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 labouredly 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

2

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 night." 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 distinguished visitors.

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

Now was the moment for it. "Captain Rafton, did you see
the Birth House? Did you have anything to do with its projec-
tion? Are you or are 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

3

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 inhibi-
tion 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-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, irrelevantly, that nothing grew there. Mollusc
hands, star-fish should so grow. She looked at her hands, brought
back to specific early-morning 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.

4

She became perversely angry; belated appraisement. It wasn't only that he was so tall. It was the stoop forward, the condescension of his slight stoop. 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 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 elbow, heavy as a millstone. She laughed, jerky monosyllable laughter, different, (so she made it) from that high 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, overseeing, 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

5

self-conscious interrogation, "would you?"

She could have left her body in this dim hall, even here,
—even early in the morning. 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 froz-
en 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, dis-
tinctive 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 clutch-
ed that. "After all, Bodge paid me for this work. I suppose I
have to do it." Anti-climax salved her conscience, minimised her
knowledge 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 distinguish-
ing 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

6

recalled as she overheard someone arguing from an upstairs bedroom 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 trade-of the Thorpe-Whartons. Mary was still insistent, "you must come back with us, mama knows people in Alex who will get us 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, de
luxe 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 on 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 supreme indifference. She hadn't known, didn't dare face
the realisation of what her casual staggering into molten sunlight

7

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 gauche-
ly. She hadn't even thanked him, for that night.

She 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 category 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 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 conventions 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

8

supreme indifference that she didn't even pretend to protest
further, when Mary appeared in 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 eternal 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 had 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."

---

Already past Kon Ombo on the Nile Boat, Rosetta, Captain
Rafton lost identity, any one of these well-groomed Englishmen and
even more suave Continental-like Americans might have been his

9

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 passen-
gers for the most part, had come all the way down stream 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 re-
lationship to Seine or Thames or Damube.

This side of the slow river, palms were scattered or grouped
in clusters, or were fantastically fringed like a careless gam:
"bang". This side of the river from Kom Ombo, they could hear the
squeaking 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.

10

It was the river, she concluded weakly, upon which Cleopatra
stretched her purple sails, but that, at the moment, failed to
convey any picture of either Cleopatra or of purple. Images fell
stagnant, like this river. It is the river, she murmured to her-
self, 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-bottle horse-flies. Allah
had ordained their settling there (and the after-effects of blind-
ness) 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? Hallucina-
tions 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

11

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 underbrush, torn leaves, water-
logged branches and the fibrous peeled bark of some tree.

Perhaps this sand-storm accounted for lead weight.
Margaret's closed 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
noon over eternal forehead, static, with side-posture. The im-
pression of these later temples was as intense as her first im-
pression of Karnak. Here however, there were no moonlight ex-
cursions and except, that all things seemed related to some other
sphere of sun and shadow, there were no "dimensional" (or should
she say "demented"?) 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

12

that last morning, 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 Kopfondo 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 were 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 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, easy 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.

13

The sand-storm, in fact, was nothing. So they said, at
the dinner. The cloud, they said, had lifted. The same care,
Margaret noted, made demarcation between tables, here as on land;
the Baltimore Stephen 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 bouillon, even if it is
cold." Above stairs an 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!

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

14

being nailed to this situation. "... *not* a gold chain, 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 incredible. 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, had value like wheat and chaff.

15

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. The sort of love, she thought, disjointedly, is neither happy nor unhappy, neither awake nor asleep, meticulous unyielding of day to night, slumber-ous, not yet awakened - her sort of simile.

Apparently, there would soon be dinner, another little ceremony, though every evening, Mrs. Thorpe-Wharton seemed to find reason for one. Last night was the last night on the boat, to-night by the same logic, would be the first night on shore, then there would be to-morrow, 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 season - 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

16

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 eucal-
yptus, dried irrigation-trenches and dead violets. Facing her,
across a stretch of water now 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 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 tra-
ditionally, metaphorically, "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, resusitated,
became alive; the dead day, became one with all eternal days.

The day was resusitated, a flower-stem in water. To watch

17

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 resusitated) she recalled the jumbled bazaars,
this morning's shopping, the poppy-red embroidered marriage-gar-
ments, 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 here merged, became the more harmonious, for the
jangled syncopation of contracted chords, false qualities of pre-
sent day appraisement. There was here no such thing as "trash"
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 the old dansant.

---

18

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

Again, over coffee, in the Cataract Hotel longhe (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,

19

received by African ambassadors. Well, so they might be, they agreed, saying it was such a comfort to have a place, theirs, on the house-boat, Rosetta 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, with 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, something 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 slightly a-symmetrical bit of flaming colour, triangulated on the shoulder‡, a Versailles bed of tulips.

20

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 cataract reminded her of banal
excursion to the Falls of the Rhine, pre-pre-pre-something.
Again, she realized the Nile as a living river, not just a crooked
twist, across school-maps, or the shaded diagram in the back of
an old Bible.

The Nile - light worshipped equally with darkness.

Here, there was wind, actually lifting hair from temples,
fluttering garments, woven fine as white-moths/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,

21

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.

