HESPERIA

ABOVE THE MNE.

UNIVERSALLY WRITTEN.

I.

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 presentment 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 to
Assuan on a job. She might, of course, take his words,
literally,
au pied de la latter, 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 novellete.
She didn't.

3/4

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

He twisted his mouth in that peculiar way, not grossly voluptuous, that served, with no too great elegance, to shift, from one corner of his mouth to the other, his just lighted cigarette. His mouth, his lips curled over, his tongue arched, reminded her (curious throw-back) of one of those Dionysian bulls in professional frieze-relief. He was bull rather than horse or lion. This was perhaps throw-back again to the pre-armistice lover-husband, some peculiar affiliation. Something in her, sub-conscious had been tapped, Margaret Fairwood 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 but inhibition didn't allow me, then, to realize it." Some door had opened, not so very subtly. Rationalistic explanation would, after all, best serve.

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

4

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 to them. 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, even brown, almost Hindoo colour. NOW
she wanted hands of iron to break his knees like iron
slave-fingers, tearing down outgrown effigies from temples.

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

6

usual not altogether subtle definition, abberation, 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, that 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
capable
outright. Was or was not Rafton/of distinguishing between
mind and 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, she had again repudiated "experience". Now
again, she repudiated magnificence, shelter, that Theseus
tors&. A world ever so high, ever so cold, ever so dis-
tant was 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 Hysperia, it had been full up, three months."

Hysperia brought inevitable wood-reaction, lux steamship
appurtenances, mixed oddly with other word-reactions.

"Hysperia" was the name, wasn't it, of a mythical country,
some Garden with golden apples or was it a Star merely?

7/

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." Margaret Fairwood said, "how can I?"
The matter was now one of supreme indifference. She hadn't
known, didn't dare face the realization of what her casual
staggering into molten sunlight had meant. Take it or leave
it. That was just it. She couldn't. Her gesture how-
ever 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 proper-
ly for that night. She said again to Mary, "I can't come."
"But surely Mrs. Fairwood said, "Why don't you call me
Margaret?" "O, I don't know. There always were so
Margaret Fairwood realized,
many - " So she was not to be confused with Mary's genera-
tion, with that so many "girl friend" Mary tactfully hadn't
added. Mary will keep me in that category, missing-link
between "Mama" and those others. Well, then Margaret said
to herself, I will be Mrs. Fairwood. "My dear friend,
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
Fairwood knew that her official employer, her more than

8/.

centennial sublimated Egyptologist, was in dire straits between the municipality of Cairo, some native faction, and the academic factions of London and the New York Metropolitan museum. There was this rumour, too, that Darnovan had been 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, she added as if to thwart it with finality. "Well, Mary, I just won't then," she thwarted with such feeble denial, her own presdence of what she added, knew inevitably must be if she finally 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 in the Luxor dining-room, flourishing her steamer ticket. "Mama said I was just to get your ticket." Margaret Wharton, she was a small guest then, presumably, in a small way (she would let them do the extras, she could just afford the ticket) of the Page Thorpes, terrible 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 Rosett 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 small trunk." Heroic action of Mrs. Thorpe Wharton, visiting outlandish

12

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 volume of Early 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 on them, to seem as if this,
like Captain Rafton 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 realize 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 inter-
lude of miniature cataract, did little to alleviate this
growing depression, this claustrophobia; 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. Margaretilibard, stifling in
her cabin, thought only of crude elephants and a giraffe,

16,

the dark loam, she knew, was used to line the irrigation ditches from which in the rainy winter, great violets spring up, the size almost of briar-roses.

Huge Violets, no longer lined this ditch. It was late February, spring roses drooped on 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, connected in a weary arid marriage. The sort of love, she thought, disjointedly, that is neither happy nor unhappy, neither awake nor asleep, meticulous unyielding of day to night, a sumberous, wife to a husband not yet awakened, her sort of simile.

