SHE STANDS UP in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shiftin the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turnsand moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms.

She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house.

In the kitchen she doesn’t pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and thencontinues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

She turns into the room which is another garden—this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its wallsand ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her asshe enters.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding itabove his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he mur.murs, seeing his smile. Above the shins theburns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tighthips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up atthe foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves thehollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and hemutters.

What? she asks, coming out of her concentration.

He turns his dark face with its grey eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plumwith her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into thatwell of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk. He wakes in thepainted arbour that surrounds him with its spilling flowers, arms of great trees. He remembers picnics, a womanwho kissed parts of his body that now are burned into the colour of aubergine.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days neverlooking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of preoccupation.

His eyes lock onto the young woman’s face. If she moves her head, his stare will travel alongside her into thewall. She leans forward. How were you burned?

It is late afternoon. His hands play with a piece of sheet, the back of his fingers caressing it.

I fell burning into the desert.

They found my body and made me a boat of sticks and dragged me across the desert. We were in the Sand Sea,now and then crossing dry riverbeds. Nomads, you see. Bedouin. I flew down and the sand itself caught fire.

They saw me stand up naked out of it. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle,a carcass boat, and feet thud.ded along as they ran with me. I had broken the spareness of the desert.

The Bedouin knew about fire. They knew about planes that since 1939 had been falling out of the sky. Some oftheir tools and utensik were made from the metal of crashed planes and tanks. It was the time of the war inheaven. They could recognize the drone of a wounded plane, they knew how to pick their way through suchshipwrecks. A small bolt from a cockpit became jewellery. I was perhaps the first one to stand up alive out of aburning machine. A man whose head was on fire. They didn’t know my name. I didn’t know their tribe.

Who are you?

I don’t know. You keep asking me.

You said you were English.

At night he is never tired enough to sleep. She reads to him from whatever book she is able to find in the librarydown.stairs. The candle flickers over the page and over the young nurse’s talking face, barely revealing at thishour the trees and vista that decorate the walls. He listens to her, swallowing her words like water.

If it is cold she moves carefully into the bed and lies beside him. She can place no weight upon him withoutgiving him pain, not even her thin wrist.

Sometimes at two a.m. he is not yet asleep, his eyes open in the darkness.

He could smell the oasis before he saw it. The liquid in the air. The rustle of things. Palms and bridles. Thebanging of tin cans whose deep pitch revealed they were full of water.

They poured oil onto large pieces of soft cloth and placed them on him. He was anointed.

He could sense the one silent man who always remained beside him, the flavour of his breath when he bent downto unwrap him every twenty-four hours at nightfall, to examine his skin in the dark.

Unclothed he was once again the man naked beside the blazing aircraft. They spread the layers of grey felt overhim. What great nation had found him, he wondered. What coun.try invented such soft dates to be chewed bythe man beside him and then passed from that mouth into his. During this time with these people, he could notremember where he was from. He could have been, for all he knew, the enemy he had been fighting from the air.

Later, at the hospital in Pisa, he thought he saw beside him the face that had come each night and chewed andsoftened the dates and passed them down into his mouth.

There was no colour during those nights. No speech or song. The Bedouin silenced themselves when he wasawake. He was on an altar of hammock and he imagined in his vanity hundreds of them around him and theremay have been just two who had found him, plucked the antlered hat of fire from his head. Those two he knewonly by the taste of saliva that entered him along with the date or by the sound of their feet running.

She would sit and read, the book under the waver of light. She would glance now and then down the hall of thevilla that had been a war hospital, where she had lived with the other nurses before they had all transferred outgradually, the war moving north, the war almost over.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half herworld. She sat at the night table, hunched over, reading of the young boy in India who learned to memorizediverse jewels and objects on a tray, tossed from teacher to teacher—those who taught him dialect those whotaught him memory those who taught him to escape the hypnotic.

