I PROMISED to tell you how one falls in love.

A young man named Geoffrey Clifton had met a friend at Oxford who had mentioned what we were doing. Hecontacted me, got married the next day, and two weeks later flew with his wife to Cairo. They were on the lastdays of their honey.moon. That was the beginning of our story.

When I met Katharine she was married. A married woman. Clifton climbed out of the plane and then,unexpected, for we had planned the expedition with just him in mind, she emerged. Khaki shorts, bony knees. Inthose days she was too ardent for the desert. I liked his youth more than the eager.ness of his new young wife.

He was our pilot, messenger, reconnaissance. He was the New Age, flying over and drop.ping codes of longcoloured ribbon to advise us where we should be. He shared his adoration of her constantly. Here were four menand one woman and her husband in his verbal joy of honeymoon. They went back to Cairo and returned a monthlater, and it was almost the same. She was quieter this time but he was still the youth. She would squat on somepetrol cans, her jaw cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees, staring at some constantly flapping tarpaulin,and Clif.ton would be singing her praises. We tried to joke him out of it, but to wish him more modest wouldhave been against him and none of us wanted that.

After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred orshe realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain asocialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself. It was painful to watch, because Cliftoncould not see it, her self-education. She read everything about the desert. She could talk about Uweinat and thelost oasis, had even hunted down marginal articles.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified withcynical villains in a book. I don’t believe in permanence, in relation.ships that span ages. I was fifteen yearsolder. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.

What altered her during their postponed honeymoon on the Nile estuary outside Cairo? We had seen them for afew days —they had arrived two weeks after their Cheshire wedding. He had brought his bride along, as hecouldn’t leave her and he couldn’t break the commitment to us. To Madox and me. We would have devouredhim. So her bony knees emerged from the plane that day. That was the burden of our story. Our situation.

Clifton celebrated the beauty of her arms, the thin lines of her ankles. He described witnessing her swim. Hespoke about the new bidets in the hotel suite. Her ravenous hunger at breakfast.

To all that, I didn’t say a word. I would look up sometimes as he spoke and catch her glance, witnessing myunspoken exasperation, and then her demure smile. There was some irony. I was the older man. I was the man ofthe world, who had walked ten years earlier from Dakhla Oasis to the Gilf Kebir, who charted the Farafra, whoknew Cyrenaica and had been lost more than twice in the Sand Sea. She met me when I had all those labels. Orshe could twist a few degrees and see the labels on Madox. Yet apart from the Geographical Society we wereunknown; we were the thin edge of a cult she had stumbled onto because of this marriage.

The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as anexplorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tactof words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you ahundred miles.

Our expedition was about forty miles from Uweinat, and Madox and I were to leave alone on a reconnaissance.

The Cliftons and the others were to remain behind. She had con.sumed all her reading and asked me for books. Ihad nothing but maps with me. “That book you look at in the evenings?” “Herodotus. Ahh. You want that?” “Idon’t presume. If it is private.” “I have my notes within it. And cuttings. I need it with me.” “It was forward ofme, excuse me.” “When I return I shall show it to you. It is unusual for me to travel without it.”

All this occurred with much grace and courtesy. I explained it was more a commonplace book, and she bowed tothat. I was able to leave without feeling in any way selfish. I acknowl.edged her graciousness. Clifton was notthere. We were alone. I had been packing in my tent when she had approached me. I am a man who has turnedmy back on much of the social world, but sometimes I appreciate the delicacy of manner.

We returned a week later. Much had happened in terms of findings and piecings together. We were in goodspirits. There was a small celebration at the camp. Clifton was always one to celebrate others. It was catching.

She approached me with a cup of water. “Congratulations, I heard from Geoffrey already—” “Yes!” “Here, drinkthis.” I put out my hand and she placed the cup in my palm. The water was very cold after the stuff in thecanteens we had been drinking. “Geoffrey has planned a party for you. He’s writing a song and wants me to reada poem, but I want to do something else.” “Here, take the book and look through it.” I pulled it from myknapsack and handed it to her.

After the meal and herb teas Clifton brought out a bottle of cognac he had hidden from everyone till thismoment. The whole bottle was to be drunk that night during Madox’s ac.count of our journey, Clifton’s funnysong. Then she began to read from The Histories—the story of Candaules and his queen. I always skim past thatstory. It is early in the book and has little to do with the places and period I am interested in. But it is of course afamous story. It was also what she had chosen to talk about.