She had been out in that garden to find something and she
hadn't found it. That much she could confess. She stepped in-
doors, went straight to one of the empty writing-desks, sat down
decisively. She drew 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 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.

22

At the end, there was the square, symmetrical little 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. Either way,
I was crude. If you were a master, a magician, I was crude; if
you were a man, I owed you simply thanks for that night - always
and always, all my life, the most beautiful night for 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 now, 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.

“All my life, I will regret that I didn't thank you. All my life, 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 in 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 feel their way, like one blind, reading Braille, along the outline of a great chick, a bee. All my life I will be dwarfed,

23

made small and human, brought into child-proportion, insect myself or bee or bird, from those vermilion 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 add a postscript,

25

longer be betrayed by terms such 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, "Nó, 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-marks on the letters.

"Isn't just any Egyptian town/exciting enough, Mary?" But Margaret didn't know what she was saying, little things as well as big ones were relatively unimportant. She waited at a 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 toilsome 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 - 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

26

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 com-
panion, half-heartedly expecting some sort of reply. The voice
in pitch-darkness said it supposed they were afraid of 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
swerved from zig-zag, straight outward toward a shadow on dark water.
Margaret judged this must be their boat.

Her voice, their voices, went on talking, coming-home-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

27

in familiar setting. "These day 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 dis-
appointing. All the other voices, including her own, mingled
to agree somewhat stridently, that Philae was disappointing.
Margaret mingling 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, vermilion and gold,
bright in green cobalt and varnished green, like water, lying on
wet leaf-pads. Somewhere, someone should suddenly switch 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 cynic-
isms in bazaars, who had warned each other across trodden dust, of
the wiles of this or that donkey-boy, of the superior fanatisme of

29

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 lost entirely. Race, seeking its advantage, may sweep across 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 no longer seated there, with sensitive arrogant features, with the decorum and the ruthlessness of the American virgin. She was something bigger, being in a 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 neither 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 tea-dansant, beneath the eucalyptus trees at Assuan, got herself re-engaged to the Baltimore Stephen Browne who said he loved her for her naivete,

30

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 pointcettias 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 refractory pen. She had written, with a stubpen, 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 held race-characteristic with Mary.

Margaret said, "Mary, get into bed, then." What did it matter that 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-beguiled-to-all-conventions left them still unsatisfied. Mary had the permanence and the charlatanism of a bright winged-beetle. Her shell was hard. She seemed to nest in roses. At heart, she

33

Things held, like a cat held, living in all dimensions.
That day they went to take the photographs they had walked right
through the place where the little temple should be - an Arab
popped up - or had she 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 was told or the person who told it, won-
dered 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 an 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, any-
where and in any language. There were those statues, for instance,
seated in the garden of the Hotel Luxor and she had sat on the

34

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 or the lion-house. Where was he? She had written, it would be anti-climax if you came now. Come now.

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 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 curants in Stampoulia. All Rafton knew about Greeks was that they were an unreliable and dirty Balkan nation. "The Greeks came to Egypt to learn", was not spoken by this Captain Rafton, on his way

35

up to Assuan, engineer, consultant on this same 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
wind rattling 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 thought 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 con-
stant 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 be-
fore wind or shock. It was wind or shock. The curtains moved
almost imperceptibly, but it was wind or shock. The curtain^
parted by ever so slight 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

36

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 "damnes" 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 dimensional slices of light. They were
spears 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 dark. 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
<u>you came now</u>, she had written. This wasn't anti-climax. <u>Come
now</u>, 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

37

of symbol. O God - I never thanked him. O God, let him know I thanked him. The stars, 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 didn'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 did not see 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 ...,

38

"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-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. Hold to this - let everything be ordinary. Yes, everything is ordinary. She forced herself to search a wall to see if an electric-light 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

39

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, "a match, Mary."

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 for its jingling, as they 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 bath-sponge, 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

40

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 reality of something else, she tried to remember.
It was beating out toward open-sea, foam decked 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, and 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 appurtenances 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?

HESPERIA

2

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

3

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 inhibi-
tion didn't allow me, then, to realize it." Some door had opened,
not so very subtly. Rationalistic explanation would, after all,
best serve.

She noted, irrelevantly, that nothing grew there. Mollusc
hands, star-fish should so grow. She looked at her hands, brought
back to specific early morning 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.

4

She became perversely angry; belated appraisement. It wasn't only that he was so tall. It was the stoop forward, the condescension of his slight stoop. 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 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 elbow, heavy as a millstone. She laughed, jerky monosyllable laughter, different (so she made it) from that high ripple of entire effacement in the moonlit tombs last night.

5

She could have left her body in this dim hall, even here,
even early in the morning. 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 froz-
en 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, dis-
tinctive 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 clutch-
ed that. "After all, Bodge paid me for this work. I suppose I
have to do it." Anti-climax salved her conscience, minimised her
knowledge 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 distinguish-
ing mind from matter?

6

recalled as she overheard someone arguing from an upstairs bedroom 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 tirade of the Thorpe-Whartons. Mary was still insistent, "you must come back with us, mama knows people in Alex who will get us 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."