Apparently, there would soon be dinner, another little ceremony, though every evening, Mrs. Page 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 silly little pin-wheel of excitement, but why not, said Margaret Wharton, herself lost for a reason, her reason for coming here exactly.

17.

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, incoohate eucalyptus, 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 Ceasar 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, whose name freely translated is ivory-island became in just one second, emerald shot with silver, in shadow, semi-translucent opal. The moon didn't rise, it sent heralds, silver that spread across the half-sky, would-seep upward. Its veil was no longer ironically "veil" (used as we use the word, forgetting the original image in metaphorically the time worn simile, "veil of light" or "veil", if it happens," of darkness". It was that actually.

18

The day, instead of remaining a jumbled syncopated
tomb sort of torture of jaded memories was, by the same
token, resusitated, became alive, the dead day, became one
with all eternal days, not just a tired day, shopping.
Margaret recalled the day, to-day as vivid, beautiful, har-
monious.

The day was resusitated, 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 bar-
tered for woven scarves and ivory and jade ornaments,
at Assuan, across this very stretch of river. In that light,
foregoing fatigue (dead flower resusitated) she recalled
the jumbled bazaars, 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 contrasted
broken chords, false qualities of present day appraisement.
There was here no such thing as "trash" as she had called
it in the bazaars. Magic of Elephantium, river-island
at the foot of the first Nile cataract, presumed had decreased other.

24

She had been out in that garden to find something
and she hadn't found it. That much she could confess.
She stepped indoors through another window, 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.

... why have I come here? Presumably to write this
letter. The day has been intangible, then out of its seeming
blur and worthlessness, the moon ... above Elephantium ...
Margaret Fairwood put down her pen. She saw in the broken
slice of mirror a figure she had noted vaguely on the parapet.
It was here, indoors, incongruously clothed in blue velvet,
one of those poured-in effects of perfect corsage. It held
a wide, three-tiered feather fan or fan-stick. The face
bending to it was reflected in little broken patterns; the
frame of the mirror was one of those Moorish effects that
cut the mirror into harem slices, little triangles of mirror
which gave back broken image of the room, a bit of the blue
costume, the tip of one of the feathers, an arm and a vulgar
diamond affair of little rows of bright beads. An arm, a fan

25.

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.
At the end, there was the square, symmetrical little birth-house.
I did not know it was there. I said good-night.
next morning, I was frozen. I didn't speak. You thought, I was
crude. Either way, I was crude. If you were a god, 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
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
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, virgin
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,

26

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,
made small and human, brought into child-proportion, insect myself
or bee or bird, from 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? 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 pattern about the few
words, the words twisted back at her, familiar letter-pattern,
**come now.** It was strange to her, had she not written **come now?**
Her poised pen moved forward, to cross out the letters, so strange-
ly 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

27

was written hierarchically, as if she had not done it. She couldn't cross it out. She must stop looking at it.

She folded the note-paper, automatically, pushed it into an envelope, scratched vague address, said, "but this ~~I'll add a postscript, on the home trip.~~" Mary said "yes, have they told you? Mamas 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 the last night's sand-storm inland, and something to do with fresh outbreak of something. Contrary to previous arrangement, it appeared, anyhow, they were to leave to-night.

So then, it was all over. Not that it really mattered. I came here casually, said Margaret Fairwood, I should never actually have come to meet him. But something is all over struck a gong in her head, that had gone empty, with a sort of prescience of disaster. Why can't one just enjoy things? The hybiscus was too large, how was it possible that there should be a pelican? She would run through the garden, shut her eyes to velvet blackness, at 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

29

being arranged for her. She could not even, she mused, pack
a tooth-brush here, without repercussions of one sort or another.

The subdued lights above Elephantium renewed impression,
of that deep in and up of moon-light that had been Spirit. She
had conceded that moon-light could no 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
there were
missed the boat, anyhow I'd
a letter-box at the quay, it was such fun having the postmarks
on the letters."

