of a great chick, a bee. All my life I will be dwarfed, made small and human, brought into child-proportion (insect myself or bee or bird) by those vermillion and green outlines. How did you know, in the dark, your way across the great hall? Did you see in the dark? Were you left undazzled by the moon? But there was no moon. The moon came up to us alone. I never thanked you.

"It would be anti-climax if you came now. Come now.

Mary said, "Let me have your letters. I must have your letters."
Margaret said, "But I haven't - finished." Her pen, she noted,
had drawn irrelevant words, the words twisted back at her, strange
letter-pattern, *come now*. It was strange to her, had she written *come now*? Her poised pen moved forward, to cross out the letters, so strangely flowing, as if they had been written for her.

Must everything go on all the time, in several dimensions?
Certainly, she could not have written *come now*. And to whom then, did she
write it? It was written automatically, as if she had not done it. She
couldn't cross it out. She must stop looking at it.

She folded the note-paper, pushed it into an envelope, scratched
vague address, said, "But this - I'll at a postscript, on the home-trip."

19.

Mary said, "Yes; have they told you? Mama's in the first boat."
"What first boat?" "Didn't you know? I thought you were waiting.
We're all due back." There was something, Mary added, speaking
casually, about wind and something to do with last night's sand-storm,
and something to do with fresh outbreak of—something. Contrary to
previous arrangement, it appeared, they were to leave to-night.

So then, it was all over. Not that it really mattered. I came here casually thought Margaret, I should never actually have come to meet him. But something is all over struck a gong in her head. It had gone empty, with a sort of prescience of disaster. Why can't one just enjoy things? How was it possible that there was a pelican? She would run through the garden, shut her eyes to velvet blackness, the last chance. "Of course, Mary —" "O mama's told them at the desk, already. There's nothing for you, really. Your bags weren't anyhow, unpacked; I didn't think you'd mind, I simply shoved in your songe and tooth-brush." It was all being arranged for her. She could not even, she mused, pack a tooth-brush here, without repercussions of one sort or another.

The lights above Elephantium renewed impression, that moon-light
was mere spirit. She had conceded that moon-light could no longer be
betrayed by such terms as silver, glimmer, glamour or iridescence; here
the moon-light was Illusion or rather here, once permeated by that
veil of Isis, moon-light over Elephantium, the whole world was Illusion.
She found herself repeating to Mary, "No, really, it was only a letter
to America, I mean I'd have missed the boat, anyhow. I'll add a postscript,"
as Mary repeated for the third time, that she ought to mail here, there
was a letter-box at the quay, it was such fun having the different post-

20.

marks on the letters.

"Isn't it just any Egyptian post-mark enough, Mary?" But Margaret didn't know what she was saying, little things as well as big ones were relatively unimportant. She waited at an jetty, for brown hands to pull a sail-boat nearer, for all the world like going for a moon-light sail, off Bailey's Island or Moon Island, Barnagat.

Familiar voices in the darkness were discussing the last days;
they hadn't meant to leave so early, they had decided that the toil-
some trip back by train however wasn't good enough, connections were
bad, they had really wanted, properly to see Philae. Mary joined in
somewhere, said all her photographs, she was afraid, would be spoiled.
She had dropped her hand-bag in the water, reaching to get it - someone
else cut across to say, "It wasn't and couldn't be, there was only at
the Delta, real Papyrus." Somewhere "off", another voice mingled
guttural orders, intended for them presumably, as another of another
timbre caught that up with, "Why the hell couldn't they tell us they were
tacking across this damn river?"

The boat swerved from side to side; the _Rosetta_ had been drawn
somewhat forward. It seemed odd to Margaret that there should be no
light, she mentioned this, tentatively, to her companion, half-heartedly
expecting some sort of reply. The voice in pitch-darkness said it supposed
they were afraid of the moths. They would flutter even out in the river like
bats; bats, too, sometimes. Margaret didn't think this an adequate
explanation. The boat tilted and they bobbed down, as they judged it
tacking. Mary went on, "I got some good snaps of those little patches,
filled with water-melons," "Is that what those little green plants are—"
a voice till now silent, joined in, (female counterpoint to the one
who had said "this damn river") "planted in sand-fields?" and the sail

21.

swerved from zig-zag, straight outward to the shadow on dark water.
Margaret judged this must be their boat.