The book lay on her lap. She realized that for more than five minutes she had been looking at the porousness ofthe paper, the crease at the corner of page 17 which someone had folded over as a mark. She brushed her handover its skin. A scurry in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling, a moth on the night window. She looked down thehall, though there was no one else living there now, no one except the English patient and herself in the Villa SanGirolamo. She had enough vege.tables planted in the bombed-out orchard above the house for them to survive, aman coming now and then from the town with whom she would trade soap and sheets and whatever there wasleft in this war hospital for other essentials. Some beans, some meats. The man had left her two bottles of wine,and each night after she had lain with the Englishman and he was asleep, she would ceremoniously pour herself asmall beaker and carry it back to the night table just outside the three-quarter-closed door and sip away furtherinto whatever book she was reading.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washedout by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by thebombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

The villa that she and the Englishman inhabited now was much like that. Some rooms could not be enteredbecause of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the li.brary downstairs—where there was in onecorner a perma.nently soaked armchair.

She was not concerned about the Englishman as far as the gaps in plot were concerned. She gave no summary ofthe missing chapters. She simply brought out the book and said “page ninety-six” or “page one hundred andeleven.” That was the only locator. She lifted both of his hands to her face and smelled them—the odour ofsickness still in them.

Your hands are getting rough, he said.

The weeds and thistles and digging.

Be careful. I warned you about the dangers.

I know.

Then she began to read.

Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog’s paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a househe would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from abrandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust,but the dog’s paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It’s a cathedral! her father had said, so-andso’sgarden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen—a concentration of hints of all the paths the animalhad taken during the day.

A scurry in the ceiling like a mouse, and she looked up from the book again.

They unwrapped the mask of herbs from his face. The day of the eclipse. They were waiting for it. Where washe? What civilisation was this that understood the predictions of weather and light? El Ahmar or El Abyadd, forthey must be one of the northwest desert tribes. Those who could catch a man out of the sky, who covered hisface with a mask of oasis reeds knit.ted together. He had now a bearing of grass. His favourite garden in theworld had been the grass garden at Kew, the colours so delicate and various, like levels of ash on a hill.

He gazed onto the landscape under the eclipse. They had taught him by now to raise his arms and drag strengthinto his body from the universe, the way the desert pulled down planes. He was carried in a palanquin of felt andbranch. He saw the moving veins of flamingos across his sight in the half-darkness of the covered sun.

Always there were ointments, or darkness, against his skin. One night he heard what seemed to be wind chimeshigh in the air, and after a while it stopped and he fell asleep with a hunger for it, that noise like the slowed-downsound from the throat of a bird, perhaps flamingo, or a desert fox, which one of the men kept in a sewn-halfclosedpocket in his burnoose.

The next day he heard snatches of the glassy sound as he lay once more covered in cloth. A noise out of thedarkness. At twilight the felt was unwrapped and he saw a man’s head on a table moving towards him, thenrealized the man wore a giant yoke from which hung hundreds of small bottles on dif.ferent lengths of string andwire. Moving as if part of a glass curtain, his body enveloped within that sphere.

The figure resembled most of all those drawings of arch.angels he had tried to copy as a schoolboy, neversolving how one body could have space for the muscles of such wings. The man moved with a long, slow gait, sosmoothly there was hardly a tilt in the bottles. A wave of glass, an archangel, all the ointments within the bottleswarmed from the sun, so when they were rubbed onto skin they seemed to have been heated especially for awound. Behind him was translated light—blues and other colours shivering in the haze and sand. The faint glassnoise and the diverse colours and the regal walk and his face like a lean dark gun.

Up close the glass was rough and sandblasted, glass that had lost its civilisation. Each bottle had a minute corkthe man plucked out with his teeth and kept in his lips while mixing one bottle’s contents with another’s, asecond cork also in his teeth. He stood over the supine burned body with his wings, sank two sticks deep into thesand and then moved away free of the six-foot yoke, which balanced now within the crutches of the two sticks.

He stepped out from under his shop. He sank to his knees and came towards the burned pilot and put his coldhands on his neck and held them there.