29

"Isn't just any Egyptian stamp exciting enough, Mary?" But Margaret didn't care 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 Baileys 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 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/cut across to say, wasn't and couldn't be, 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

30

night-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 instantaneously, as they judged it tacking. Mary went on, "I got some good snaps of those little patches, filled with watermelons." "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 boat swerved from zig-zag, straight outward toward a shadow on dark water. Margaret judged this finally must be the house-boat, Rossetti.

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 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 moonlight, to see if we couldn't get something out of it." Philae, they agreed loudly, as they neared the familiar boat hulk, was disappointing. All the

31,

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 had been switched on, the house-boat had come 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 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 water.

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 or that camelboy, of the superior fanaticism of this or that dragoman. They faced each other from Barnagat Bay, from Fifth Avenue, from Main Street, Cincinnati, 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 dessicated English, but since her debacle with Captain Rafton, she found herself drawn closer

32.

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, "How it's like the Arizona
desert." Certainly, Sadie and her companions could find
similies for these things, could say "but those are like our
Rocky Mountain 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, Isis a dead goddess?

Philae was all but lost, but not lost certainly. Race
characteristics, daemon insistence on the perpetuation of the

34.

Baltimore

enchanting Philadelphia Stephen Browne who said he loved her for her naivté and entire child freshness, for her (in fact) ~~complete American~~ affiliation. Where was this taking them?

Baltimore

In Philadelphia, it seemed, there were no pepper-trees and those and the eucalyptus and the native Egyptian pointcettias put him in mind of California. de la Rive

Mary had defied 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? America faced America. Margaret Fairwood 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 Captain Rafton. She had sat down in the writing-room of the Cataract hotel and men and images of men, dead and living and half-dead and half-born and un-burn and lately living, had crowded about her, refractory, unfamiliar pen point. She had written, with a stub pen, in the Cataract hotel, at the end of the world, to a chance dead soldier, and she had likewise written half defined words to another someone (name forgotten), who had changed her from a school-girl to a flapper. She was a jumble of like insincerity, she held race-characteristic with Mary.

Margaret Fairwood said, "Mary, get into bed, then." What

37.

she had forgotten. She found she was still talking. She
must talk aloud to Mary.

10.

But Mary was asleep now, she must talk to herself.

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 ritually and to order, shelves of tiny objects, laid carefully on stretch-er, 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.

38

Things held like a cat held, living in all dimension.

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,
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 women (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 Pharaoh 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

39,

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,
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 weren't 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/was that they cheated,
had fleas in the beds at Samothrace where he, unhappily, once was
stationed,

40

11

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 constant pre-occupations, she recalled, during the sand-storm, she had felt more malaise than 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. 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-lightening, 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

41

"damns" and shaving-mugs being filled - but that was in the morning. Arabs, linked in a strange sort of dance, and 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. It is, she thought a sort of rapes, yes, the door would be, I suppose, symbolically the woman, the light ray, the man, the god. But I am propped on my elbow, with its quiet natural. Probably it's a lantern from some passing house-boat or sail-hoat.

She knew it was no lantern.

The curtain flung inward and her eyes shut, as they do, automatically, before some blaze of light, before forked lightening. It wasn't fork lightening or even heat-lightening, 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 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

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of symbol, 0 God - I never thanked him. 0 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 her or not find her. If they didn't find her, this
was, she knew, a mere convention, she couldn't walk out. She
couldn't move anymore than she could on the wall, though she was
un-selfconscious then, didn't know she was feeling 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 ....

43.

18.

"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, like Lyons' 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 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.

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"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 three 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 been 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 stiff 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 -

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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 pitted on little paths, blue thyme, and water. There was a spring that welled up in a market-place - cold water. She put down the towel. "O, don't bother with the towel."

"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 lux steamship appurtenances mixed oddly with other word-reactions. Hysperia was the name, wasn't it, of a mythical country, some Garden with golden apples ... or was it a Star merely?

Vand
1924 (1948)