Her voice, their voices, went on talking, coming-from-a-dance
banter, saying the sort of things you used to say on a moon-light sail,
off Breeze Point. The voices went on, wove a net of familiarity about
this bottomless Chaos; the river was Styx, they were not, it is to be
presumed, alive here. The voices, one against the other, made a net, to
which they clung, wounded, dead maybe, but in familiar setting.
"These say and night excursions seem indicated." That voice continued,
"I meant to make up a party, to ask you all to Philae, to slide round those
pillars by moon-light, to see if we couldn't get something out of it."
Philae, they agreed loudly, as they neared the familiar hulk, was
disappointing. All the other voices, including her own, mingled to
agree somewhat stridently, that Philae was disappointing. Margaret
mingled her protest with theirs, who had "got nothing" out of Philae,
saw that temple in her mind, drenched and drab, half-drowned and faded,
rising from swollen water.

She thought of Philae, as it should be, as she followed the others
on board. The light suddenly switched on, the house-boat came back. So
Philae should come back, vermillion and gold, bright in green cobalt and
varnished green, like water, lying on wet leaf-pads. Somewhere, someone
should suddenly switch the lights on. It would be no more miraculous
than this; themselves safe on board, standing on solid planks, after
that mysterious Styx-like progress, across this baffling river.

They saw each other, now miraculously, in the familiar bright
lights of the Rosetta, as people who had dined together for some
days, who had danced, who had chattered, who had exchanged cynicisms
in bazaars, who had warned each other across trodden dust, of the wiles
of this

22.

this or that donkey-boy of this or that dragoman. They faced each
other from Barganat Bay, from Fifth Avenue, from Main Street,
Cincinatti, and they spoke, each to each, the language that each had
learned, in his familiar last life.

In that last life, Margaret really had learned a more desiccated
English, but since her debacle with Captain Rafton, she found herself
drawn closer to these others. Wind makes people, doesn't it, sand
and sun and thunder? Storm, snow, sleet, hail—well, she concluded
weakly, "Here, it's more like America."

The width of the river, the depth of the sky, the tilt of a sail-
boat toward a house-boat— America? She didn't know what she did mean,
had found it expressed, somewhere, by the voice that addressed Sadie,
"It's like the Arizona desert." Certainly, Sadie and her companions
could find similarities for these things, could say, "But those are like our
Pasadena lizards", or could discuss the relative size of bat-wings.
There was, it was apparent, no scale of these values to be found in
England.

Nevertheless, it was the English, Margaret would find herself insisting,
who kept this living, who built the great dam and she would click the usual
intellectual counter, "What of the island, Philae?" Philae was all but
drowned beneath the Nile, a drowned temple for a dead goddess. Was
Philae a drowned temple for a dead goddess?

Philae was

---

Philae was all but lost, but not lost certainly. Race characteristics,
insistence on the perpetuation of the species, had kept Philae alive,
as it had lived here always. Concentrated for a moment, Isis had retained
permanence, was for all time, this goddess. Race scattered, lost, is never

originally lost

23.

lost entirely. Race, seeking its advantage, may sweep asross country
continents, Isis still does live in Arizona. This last was prompted
by the voice of Mary.

Mary, seated on the edge of the opposite bunk, was nervously
fitting and re-fitting slim feet into slippers, edged with ridiculous,
uncurled plumes. Her feet rose from the cloud of shredded feather, like
naked birds, lifting a little, to sink back into fantastic nests.
Mary was now seated there, with sensitive arrogant features, with the
decorum and the ruthlessness of the American virgin. She was something
bigger, being in second, to MArgaret's strained, fatalistic vision,
something so much worse.

Mary had "got engaged" to the Cope boy, she had told them all, after
that night in the Karnak temple. That was nieither here nor there, but
Margaret felt vaguely implicated. If she hadn't taken Mary to Karnak,
Mary wouldn't have involved herself with this same "boy". Mary, by the
same token was a harlot, having after this evening and the prolongment
of the thê-dansant, beneath the eucalyptus trees at Assuan, got herself
re-engaged to the Baltimore Stephen Browne who said he loved her for
& her naiveté, for her (in fact) complete Americanism. Where was
this taking them? In Baltimore, it seemed, there were no pepper-trees and
those and the eucalyptus and the native pintcettias put him in mind
of California. Mary had despised California and the "coast". She now
embraced it. "He says we will go to California, on our honey-moon."