He was known to everyone along the camel route from the Sudan north to Giza, the Forty Days Road. He met thecara.vans, traded spice and liquid, and moved between oases and water camps. He walked through sandstormswith this coat of bottles, his ears plugged with two other small corks so he seemed a vessel to himself, thismerchant doctor, this king of oils and perfumes and panaceas, this baptist. He would enter a camp and set up thecurtain of bottles in front of whoever was sick.

He crouched by the burned man. He made a skin cup with the soles of his feet and leaned back to pluck, withouteven looking, certain bottles. With the uncorking of each tiny bottle the perfumes fell out. There was an odour ofthe sea. The smell of rust. Indigo. Ink. River-mud arrow-wood formalde.hyde paraffin ether. The tide of airschaotic. There were screams of camels in the distance as they picked up the scents. He began to rub green-blackpaste onto the rib cage. It was ground peacock bone, bartered for in a medina to the west or the south—the mostpotent healer of skin.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemedsafe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two monthsearlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, thesound of birds. There was a sofa, a piano covered in a grey sheet, the head of a stuffed bear and high walls ofbooks. The shelves nearest the torn wall bowed with the rain, which had doubled the weight of the books.

Lightning came into the room too, again and again, falling across the covered piano and carpet.

At the far end were French doors that were boarded up. If they had been open she could have walked from thelibrary to the loggia, then down thirty-six penitent steps past the chapel towards what had been an ancientmeadow, scarred now by phosphorus bombs and explosions. The German army had mined many of the housesthey retreated from, so most rooms not needed, like this one, had been sealed for safety, the doors hammered intotheir frames.

She knew these dangers when she slid into the room, walk.ing into its afternoon darkness. She stood conscioussuddenly of her weight on the wooden floor, thinking it was probably enough to trigger whatever mechanismwas there. Her feet in dust. The only light poured through the jagged mortar circle that looked onto the sky.

With a crack of separation, as if it were being dismantled from one single unit, she pulled out The Last of theMohicans and even in this half-light was cheered by the aquamarine sky and lake on the cover illustration, theIndian in the fore.ground. And then, as if there were someone in the room who was not to be disturbed, shewalked backwards, stepping on her own footprints, for safety, but also as part of a private game, so it wouldseem from the steps that she had entered the room and then the corporeal body had disappeared. She closed thedoor and replaced the seal of warning.

She sat in the window alcove in the English patient’s room, the painted walls on one side of her, the valley on theother. She opened the book. The pages were joined together in a stiff wave. She felt like Crusoe finding adrowned book that had washed up and dried itself on the shore. A Narrative of 1757. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth.

As in all of the best books, there was the important page with the list of illustrations, a line of text for each ofthem.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, inplots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with aheaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Their Italian hill town, sentinel to the northwest route, had been besieged for more than a month, the barragefocusing upon the two villas and the monastery surrounded by apple and plum orchards. There was the VillaMedici, where the generals lived. Just above it the Villa San Girolamo, previously a nunnery, whose castlelikebattlements had made it the last stronghold of the German army. It had housed a hundred troops. As the hill townbegan to be torn apart like a battleship at sea, by fire shells, the troops moved from the barrack tents in theorchard into the now crowded bedrooms of the old nunnery. Sections of the chapel were blown up. Parts of thetop storey of the villa crumbled under explosions. When the Allies finally took over the building and made it ahospital, the steps leading to the third level were sealed off, though a section of chimney and roof survived.

She and the Englishman had insisted on remaining behind when the other nurses and patients moved to a saferlocation in the south. During this time they were very cold, without electricity. Some rooms faced onto the valleywith no walls at all. She would open a door and see just a sodden bed huddled against a corner, covered withleaves. Doors opened into land.scape. Some rooms had become an open aviary.

The staircase had lost its lower steps during the fire that was set before the soldiers left. She had gone into thelibrary, removed twenty books and nailed them to the floor and then onto each other, in this way rebuilding thetwo lowest steps. Most of the chairs had been used for fires. The armchair in the library was left there because itwas always wet, drenched by evening storms that came in through the mortar hole. Whatever was wet escapedburning during that April of 1945. There were few beds left. She herself preferred to be no.madic in the housewith her pallet or hammock, sleeping sometimes in the English patient’s room, sometimes in the hall, dependingon temperature or wind or light. In the morn.ing she rolled up her mattress and tied it into a wheel with string.