---

Anti-climax in the shape of Mary Page, insisted, "well,
now your good-looking Englishman's gone off, you'll just have
to come on 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 supreme indifference. She hadn't known, didn't dare face
the realisation of what her casual staggering into molten sunlight

7

8

---

Already past Kon Ombo on the Nile Boat, Rosetta, Captain
Rafton lost entity, any one of these well-groomed Englishmen and
even more suave Continental-like Americans might have been his

9

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 down stream 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 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 gamaine "bang". This side of the river from Kom Ombo, they could hear the squeaking 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.

10

11

decide it, if I meet him.

Perhaps this sand-storm accounted for lead weight.
Margaret's closed 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 im-
pression of these later temples was as intense as her first im-
pression of Karnak. Here however, there were no moonlight ex-
cursions and except, that all things seemed related to some other
sphere of sun and shadow, there were no "dimensional" (or should
she say "demented"?) 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 of History of Architecture.

12

that last morning, had eluded her - no, not so much eluded her
as crassly cheated. It was terrible to weigh possible with im-
possible, to adjust her psychic-lenses, those days past. Here,
it was even more terrible to realise that Kon 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 depres-
sion; they were going inland. A boat, properly speaking, makes
for the open spaces; they were 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 of elephants and a giraffe, sizes too big, that she had
pasted, as a child, on a cut-out map of Africa.

13

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!

14

---

15

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.

16

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 tra-
ditionally, metephorically, "veil of light" or "veil", if it
happens, "of darkness". It was that actually.

- - - -

17

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

18

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

Again, over coffee, in the Cataract Hotel longue (coffee
that wasn't quite so "Turkish", as that other) they agreed that
it **was** rather fun buying things to the accompaniment of conver-
sation, the flash of black eyes flattering, appraising, at the
same time cajoling, as if one were European (almost) royalty,

19

received by African ambassadors. Well, so they might be, they
agreed, saying it was such a comfort to have a place, theirs, on
the house-boat, Rosetta 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, with 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, something
Ramadan.

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 slightly a-symmetrical bit of flaming colour,
triangulated on the shoulders, a Versailles bed of tulips.

20

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."

Here, there was wind, actually lifting hair from temples,
fluttering garments, woven fine as white-moths-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,

21

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 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.

22

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 now, 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.

All my life, I will regret that I didn't thank you. O, my
God - 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 in 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 feel their way, like one blind, reading Braille, along the
outline of a great chick, a bee. All my life I will be dwarfed,

23

made small and human, brought into child-proportion/ insect my-
self or bee or bird, fly from those vermilion 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.

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 add a postscript,

24

on the home-trip." 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 some-
thing, Mary added, speaking casually, about wind and something
to do with the 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; said 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 sponge 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 more spirit. She had conceded that moon-light could no

25

longer be betrayed by terms such as silver, glimmer, glamour or
irridescence; 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 differ-
ent post-marks on the letters.

"Isn't just any Egyptian town exciting enough, Mary?" But
Margaret didn't know what she was saying, little things as well
as big ones were relatively unimportant. She waited at a 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 toilsome trip back by train however wasn't good enough, con-
nections 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 - 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

26

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 com-
panion, half-heartedly expecting some sort of reply. The voice
in pitch-darkness said it supposed they were afraid of 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
swerved from zig-zag, straight outward toward a shadow on dark water.
Margaret judged this must be their boat.

27

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 cynic-
isms in bazaars, who had warned each other across trodden dust, of
the wiles of this or that donkey-boy, of the superior fanaticism of

29

Philae was all but lost, but not lost certainly. Race char-
acteristics, 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 lost entirely. Race,
seeking its advantage, may sweep across 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 ridicu-
lous, 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 not seated there, with sensitive arro-
gant features, with the decorum and the ruthlessness of the
American virgin. She was something bigger, being in a second, to
Margaret's strained, fatalistic vision, something so much worse.

30

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 refractory pen. She had written, with a stubpen, 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 held race-characteristic with Mary.

Margaret said, "Mary, get into bed, then." What did it matter that 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-beguiled-to-all-conventions left them still unsatisfied. Mary had the permanence and the charlatanism of a bright-winged beetle. Her shell was hard. She seemed to nest in roses. At heart, she

31

was a devourer. Isis was dethroned from the dam, above Philae.

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

Mary was 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 a stub-pen scratched hastily at Assuan.

Things, people, exist in no parallel dimension. They climb
spirals, there is always that spiral, where Isis seeks the fragments
of her dead Lord. "He was buried here at Philae." Mary was star-
ing at her.

"Turn out the light, Mary." Margaret lay in her bunk. The
gong beat in her head. She wished the boat would move, plough them

32

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-fashioned 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 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 novels, floating down the Mississippi. It was more like America.

33

Things held, like a cat held, living in all dimensions.
That day they went to take the photographs they had walked right
through the place where the little temple should be - an Arab
popped up - or had she 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 was told or the person who told it, won-
dered 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 an 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?