Well, why shouldn't she? What in god's name, did any of this
matter? Margaret said to herself, "Yes, I am equally unreliable,
and equally shallow." She had come here, poignard in her heart, on a
rendezvous and she had forgotten the gallant Rafton. She had sat down
in the writing-room of the Cataract Hotel and struggled with a

24.

refractory pen. She had written, with a stub-pen, in the Cataract
Hotel, at the end of the world, to a chance soldier, she had written
half-defined words to someone (name forgotten). She was a jumble of
like insincerity, she had race-characteristic with Mary.

Margaret said, "Mary, get into bed, then." What did it matter
whether the man's name was Jerry or Stephen? It was evident "Jerry"
and "Stephen" were both "ideas", in the mind of Mary. Race characteristic,
this~~ half-baked do-what-you-will-and-be-damned-to-all-conventions
left them still unsatisfied. Mary had the permanence and the charlatanism
of a bright beetle. Her shell was hard. She seemed to nest in roses.
At heart, she was a devourer. Isis was dethroned from the dam, above
Philae.

Stars hung too near; enchantment yet pertains, yet has no recognized
chart nor course of being; Osiris is scattered not only along Nile
river, but along all mud-banks and sandbanks from Liverpool to Tank-
town, Montana; women are individually seeking, as one woman, fragments
of the Eternal Love. " - yes - certainly take my nail-set."

Mary was still sitting on the edge of the bed, polishing finger-nails.
Her feet were ridiculously poised, slightly jazzed out, slightly toed in.
She danced beautifully. Already negro-rhythm and style was creating new
art-form. Our American negroes, thought Margaret, inanely, come from
Africa. Certainly, Margaret concluded, in the things of actual life,
Egypt is nearer America than Europe because of that very transplanted
negro race-urge in the sub-soil, they were nearer Africa. Tom-tom and
the Arab music; the beating in Margaret's own head of a gong that went
on, remembering words from the stub-pen scratched hastily as Assuan.

Things, people, exist in no parallel dimension. They climb
spirals, there is always that spiral, where Isis seeks the fragments

25.

of her dead Lord. He was buried here at Philae.

"Turn out the light, Mary." Margaret lay in her bunk. The gong beat in her head. She wished the boat would move, plough them out of this stagnation; there was terror in this river. She wished the boat would lumber out, heavy and ridiculous, a flat plank floating on a pond. She longed for the nosing-forward of the house-boat. A gong beat on and on, as Mary put the light out.

Her brain went on with its tom-tom, the thud-thud of the boat-wheel really. It was like an old-fashined paddle-wheel ferry to get you across a river, out of Mark Twain. Those Americans upstairs, were responsible, they wouldn't leave well enough alone, actually talked of light and darkness, and the temple, as if these things held contemporary interest. It was best to be cool and collected, indifferent, as the things came out of the tomb, like Darnovan with his slouch hat on the back of his head instead of a sun-helmet and Carter with his engineer expression—engineer? They were practical people, who built dams and when they excavated a tomb, there was no nonsense about it, all done to order, shelves of tiny objects were laid carefully on stretchers, like objects really, already on shelves in a museum. It was better to think of them like that -like things in a museum, scattered somehow out of the dimension, for this was an old-fashioned sort of paddle-boat, like you read about in the early-American novel, floating down the Mississippi. It was more like America.

Things held, like a cat held, living in all dimensions. That day they went to take the photograph they had walked right through the place where the little temple should be - an Arab popped up - or had she

26.

dreamed it? He said, "Meaw". Was this an experience or a dream or
had someone told it, like the hawk on a gold chain at dinner? But Meaw
was Arabic for cat and she or the person to whom the story had been
told or the person who told it, wondered if the Arab had a cat, and
went forward while he ran on. She thought he was taking her to a cat
somewhere, maybe one of those great wild-cats the officers bring up
from the Soudan. She wanted one of those cats. But she went on across
the sand, it was like a dream even if it wasn't, and they were in the tiny
Sekmet temple. This was the temple that now had forbidden visitors by
moon-light for the moon at certain phases, cast a strange light so that the
polished globe or stone-halo about the cat-head, shone, so they said,
with supernatural light—and some French woman (but French women are
hysterical) jabbered in a unknown tongue, anyhow so they said. People
talked too much — there was nothing in it. The Arabs helped at the
tomb — but people talked too much, said the violated Pharoah would have
his revenge — as others had had. Others?

