“Kit, Kit. I’m afraid, but it’s not only that. Kit! All these years I’ve been living for you. I didn’t know it, and now I do. I do know it! But now you’re going away.” He tried to roll over and lie on top of her arm; he clutched her hand always tighter.

“I’m not!” she cried.

His legs moved spasmodically.

“I’m right here!” she shouted, even louder, trying to imagine how her voice sounded to him, whirling down his own dark halls toward chaos. And as he lay still for a while, breathing violently, she began to think: “He says it’s more than just being afraid. But it isn’t. He’s never lived for me. Never. Never.” She held to the thought with an intensity that drove it from her mind, so that presently she found herself lying taut in every muscle without an idea in her head, listening to the wind’s senseless monologue, For a time this went on; she did not relax. Then little by little she tried to draw her hand away from Port’s desperate grasp. There was a sudden violent activity beside her, and she turned to see him partially sitting up.

“Port!” she cried, pushing herself up and putting her hands on his shoulders. “You’ve got to lie down!” She used all her strength; he did not budge. His eyes were open and he was looking at her. “Port!” she cried again in a different voice. He raised one hand and took hold of her arm.

“But Kit,” he said softly. They looked at each other. She made a slight motion with her head, letting it fall onto his chest. Even as he glanced down at her, her first sob came up, and the first cleared the passage for the others. He closed his eyes again, and for a moment had the illusion of holding the world in his arms—a warm world all tropics, lashed by storm. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” he said. It was all he had the strength to say. But even if he had been able to say more, still he would have said only: “No, no, no, no.”

It was not a whole life whose loss she was mourning there in his arms, but it was a great part of one; above all it was a part whose limits she knew precisely, and her knowledge augmented the bitterness. And presently within her, deeper than the weeping for the wasted years, she found a ghastly dread all formed and growing. She raised her head and looked up at him with tenderness and terror. His head had dropped to one side; his eyes were closed. She put her arms around his neck and kissed his forehead many times.

Then, half-pulling and half-coaxing, she got him back down into bed and covered him. She gave him his pill, undressed silently and lay down facing him, leaving the lamp burning so she could see him as she fell asleep. The wind at the window celebrated her dark sensation of having attained a new depth of solitude.

XXIII

“More wood!” shouted the lieutenant, looking into the fireplace where the flames were dying down. But Ahmed refused to be prodigal with the wood, and brought in another small armful of the meager, gnarled branches. He remembered the early mornings of bitter cold when his mother and sister had got up long before dawn to set out across the high dunes toward Hassi Mokhtar; he remembered their return when the sun would be setting, and their faces, seamed with fatigue, as they came into the courtyard bent over double beneath their loads. The lieutenant would often throw on the fire as much wood as his sister had used to gather in the entire day, but he would not do it; he always brought in a scant amount. The lieutenant was quite aware that this was sheer recalcitrance on Ahmed’s part. He considered it a senseless but unalterable eccentricity.

“He’s a crazy boy,” said Lieutenant d’Armagnac, sipping his vermouth-cassis, “but honest and faithful. Those are the prime qualities to look for in a servant. Even stupidity and stubbornness are acceptable, if he has the others. Not that Ahmed is stupid, by any means. Sometimes he has a better intuition than I. In the case of your friend, for instance. The last time he came to see me here at my house. I invited him and his wife for dinner. I told him I would send Ahmed to let him know exactly which day it would be. I was ill at the time. I think my cook had been trying to poison me. You understand everything I am saying, monsieur?”

“Oui, oui,” said Tunner, whose ear was superior to his tongue. He was following the lieutenant’s conversation with only a slight amount of difficulty.

“After your friend had left, Ahmed said to me: ‘He will never come.’ I said: ‘Nonsense. Of course he will, and with his wife.’ ‘No,’ said Ahmed. ‘I can tell by his face. He has no intention of coming.’ And you see he was right. That very evening they both left for El Ga’a. I heard only the next day. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

“Oui,” said Tunner again; he was sitting forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, looking very serious.