This Candaules had become passionately in love with his own wife; and having become so, he deemed that hiswife was fairer by far than all other women. To Gyges, the son of Daskylus (for he of all his spearmen was themost pleasing to him), he used to describe the beauty of his wife, praising it above all measure.

“Are you listening, Geoffrey?”

“Yes, my darling.”

He said to Gyges: “Gyges, I think that you do not believe me when I tell you of the beauty of my wife, for ithappens that men’s ears are less apt of belief than their eyes. Contrive therefore means by which you may lookupon her naked.”

There are several things one can say. Knowing that even.tually I will become her lover, just as Gyges will be thequeen’s lover and murderer of Candaules. I would often open Herod.otus for a clue to geography. But Katharinehad done that as a window to her life. Her voice was wary as she read. Her eyes only on the page where the storywas, as if she were sinking within quicksand while she spoke.

“I believe indeed that she is of all women the fairest and I entreat you not to ask of me that which it is not lawfulfor me to do.” But the King answered him thus: “Be of good courage, Gyges, and have no fear, either of me, thatI am saying these words to try you, or of my wife, lest any harm may happen to you from her. For I will contriveit so from the first that she shall not perceive that she has been seen by you.”

This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman, who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard thewords she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband. Perhaps she was justreading it to him. Perhaps there was no ulterior motive in the selection except for them.selves. It was simply astory that had jarred her in its familiar.ity of situation. But a path suddenly revealed itself in real life. Eventhough she had not conceived it as a first errant step in any way. I am sure.

“I will place you in the room where we sleep, behind the open door; and after I have gone in, my wife will alsocome to lie down. Now there is a seat near the entrance of the room and on this she lays her garments as shetakes them off one by one; and so you will be able to gaze at her at full leisure.”

But Gyges is witnessed by the queen when he leaves the bedchamber. She understands then what has been doneby her husband; and though ashamed, she raises no outcry... she holds her peace.

It is a strange story. Is it not, Caravaggio? The vanity of a man to the point where he wishes to be envied. Or hewishes to be believed, for he thinks he is not believed. This was in no way a portrait of Clifton, but he became apart of this story. There is something very shocking but human in the husband’s act. Something makes us believeit.

The next day the wife calls in Gyges and gives him two choices.

“There are now two ways open to you, and I will give you the choice which of the two you will prefer to take.

Either you must slay Candaules and possess both me and the King.dom of Lydia, or you must yourself here onthe spot be slain, so that you mayest not in future, by obeying Candaules in all things, see that which you shouldnot. Either he must die who formed this design, or you who have looked upon me naked.”

So the king is killed. A New Age begins. There are poems written about Gyges in iambic trimeters. He was thefirst of the barbarians to dedicate objects at Delphi. He reigned as King of Lydia for twenty-eight years, but westill remember him as only a cog in an unusual love story.

She stopped reading and looked up. Out of the quicksand. She was evolving. So power changed hands.

Meanwhile, with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love.

Words, Caravaggio. They have a power.

When the Cliftons were not with us they were based in Cairo. Clifton doing other work for the English, Godknows what, an uncle in some government office. All this was before the war. But at that time the city had everynation swimming in it, meeting at Groppi’s for the soiree concerts, dancing into the night. They were a popularyoung couple with honour be.tween them, and I was on the periphery of Cairo society. They lived well. Aceremonial life that I would slip into now and then. Dinners, garden parties. Events I would not normally havebeen interested in but now went to because she was there. I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.

How do I explain her to you? With the use of my hands? The way I can arc out in the air the shape of a mesa orrock? She had been part of the expedition for almost a year. I saw her, conversed with her. We had each beencontinually in the presence of the other. Later, when we were aware of mutual desire, these previous momentsflooded back into the heart, now suggestive, that nervous grip of an arm on a cliff, looks that had been missed ormisinterpreted.

I was at that time seldom in Cairo, there about one month in three. I worked in the Department of Egyptology onmy own book, Recentes Explorations dans le Desert Libyque, as the days progressed, coming closer and closerto the text as if the desert were there somewhere on the page, so I could even smell the ink as it emerged from thefountain pen. And simul.taneously struggled with her nearby presence, more obsessed if truth be known withher possible mouth, the tautness be.hind the knee, the white plain of stomach, as I wrote my brief book, seventypages long, succinct and to the point, complete with maps of travel. I was unable to remove her body from thepage. I wished to dedicate the monograph to her, to her voice, to her body that I imagined rose white out of a bedlike a long bow, but it was a book I dedicated to a king. Believing such an obsession would be mocked,patronized by her polite and em.barrassed shake of the head.