Now it was warmer and she was opening more rooms, airing the dark reaches, letting sunlight dry all thedampness. Some nights she opened doors and slept in rooms that had walls missing. She lay on the pallet on thevery edge of the room, facing the drifting landscape of stars, moving clouds, wakened by the growl of thunderand lightning. She was twenty years old and mad and unconcerned with safety dur.ing this time, having noqualms about the dangers of the pos.sibly mined library or the thunder that startled her in the night. She wasrestless after the cold months, when she had been limited to dark, protected spaces. She entered rooms that hadbeen soiled by soldiers, rooms whose furniture had been burned within them. She cleared out leaves and shit andurine and charred tables. She was living like a vagrant, while elsewhere the English patient reposed in his bedlike a king.

From outside, the place seemed devastated. An outdoor staircase disappeared in midair, its railing hanging off.

Their life was foraging and tentative safety. They used only essential candlelight at night because of the brigandswho annihilated everything they came across. They were protected by the sim.ple fact that the villa seemed aruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child. Coming out of what had happened to her during the war, shedrew her own few rules to herself. She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the greater good. Shewould care only for the burned patient. She would read to him and bathe him and give him his doses of morphine—her only communication was with him.

She worked in the garden and orchard. She carried the six-foot crucifix from the bombed chapel and used it tobuild a scarecrow above her seedbed, hanging empty sardine cans from it which clattered and clanked wheneverthe wind lifted. Within the villa she would step from rubble to a candlelit alcove where there was her neatlypacked suitcase, which held little besides some letters, a few rolled-up clothes, a metal box of medical supplies.

She had cleared just small sections of the villa, and all this she could burn down if she wished.

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders.

She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines shealso breathes in light.

She moves backwards a few feet and with a piece of white chalk draws a rectangle onto the wood floor. Thencontinues backwards, drawing more rectangles, so there is a pyramid of them, single then double then single, herleft hand braced flat on the floor, her head down, serious. She moves farther and farther away from the light. Tillshe leans back onto her heels and sits crouching.

She drops the chalk into the pocket of her dress. She stands and pulls up the looseness of her skirt and ties itaround her waist. She pulls from another pocket a piece of metal and flings it out in front of her so it falls justbeyond the farthest square.

She leaps forward, her legs smashing down, her shadow behind her curling into the depth of the hall. She is veryquick, her tennis shoes skidding on the numbers she has drawn into each rectangle, one foot landing, then twofeet, then one again, until she reaches the last square.

She bends down and picks up the piece of metal, pauses in that position, motionless, her skirt still tucked upabove her thighs, hands hanging down loose, breathing hard. She takes a gulp of air and blows out the candle.

Now she is in darkness. Just a smell of smoke.

She leaps up and in midair turns so she lands facing the other way, then skips forward even wilder now down theblack hall, still landing on squares she knows are there, her tennis shoes banging and slamming onto the darkfloor—so the sound echoes out into the far reaches of the deserted Italian villa, out towards the moon and thescar of a ravine that half circles the building.

Sometimes at night the burned man hears a faint shudder in the building. He turns up his hearing aid to draw in abanging noise he still cannot interpret or place.

She picks up the notebook that lies on the small table beside his bed. It is the book he brought with him throughthe fire— a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from otherbooks or writing in his own observations—so they all are cradled within the text ofHerodotus.

She begins to read his small gnarled handwriting.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives.

There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. Thearifi, also christened are/or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live inthe present tense.

There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realignthemselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days —burying villages. There is the hot,dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust stormthat dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blowsand eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sightowards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May,named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out ofGi.braltar, which carries fragrance.

There is also the ———, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son diedwithin it.

And the nafliat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen —a violent and cold southwesterly known toBerbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry north.easterly out of the Caucasus,“black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poisonwinds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.

Other, private winds.

Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stonesand statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering andcoagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of dark.ness.” Red sand fogs out of theSahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was alsomistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.”

There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and moreliving flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotusrecords the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “soenraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly andcompletely interred.”

Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second youare surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.”

She looks up from the book and sees his eyes on her. He begins to talk across the darkness.

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someone there had assumed I had a skillwhen my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on amap. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks tothe bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps thatdepict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of theCrusades.

So I knew their place before I crashed among them, knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, forthis cause or that greed. I knew the customs of nomads besotted by silk or wells. One tribe dyed a whole valleyfloor, blackening it to increase convection and thereby the possibility of rainfall, and built high structures topierce the belly of a cloud. There were some tribes who held up their open palm against the beginnings of wind.

Who believed that if this was done at the right moment they could deflect a storm into an adjacent sphere of thedesert, towards another, less loved tribe. There were continual drownings, tribes suddenly made historical withsand across their gasp.

In the desert it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation. When I came out of the air and crashed into the desert, intothose troughs of yellow, all I kept thinking was, I must build a raft... I must build a raft.

And here, though I was in the dry sands, I knew I was among water people.

In Tassili I have seen rock engravings from a time when the Sahara people hunted water horses from reed boats.

In Wadi Sura I saw caves whose walls were covered with paintings of swimmers. Here there had been a lake. Icould draw its shape on a wall for them. I could lead them to its edge, six thousand years ago.

Ask a mariner what is the oldest known sail, and he will describe a trapezoidal one hung from the mast of a reedboat that can be seen in rock drawings in Nubia. Pre-dynastic. Harpoons are still found in the desert. These werewater peo.ple. Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is theexile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

When I was lost among them, unsure of where I was, all I needed was the name of a small ridge, a local custom,a cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place.

What did most of us know of such parts of Africa? The armies of the Nile moved back and forth—a battlefieldeight hundred miles deep into the desert. Whippet tanks, Blenheim medium-range bombers. Gladiator biplanefighters. Eight thousand men. But who was the enemy? Who were the allies of this place—the fertile lands ofCyrenaica, the salt marshes of El Agheila? All of Europe were fighting their wars in North Africa, in SidiRezegh, in Baguoh.

He travelled on a skid behind the Bedouin for five days in darkness, the hood over his body. He lay within thisoil-doused cloth. Then suddenly the temperature fell. They had reached the valley within the red high canyonwalls, joining the rest of the desert’s water tribe that spilled and slid over sand and stones, their blue robesshifting like a spray of milk or a wing. They lifted the soft cloth off him, off the suck of his body. He was withinthe larger womb of the canyon. The buzzards high above them slipping down a thousand years into this crack ofstone where they camped.

In the morning they took him to the far reach of the siq. They were talking loudly around him now. Thedialect suddenly clarifying. He was here because of the buried guns.

He was carried towards something, his blindfolded face looking straight ahead, and his hand made to reach out ayard or so. After days of travel, to move this one yard. To lean towards and touch something with a purpose, hisarm still held, his palm facing down and open. He touched the Sten barrel and the hand let go of him. A pauseamong the voices. He was there to translate the guns.

“Twelve-millimetre Breda machine gun. From Italy.”

He pulled back the bolt, inserted his finger to find no bullet, pushed it back and pulled the trigger. Puht. “Famousgun,” he muttered. He was moved forward again.

“French seven-point-five-millimetre Chattelerault. Light machine gun. Nineteen twenty-four.”

“German seven-point-nine-millimetre MG-Fifteen air service.

He was brought to each of the guns. The weapons seemed to be from different time periods and from manycountries, a museum in the desert. He brushed the contours of the stock and magazine or fingered the sight. Hespoke out the gun’s name, then was carried to another gun. Eight weapons for.mally handed to him. He calledthe names out loud, speaking in French and then the tribe’s own language. But what did that matter to them?

Perhaps they needed not the name but to know that he knew what the gun was.

He was held by the wrist again and his hand sunk into a box of cartridges. In another box to the right were moreshells, seven-millimetre shells this time. Then others.