Meaw was a great cat, that was all there was about it, anywhere and in
any language. There were those statues, for instance, seated in the garden
of the Hotel Luxor and she had sat on the verandah with the stuffed
alligator, or crocodile, varnished and neatly mounted on the wall.
Rafton was at home there, had been in the Holy Land, in Greece too. But
what did he know of anything? The things he said, were transmuting-stations
for other things said. There were vibrations in the things he said, but
one had to be careful. It was so hysterical of the French women, for the
little temple that was really and actually about the size of the Birth
House (she had seen that wasn't there) had been closed. Rafton hadn't
told her about the cat-house otr the lion-house. Where was he? She
had written, it would be anti-climax if you came now. Come now.

27.

So she had saved her face, for she hadn't had time to see him,
even if he had been there. But no doubt, by that time, he had found someone
else to ride into the desert with him; perhaps he had so ridden. It was
all a nurse-maid novelette, Mary herself couldn't have done better.
Rafton wasn't Rafton but a sort of transmitting-agent. It was not Rafton who
had said "The Greeks came to Egypt to learn." All Rafton knew of the
Greeks was that they cheated, had fleas in the beds at Samothrace where
he, unhappily, once was stationed, that they grew tobacco in Macedonia
and currants in Stampoulia. All Rafton knew about Greeks was that they
were an unreliable Balkan nation. "The Greeks came to Egypt to learn",
was not spoken by this Captain Rafton, on his way up to Assuan,
engineer, consultant on this same Great-Dam. Rafton was not Rafton -
who then, was Margaret?

In a moment, she knew that she would not be. There wasn't
any question of it. The boat was quiet but not stagnant. There was a
wind somewhere. She had been asleep and was wakened by the rattling of the
curtain that shivered, hanging straight down, but shaking the
curtain-rings. All the doors have these rings., Margaret said to herself,
assuring herself of something. It was a green curtain, she remembered.
She felt they must have been moving forward steadily for hours, for
the air was different, fresh to her nostrils, to her lungs. It was
not so unusual to wake like this. Curtain-rings do rattle. It had been
her constant pre-occupations, she recalled, during the sand-storm; she
had felt more malaise than she had ever felt in any storm at sea. She repeated
to herself, that it was natural for curtain-rings to rattle.

She propped herself up on her elbow however, as one does before
wind or shock. The curtains moved almost imperceptibly, but it was

28.

by

wind or shock. The curtains parted ever so slightly, a fraction, only enough to let light in. Well - it's like heat-lightning, she said to herself, there may be a storm somewhere. Her mind worked, as if she were talking aloud. She knew there was no storm anywhere.

It was absolutely quiet.

People should rattle things, turn in beds; she seemed to have remembered elbows thumping on partitions and occasional muffled "damns" and shaving-mugs being filled - but that was in the morning. Arabs, linked in a strange sort of dance, washed the decks to rhythm, but of course that was in the morning. It would soon be morning.

She knew, as one does know these things, that the slices of light weren't ordinary slices of light. But I am propped on my elbow, it's quite natural. Probably it's a lantern from some passing house-boat or sail-boat.

She knew it was no lantern.

The curtain was flung inward and her eyes shut, as they do, automatically, before some blaze of light before forked-lightning. It wasn't forked-lightning or even heat-lightning, it was a sheet of luminous light, such as you get at dawn, pre-dawn. But it was still It was dawn but still dark. Well - what can I do? She could jerk suddenly alert, shout for help, call Mary. She could not shout for help, call Mary. It would be anti-climax if you came now, she had written. This wasn't anti-climax. Come now, she had written.

He came now.

So this was the god, the demonstration, but it didn't prove Rafton was or wasn't. Rafton was a sort of symbol, I am a sort of symbol. O God - I never thanked him. O God, let him know I thanked him. The stars,

29.

over the temple, were like a near roof. Let me thank him.