I began to be doubly formal in her company. A characteristic of my nature. As if awkward about a previouslyrevealed na.kedness. It is a European habit. It was natural for me—having translated her strangely into my textof the desert—now to step into metal clothing in her presence.

The wild poem is a substituteFor the woman one loves or ought to love,One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

On Hassanein Bey’s lawn—the grand old man of the 1923 expedition—she walked over with the governmentaide Roun-dell and shook my hand, asked him to get her a drink, turned back to me and said, “I want you toravish me.” Roundell returned. It was as if she had handed me a knife. Within a month I was her lover. In thatroom over the souk, north of the street of parrots.

I sank to my knees in the mosaic-tiled hall, my face in the curtain of her gown, the salt taste of these fingers inher mouth. We were a strange statue, the two of us, before we be.gan to unlock our hunger. Her fingersscratching against the sand in my thinning hair. Cairo and all her deserts around us.

Was it desire for her youth, for her thin adept boyishness? Her gardens were the gardens I spoke of when I spoketo you of gardens.

There was that small indentation at her throat we called the Bosphorus. I would dive from her shoulder into theBos-phorus. Rest my eye there. I would kneel while she looked down on me quizzical as if I were a planetarystranger. She of the quizzical look. Her cool hand suddenly against my neck on a Cairo bus. Taking a closed taxiand our quick-hand love between the Khedive Ismail Bridge and the Tipperary Club. Or the sun through herfingernails on the third-floor lobby at the museum when her hand covered my face.

As far as we were concerned there was only one person to avoid being seen by.

But Geoffrey Clifton was a man embedded in the English machine. He had a family genealogy going back toCanute. The machine would not necessarily have revealed to Clifton, married only eighteen months, his wife’sinfidelity, but it began to encircle the fault, the disease in the system. It knew every move she and I made fromthe first day of the awkward touch in the porte cochere of the Semiramis Hotel.

I had ignored her remarks about her husband’s relatives. And Geoffrey Clifton was as innocent as we were aboutthe great English web that was above us. But the club of body.guards watched over her husband and kept himprotected. Only Madox, who was an aristocrat with a past of regimental associations, knew about such discreetconvolutions. Only Madox, with considerable tact, warned me about such a world.

I carried Herodotus, and Madox—a saint in his own mar.riage—carried Anna Karenina, continually rereadingthe story of romance and deceit. One day, far too late to avoid the machinery we had set in motion, he tried toexplain Clifton’s world in terms of Anna Karenina’s brother. Pass me my book. Listen to this.

Half Moscow and Petersburg were relations or friends of Oblonsky. He was born into the circle of people whowere, or who became, the great ones of this earth. A third of the official world, the older men, were his father’sfriends and had known him from the time he was a baby in petticoats.... Conse.quently, the distributors of theblessings of this world were all friends of his. They could not pass over one of their own.... It was only necessarynot to raise objections or be envious, not to quarrel or take offence, which in accordance with his nat.uralkindliness he never did.

I have come to love the tap of your fingernail on the syringe, Caravaggio. The first time Hana gave me morphinein your company you were by the window, and at the tap of her nail your neck jerked towards us. I know acomrade. The way a lover will always recognize the camouflage of other lovers.

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear undersand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, mydisappearances, her sus.picions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia ofhidden love.

“I think you have become inhuman,” she said to me.

“I’m not the only betrayer.”

“I don’t think you care—that this has happened among us. You slide past everything with your fear and hate ofowner.ship, of owning, of being owned, of being named. You think this is a virtue. I think you are inhuman. If Ileave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?”

I said nothing.

“Deny it, damn you.”

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

She returned to her husband.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replacedby estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.

What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?

She climbed back into her house beside her husband, and I retired to the zinc bars.

I’ll be looking at the moon,but I’ll be seeing you.

That old Herodotus classic. Humming and singing that song again and again, beating the lines thinner to bendthem into one’s own life. People recover from secret loss variously. I was seen by one of her retinue sitting witha spice trader. She had once received from him a pewter thimble that held saffron. One of the ten thousandthings.

And if Bagnold—having seen me sitting by the saffron trader—brought up the incident during dinner at the tablewhere she sat, how did I feel about that? Did it give me some comfort that she would remember the man who hadgiven her a small gift, a pewter thimble she hung from a thin dark chain around her neck for two days when herhusband was out of town? The saffron still in it, so there was the stain of gold on her chest.

