I know now that I shall return to the Everglades. As the example of that brave apostate priest who gave the cross to me illustrates, there is an immense reward to be found in that frozen forest. There in the Everglades the transfiguration of all living and inanimate forms occurs before our eyes, the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identity. However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become apostles of the prismatic sun.

So, when my convalescence is complete and I return to Washington, I shall seize an opportunity to visit the Florida peninsula again with one of the many scientific expeditions. It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled alligators glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.

The Delta at Sunset

Each evening, when the dense powdery dusk lay over the creeks and drained mud-basins of the delta, the snakes would come out on to the beaches. Half-asleep on the wicker stretcher-chair below the awning of his tent, Charles Gifford watched their sinuous forms coiling and uncoiling as they wound their way up the slopes. In the opaque blue light the dusk swept like a fading searchlight over the damp beaches, and the interlocked bodies shone with an almost phosphorescent brilliance.

The nearest creeks were three hundred yards from the camp, but for some reason the appearance of the snakes always coincided with Gifford’s recovery from his evening fever. As this receded, carrying with it the familiar diorama of reptilian phantoms, he would sit up in the stretcher-chair and find the snakes crawling across the beaches, almost as if they had materialized from his dreams. Involuntarily he would search the sand around the tent for any signs of their damp skins.

‘The strange thing is they always come out at the same time,’ Gifford said to the Indian head-boy who had emerged from the mess tent and was now covering him with a blanket. ‘One minute there’s nothing there, and the next thousands of them are swarming all over the mud.’

‘You not cold, sir?’ the Indian asked.

‘Look at them now, before the light goes. It’s really fantastic. There must be a sharply defined threshold — ‘ He tried to lift his pale, bearded face above the hillock formed by the surgical cradle over his foot, and snapped: ‘All right, all right!’

‘Doctor?’ The head-boy, a thirty-year-old Indian named Mechippe, continued to straighten the cradle, his limpid eyes, set in a face of veined and weathered teak, watching Gifford.

‘I said get out of the damned way!’ Leaning weakly on one elbow, Gifford watched the last light fade across the winding causeways of the delta, taking with it a final image of the snakes. Each evening, as the heat mounted with the advancing summer, they came out in greater numbers, as if aware of the lengthening periods of his fever.

‘Sir, I get more blanket for you?’

‘No, for God’s sake.’ Gifford’s thin shoulders shivered in the dusk air, but he ignored the discomfort. He looked down at his inert, corpse-like body below the blanket, examining it with far more detachment than he had felt for the unknown Indians dying in the makeshift WHO field hospital at Taxcol. At least there was a passive repose about the Indians, a sense of the still intact integrity of flesh and spirit, if anything reinforced by the failure of one of the partners. It was this paradigm of fatalism which Gifford would have liked to achieve — even the most wretched native, identifying himself with the irrevocable flux of nature, had bridged a greater span of years than the longest-lived European or American with his obsessive timeconsciousness, cramming so-called significant experiences into his life like a glutton. By contrast, Gifford realized, he himself had merely thrown aside his own body, divorcing it like some no longer useful partner in a functional business marriage. So marked a lack of loyalty depressed him.

He tapped his bony loins. ‘It’s not this, Mechippe, that ties us to mortality, but our confounded egos.’ He smiled slyly at the head-boy. ‘Louise would appreciate that, don’t you think?’

The head-boy was watching a refuse fire being raised behind the mess tent. He looked down sharply at the supine figure on the stretcher-chair, his half-savage eyes glinting like arrow heads in the oily light of the burning brush. ‘Sir? You want—?’

‘Forget it,’ Gifford told him. ‘Bring two whisky sodas. And some more chairs. Where’s Mrs Gifford?’

He glanced up at Mechippe when he failed to reply. Briefly their eyes met, in an instant of absolute clarity. Fifteen years earlier, when Gifford had come to the delta with his first archaeological expedition, Mechippe had been one of the junior camp-followers. Now he was in the late middle age of the Indian, the notches on his cheeks lost in the deep hatchwork of lines and scars, wise in the tent-lore of the visitors.

‘Miss’ Gifford — resting,’ he said cryptically. In an attempt to alter the tempo and direction of their dialogue, he added: ‘I tell Mr Lowry, then bring whiskies and hot towel, Doctor.’

‘Okay, Mechippe.’ Lying back with an ironic smile, Gifford listened to the head-boy’s footsteps move away softly through the sand. The muted sounds of the camp stirred around him — the cooling plash of water in the shower stall, the soft interchanges of the Indians, the whining of a desert dog waiting to approach the refuse dump — and he sank downwards into the thin tired body stretched out in front of him like a collection of bones in a carpet bag, rekindling the fading senses of touch and pressure in his limbs.

In the moonlight, the white beaches of the delta glistened like banks of luminous chalk, the snakes festering on the slope like the worshippers of a midnight sun.

Half an hour later they drank their whiskies together in the dark tinted air. Revived by Mechippe’s massage, Charles Gifford sat upright in the stretcher-chair, gesturing with his glass. The whisky had momentarily cleared his brain; usually he was reluctant to discuss the snakes in his wife’s presence, let alone Lowry’s, but the marked increase in their numbers seemed important enough to mention. There was also the mildly malicious pleasure — less amusing now than it had been — of seeing Louise shudder at any mention of the snakes.

‘What is so unusual,’ he explained, ‘is the way they emerge on to the banks at the same time. There must be a precise level of luminosity, an exact number of photons, to which they all respond — presumably an innate trigger.’

Dr Richard Lowry, Gifford’s assistant and since his accident the acting leader of the expedition, watched Gifford uncomfortably from the edge of his canvas chair, rotating his glass below his long nose. He had been placed downwind from the loose bandages swaddling Gifford’s foot (little revenges of this kind, however childish, alone sustained Gifford’s interest in the people around him), and carefully averted his face as he asked: ‘But why the sudden increase in numbers? A month ago there was barely a snake in sight?’

‘Dick, please!’ Louise Gifford turned an expression of martyred weariness on Lowry. ‘Must we?’

‘There’s an obvious answer,’ Gifford said to Lowry. ‘During the summer the delta drains, and begins to look like the half-empty lagoons that were here 50 million years ago. The giant amphibians had died out, and the small reptiles were the dominant species. These snakes are probably carrying around what is virtually a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene as sharp as our own memories of New York and London.’ He turned to his wife, the shadows cast by the distant refuse fire hollowing his cheeks. ‘What’s the matter, Louise? Don’t say you can’t remember New York and London?’