“Ah, yes,” yawned his host, rising to throw more wood on the fire. “A surprising people, the Arabs. Of course here there’s a very heavy admixture of Soudanese, from the time of slavery—”

Tunner interrupted him. “But you say they’re not in El Ga’a now?”

“Your friends? No. They’ve gone to Sba, as I told you. The Chef de Poste there is Captain Broussard; he is the one who telegraphed me about the typhoid. You’ll find him a bit curt, but he’s a fine man. Only the Sahara does not agree with him. Some it does, some not. Me, for example, I’m in my element here.”

Again Tunner interrupted. “How soon do you think I can be in Sba?”

The lieutenant laughed indulgently. “Vous etes bien pressi! But there’s no hurry with typhoid. It will be several weeks before your friend will care whether he sees you or not. And he will not be needing that passport in the meantime! So you can take your time.” He felt warmly toward this American, whom he found much more to his liking than the first. The first had been furtive, had made him vaguely uneasy (but perhaps that impression had been due to his own state of mind at the time). In any case, in spite of Tunner’s obvious haste to leave Bou Noura, he found him a sympathetic companion, and he hoped to persuade him to stay a while.

“You will remain for dinner?” said the lieutenant.

“Oh,” said Tunner distraughtly. “Thank you very much.”

First of all there was the room. Nothing could change the hard little shell of its existence, its white plaster walls and its faintly arched ceiling, its concrete floor and its windows across which a sheet had been tacked, folded over many times to keep out the light. Nothing could change it because that was all there was of it, that and the mattress on which he lay. When from time to time a gust of clarity swept down upon him, and he opened his eyes and saw what was really there, and knew where he really was, he fixed the walls, the ceiling and the floor in his memory, so that he could find his way back next time. For there were so many other parts of the world, so many other moments in time to be visited; he never was certain that the way back would really be there. Counting was impossible. How many hours he had been like this, lying on the burning mattress, how many times he had seen Kit stretched out on the floor nearby, had made a sound and seen her turn over, get up and then come toward him to give him water—things like that he could not have told, even if he had thought to ask them of himself. His mind was occupied with very different problems. Sometimes he spoke aloud, but it was not satisfying; it seemed rather to hold back the natural development of the ideas. They flowed out through his mouth, and he was never sure whether they had been resolved in the right words. Words were much more alive and more difficult to handle, now; so much so that Kit did not seem to understand them when he used them. They slipped into his head like the wind blowing into a room, and extinguished the frail flame of an idea forming there in the dark. Less and less he used them in his thinking. The process became more mobile; he followed the course of thoughts because he was tied on behind. Often the way was vertiginous, but he could not let go. There was no repetition in the landscape; it was always new territory and the peril increased constantly. Slowly, pitilessly, the number of dimensions was lessening. There were fewer directions in which to move. It was not a clear process, there was nothing definite about it so that he could say: “Now up is gone.” Yet he had witnessed occasions when two different dimensions had deliberately, spitefully, merged their identities, as if to say to him: “Try and tell which is which.” His reaction was always the same: a sensation in which the outer parts of his being rushed inward for protection, the same movement one sometimes sees in a kaleidoscope on turning it very slowly, when the parts of the design fall headlong into the center. But the center! Sometimes it was gigantic, painful, raw and false, it extended from one side of creation to the other, there was no telling where it was; it was everywhere. And sometimes it would disappear, and the other center, the true one, the tiny burning black point, would be there in its place, unmoving and impossibly sharp, hard and distant. And each center he called “That.” He knew one from the other, and which was the true, because when for a few minutes sometimes he actually came back to the room and saw it, and saw Kit, and said to himself—“I am in Sba,” he could remember the two centers and distinguish between them, even though he hated them both, and he knew that the one which was only there was the true one, while the other was wrong, wrong, wrong.