How did she hold this story about me, pariah to the group after some scene or other where I had disgracedmyself, Bag.nold laughing, her husband who was a good man worrying about me, and Madox getting up andwalking to a window and looking out towards the south section of the city. The conver.sation perhaps moved toother sigh tings. They were mapmak-ers, after all. But did she climb down into the well we helped dig togetherand hold herself, the way I desired myself towards her with my hand?

We each now had our own lives, armed by the deepest treaty with the other.

“What are you doing?” she said running into me on the street. “Can’t you see you are driving us all mad.”

To Madox I had said I was courting a widow. But she was not a widow yet. When Madox returned to Englandshe and I were no longer lovers. “Give my greetings to your Cairo widow,” Madox murmured. “Would’ve likedto have met her.” Did he know? I always felt more of a deceiver with him, this friend I had worked with for tenyears, this man I loved more than any other man. It was 1939, and we were all leaving this country, in any case,to the war.

And Madox returned to the village of Marston Magna, Somerset, where he had been born, and a month later satin the congregation of a church, heard the sermon in honour of war, pulled out his desert revolver and shothimself.

I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, set forth my history, that time may not draw the colour from what Man hasbrought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both Greeks and Barbarians... togetherwith the reason they fought one another.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. And Madox—to the Geographical Society—had spokenbeau.tiful accounts of our traversals and coursings. Bermann blew theory into the embers. And I? I was the skillamong them. The mechanic. The others wrote out their love of solitude and meditated on what they found there.

They were never sure of what I thought of it all. “Do you like that moon?” Madox asked me after he’d known mefor ten years. He asked it tentatively, as if he had breached an intimacy. For them I was a bit too cunning to be alover of the desert. More like Odysseus. Still, I was. Show me a desert, as you would show another man a river,or another man the metropolis of his childhood.

When we parted for the last time, Madox used the old farewell. “May God make safety your companion.” And Istrode away from him saying, “There is no God.” We were utterly unlike each other.

Madox said Odysseus never wrote a word, an intimate book. Perhaps he felt alien in the false rhapsody of art.

And my own monograph, I must admit, had been stern with accuracy. The fear of describing her presence as Iwrote caused me to burn down all sentiment, all rhetoric of love. Still, I described the desert as purely as I wouldhave spoken of her. Madox asked me about the moon during our last days together before the war began. Weparted. He left for England, the probability of the oncoming war interrupting everything, our slow un.earthing ofhistory in the desert. Good-bye, Odysseus, he said grinning, knowing I was never that fond of Odysseus, lessfond of Aeneas, but we had decided Bagnold was Aeneas. But I was not that fond of Odysseus either. Good-bye,I said.

I remember he turned back, laughing. He pointed his thick finger to the spot by his Adam’s apple and said, “Thisis called the vascular sizood.” Giving that hollow at her neck an official name. He returned to his wife in thevillage of Marston Magna, took only his favourite volume of Tolstoy, left all of his compasses and maps to me.

Our affection left unspoken.

And Marston Magna in Somerset, which he had evoked for me again and again in our conversations, had turnedits green fields into an aerodrome. The planes burned their exhaust over Arthurian castles. What drove him to theact I do not know. Maybe it was the permanent noise of flight, so loud to him now after the simple drone of theGypsy Moth that had putted over our silences in Libya and Egypt. Someone’s war was slashing apart his delicatetapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was aman who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they hadturned out now to be the enemy.

He was in Somerset alone with his wife, who had never met us. Small gestures were enough for him. One bulletended the war.

It was July 1939. They caught a bus from their village into Yeovil. The bus had been slow and so they had beenlate for the service. At the back of the crowded church, in order to find seats they decided to sit separately. Whenthe sermon began half an hour later, it was jingoistic and without any doubt in its support of the war. The priestintoned blithely about battle, blessing the government and the men about to enter the war. Madox listened as thesermon grew more im.passioned. He pulled out the desert pistol, bent over and shot himself in the heart. He wasdead immediately. A great si.lence. Desert silence. Planeless silence. They heard his body collapse against thepew. Nothing else moved. The priest fro.zen in a gesture. It was like those silences when a glass funnel round acandle in church splits and all faces turn. His wife walked down the centre aisle, stopped at his row, mutteredsomething, and they let her in beside him. She knelt down, her arms enclosing him.

How did Odysseus die? A suicide, wasn’t it? I seem to recall that. Now. Maybe the desert spoiled Madox. Thattime when we had nothing to do with the world. I keep thinking of the Russian book he always carried. Russiahas always been closer to my country than to his. Yes, Madox was a man who died because of nations.