But if I walk out (I know now, if I walk out past that curtain,
there will be eternity) it will be awkward. She thought in stupid symbol,
how awkward it would be for Mary, what a shock to find me or not find me. If
they couldn't find me ...this was, she knew, a mere convention, she couldn't
walk out. She couldn't move, anymore than she could on the wall at Karnak -
though she was un-selfconscious then, didn't know she was in another
dimension. Now, she did know.

If I get up and look out across the river, I will see - I will
see - Hadn't she already seen enough? She was frozen. I must stay here.
Would it be better to call Mary? The curtain was flung back and, through
no volition of her own, she gazed out across the river. She imagined the Nile,
she did not know why, as crowded with boats. There was no doubt music,
which she didn't hear but would hear, if she walked out. All she saw was one
star, luminous in the east. It was so large that she wanted to measure
it - in some way - a tea-cup might do. It was as large as the
electric-light bulb, that was by the door, on Mary's side. She tried to
give it a size for she said, I will forget, either I will walk out
and never come back. Or I will forget. She said, the star is as large as
the electric-light bulb ...

---

"Did you sleep well?" "Tolerably." There was the familiar chug-chug
of the paddle-wheel, sounds off, the clatter of dishes, the pad
of bare feet along the deck. "Are you going up for breakfast?"
"Not this morning. I've just rung." She sat up. There would be a tray,
tea steaming in a small brown pot, familiar, English, almost common-

30.

place, Lyons Corner-house. There would be toast and honey in a glass-jar. She held to these things.

"Hand me my cigarettes, will you?" Everything must be ordinary. She forced herself to search a wall to see if an electric bulb was there. Yes - there was a large - bulbous light-bulb. As big as that star. She must hold on to something, whether it was an ordinary star, the east does things, the sky, the desert, surely it must be in any text-book. A star as large as a somewhat bloated electric-light bulb? It was a star - the star - She must hold on to something.

It was a very ordinary miracle - as miracles go.

It was quite logical -stars are like that in Egypt. Isis wept here for Osiris; the guide-book said, he was buried there at Philae. It was part of the tomb -part of - someone who was dead, was living, "out of Egypt;" it was, as the little boy said of Hamlet, too full of quotations. It was all quotations.

"The Greeks came to Egypt to learn" for instance, well she had learnt something. She had, as a matter of fact, learnt everything. There wasn't anything else she could learn. That is, there wasn't anything else - she faced it here now, in Egypt. She must weigh reality in terms of a carefully copied shawl, with thread of green, violet, blue and pale lavender, twined into naturalistic little flowers. A box of cigarettes, was real.

Mary was real enough; for the matter of that, Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton, with her pre-occupation with patent leather hand-bags, a second best diamond-set wrist-watch (she had informed them at dinner last night how much better it was to leave one's valuables in the hotel-safe — she had left hers at Luxor). There were such things as curtain-rings, for instance, a soap-dish that had annoyed her with its jingling, as they

31.

had crept down, beaten, toward Assuan, in the sand-storm. Sand was real.
It crept into canisters and tin-boxes, "You should have seen my
collars," Sadie's father or uncle or husband had exclaimed, that first day.
There was one reality of hunger, another of thirst. There was reality
of a sponge-bath, soaked in really cold water. "Dip that towel in water,
Mary."

"Have you got a head-ache?" "No - not exactly." The cigarette could wait, Mary shoved forward the soap-dish, for an ash-tray. Margaret slapped the wet towel against her temples. "That's all right." A negro was standing, exactly like a steward on a river-boat, or a train-porter in America, with her tray. "O good—breakfast." There was reality of hot tea - there would be, in a moment.

There was a reality of something else, she tried to remember.
It was beating out toward the open-sea, foam flecked its sleek sides.
It was sleek and swift and cut through ocean-water. It was fitted
with soap-dishes that didn't rattle, with fine bevelled edges, a yacht
almost. It was making for Sicily where there was reality of rock,
blue thyme, water. There was a spring that welled up in the market-place —
cold water. She put down the towel. "O, don't bother with the towel."

Margaret said, "I'm trying to remember something - O yes, tell
your mother, I'll come back ...on that boat ..."

It was a name she was trying to remember ...de luxe steam-ship appur-
tenances mixed oddly with other word-reactions. Hesperia was the name,
wasn't it, of a mythical country, some Garden with golden apples ...
or was it a Star merely?