When he was a child he had grown up with an aunt, and on the grass of her lawn she had scattered a deck ofcards face down and taught him the game of Pelmanism. Each player allowed to turn up two cards and,eventually, through memory pairing them off. This had been in another landscape, of trout streams, birdcalls thathe could recognize from a halting frag.ment. A fully named world. Now, with his face blindfolded in a mask ofgrass fibres, he picked up a shell and moved with his carriers, guiding them towards a gun, inserted the bullet,bolted it, and holding it up in the air fired. The noise cracking crazily down the canyon walls. “For echo is thesoul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.” A man thought to be sullen and mad had written that sentencedown in an English hospital. And he, now in this desert, was sane, with clear thought, picking up the cards,bringing them together with ease, his grin flung out to his aunt, and firing each successful combi.nation into theair, and gradually the unseen men around him replied to each rifle shot with a cheer. He would turn to face onedirection, then move back to the Breda this time on his strange human palanquin, followed by a man with a knifewho carved a parallel code on shell box and gun stock. He thrived on it—the movement and the cheering afterthe solitude. This was payment with his skill for the men who had saved him for such a purpose.

There are villages he will travel into with them where there are no women. His knowledge is passed like acounter of use.fulness from tribe to tribe. Tribes representing eight thousand individuals. He enters specificcustoms and specific music. Mostly blindfolded he hears the water-drawing songs of the Mzina tribe with theirexultations, dahhiya dances, pipe-flutes which are used for carrying messages in times of emergency, themakruna double pipe (one pipe constantly sounding a drone). Then into the territory of five-stringed lyres. Avillage or oasis of preludes and interludes. Hand-clapping. Antiph-onal dance.

He is given sight only after dusk, when he can witness his captors and saviours. Now he knows where he is. Forsome he draws maps that go beyond their own boundaries and for other tribes too he explains the mechanics ofguns. The musicians sit across the fire from him. The simsimiya lyre notes flung away by a gust of breeze. Or thenotes shift towards him over the flames. There is a boy dancing, who in this light is the most desirable thing hehas seen. His thin shoulders white as papyrus, light from the fire reflecting sweat on his stomach, nakednessglimpsed through openings in the blue linen he wears as a lure from neck to ankle, revealing himself as a line ofbrown lightning.

The night desert surrounds them, traversed by a loose order of storms and caravans. There are always secrets anddangers around him, as when blind he moved his hand and cut himself on a double-edged razor in the sand. Attimes he doesn’t know if these are dreams, the cut so clean it leaves no pain, and he must wipe the blood on hisskull (his face still untouchable) to signal the wound to his captors. This village of no women he has beenbrought into in complete silence, or the whole month when he did not see the moon. Was this invented? Dreamedby him while wrapped in oil and felt and darkness?

They had passed wells where water was cursed. In some open spaces there were hidden towns, and he waitedwhile they dug through sand into the buried rooms or waited while they dug into nests of water. And the purebeauty of an inno.cent dancing boy, like sound from a boy chorister, which he remembered as the purest ofsounds, the clearest river water, the most transparent depth of the sea. Here in the desert, which had been an oldsea where nothing was strapped down or permanent, everything drifted—like the shift of linen across the boy asif he were embracing or freeing himself from an ocean or his own blue afterbirth. A boy arousing himself, hisgenitals against the colour of fire.

Then the fire is sanded over, its smoke withering around them. The fall of musical instruments like a pulse orrain. The boy puts his arm across, through the lost fire, to silence the pipe-flutes. There is no boy, there are nofootsteps when he leaves. Just the borrowed rags. One of the men crawls forward and collects the semen whichhas fallen on the sand. He brings it over to the white translator of guns and passes it into his hands. In the desertyou celebrate nothing but water.

She stands over the sink, gripping it, looking at the stucco wall. She has removed all mirrors and stacked themaway in an empty room. She grips the sink and moves her head from side to side, releasing a movement ofshadow. She wets her hands and combs water into her hair till it is completely wet. This cools her and she likes itwhen she goes outside and the breezes hit her, erasing the thunder.