I loved his calmness in all things. I would argue furiously about locations on a map, and his reports wouldsomehow speak of our “debate” in reasonable sentences. He wrote calmly and joyfully about our journeys whenthere was joy to describe, as if we were Anna and Vronsky at a dance. Still, he was a man who never enteredthose Cairo dance halls with me. And I was the man who fell in love while dancing.

He moved with a slow gait. I never saw him dance. He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world.

Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs oftheory. If he witnessed a new knot among a desert tribe or found a rare palm, it would charm him for weeks.

When we came upon messages on our travels—any wording, contemporary or ancient, Arabic on a mud wall, anote in English written in chalk on the fender of a jeep—he would read it and then press his hand upon it as if totouch its possible deeper meanings, to become as intimate as he could with the words.

He holds out his arm, the bruised veins horizontal, facing up, for the raft of morphine. As it floods him he hearsCaravaggio drop the needle into the kidney-shaped enamel tin. He sees the grizzled form turn its back to him andthen reappear, also caught, a citizen of morphia with him.

There are days when I come home from arid writing when all that can save me is “Honeysuckle Rose” byDjango Rein-hardt and Stephane Grappelly performing with the Hot Club of France. 1935. 1936. 1937. Greatjazz years. The years when it floated out of the Hotel Claridge on the Champs-Elysees and into the bars ofLondon, southern France, Mo.rocco, and then slid into Egypt, where the rumour of such rhythms was introducedin a hush by an unnamed Cairo dance band. When I went back into the desert, I took with me the evenings ofdancing to the 78 of “Souvenirs” in the bars, the women pacing like greyhounds, leaning against you while youmuttered into their shoulders during “My Sweet.” Courtesy of the Societe Ultraphone Franchise record company.

1938. 1939. There was the whispering of love in a booth. There was war around the corner.

During those final nights in Cairo, months after the affair was over, we had finally persuaded Madox into a zincbar for his farewell. She and her husband were there. One last night. One last dance. Almasy was drunk andattempting an old dance step he had invented called the Bosphorus hug, lifting Katharine Clifton into his wiryarms and traversing the floor until he fell with her across some Nile-grown aspidistras.

Who is he speaking as now? Caravaggio thinks.

Almasy was drunk and his dancing seemed to the others a brutal series of movements. In those days he and shedid not seem to be getting on well. He swung her from side to side as if she were some anonymous doll, andsmothered with drink his grief at Madox’s leaving. He was loud at the tables with us. When Almasy was like thiswe usually dispersed, but this was Madox’s last night in Cairo and we stayed. A bad Egyptian violinistmimicking Stephane Grappelly, and Almasy like a planet out of control. “To us—the planetary strangers,” helifted his glass. He wanted to dance with everyone, men and women. He clapped his hands and announced,“Now for the Bosphorus hug. You, Bernhardt? Hetherton?” Most pulled back. He turned to Clifton’s young wife,who was watching him in a courteous rage, and she went forward as he beckoned and then slammed into her, histhroat already at her left shoul.der on that naked plateau above the sequins. A maniac’s tango ensued till one ofthem lost the step. She would not back down from her anger, refused to let him win by her walking away andreturning to the table. Just staring hard at him when he pulled his head back, not solemn but with an attackingface. His mouth muttering at her when he bent his face down, swearing the lyrics of “Honeysuckle Rose,”

perhaps.

In Cairo between expeditions no one ever saw much of Almasy. He seemed either distant or restless. He workedin the museum during the day and frequented the South Cairo market bars at night. Lost in another Egypt. It wasonly for Madox they had all come here. But now Almasy was dancing with Katharine Clifton. The line of plantsbrushed against her slimness. He pivoted with her, lifting her up, and then fell. Clifton stayed in his seat, halfwatching them. Almasy lying across her and then slowly trying to get up, smoothing back his blond hair,kneeling over her in the far corner of the room. He had at one time been a man of delicacy.

It was past midnight. The guests there were not amused, except for the easily amused regulars, accustomed tothese ceremonies of the desert European. There were women with long tributaries of silver hanging off their ears,women in sequins, little metal droplets warm from the bar’s heat that Almasy in the past had always been partialtowards, women who in their dancing swung the jagged earrings of silver against his face. On other nights hedanced with them, carry.ing their whole frame by the fulcrum of rib cage as he got drunker. Yes, they wereamused, laughing at Almasy’s stom.ach as his shirt loosened, not charmed by his weight, which leaned on theirshoulders as he paused during the dance, col.lapsing at some point later during a schottische onto the floor.

It was important during such evenings to proceed into the ............