‘I don’t know whether I can or not.’ She pushed a lock of fraying blonde hair off her forehead. ‘I wish you wouldn’t think about the snakes all the time.’

‘Well, I’m beginning to understand them. I was always baffled by the way they’d appear at the same time. Besides, there’s nothing else to do. I don’t want to sit here staring at that damned Toltec ruin of yours.’

He gestured towards the low ridge of sandstone, its profile illuminated against the white moonlit clouds, which marked the margins of the alluvial bench half a mile from the camp. Before Gifford’s accident their chairs had faced the ruined terrace city emerging from the thistles which covered the ridge. But Gifford had tired of staring all day at the crumbling galleries and colonnades where his wife and Lowry worked together. He told Mechippe to dismantle the tent and turn it through ninety degrees, so that he could watch the last light of the sunset fading over the western delta. The burning refuse fires they now faced provided at least a few wisps of motion. Gazing for hours across the endless creeks and mud-banks, whose winding outlines became more and more serpentine as the summer drought persisted and the level of the water table fell, he had one evening discovered the snakes.

‘Surely it’s simply a shortage of dissolved oxygen,’ Lowry commented.

He noticed Gifford regarding him with an expression of critical distaste, and added: ‘Jung believes the snake is primarily a symbol of the unconscious, and that its appearance always heralds a crisis in the psyche.’

‘I suppose I accept that,’ Charles Gifford said. With rather forced laughter he added, shaking his foot in the cradle: ‘I have to. Don’t I, Louise?’ Before his wife, who was watching the fires with a distracted expression, could reply he went on: ‘Though in fact I disagree with Jung. For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Paleocene are re-created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing is the snake a symbol of wisdom.’

Richard Lowry frowned doubtfully into his glass. ‘I’m not convinced, sir. It was primitive man who had to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche.’

‘Absolutely right,’ Gifford rejoined. ‘How else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience? The only real landscapes are the internal ones, or the external projections of them, such as this delta.’ He passed his empty glass to his wife. ‘Agree, Louise? Though perhaps you take a Freudian view of the snakes?’

This thin jibe, uttered with the cold humour which had become characteristic of Gifford4 brought their conversation to a halt. Restlessly, Lowry looked at his watch, eager to be away from Gifford and his pathetic boorishness. Gifford, a cold smirk on his lips, waited for Lowry to catch his eye; by a curious paradox his dislike of his assistant was encouraged by the latter’s reluctance to retaliate, rather than by the still ambiguous but crystallizing relationship between Lowry and Louise. Lowry’s meticulous neutrality and good manners seemed to Gifford an attempt to preserve a world on which Gifford had turned his back, that world where there were no snakes on the beaches and where events moved on a single plane of time like the blurred projection of a three-dimensional object by a defective camera obscura.

Lowry’s politeness was also, of course, an attempt to shield himself and Louise from Gifford’s waspish tongue. Like Hamlet taking advantage of his madness to insult and cross-examine anyone at will, Gifford often used the exhausted half-lucid interval after his fever subsided to make his more pointed comments. As he emerged from the penumbral shallows, the looming figures of his wife and assistant still surrounded by the rotating mandalas he saw in his dreams, he would give full rein to his tortured humour. That in this way he was helping his wife and Lowry towards an inevitable climax only encouraged Gifford.

His long farewell to Louise, protracted now for so many years, at last seemed feasible, even if only part of the greater goodbye, the vast leave-taking that Gifford was about to embark upon. The fifteen years of their marriage had been little more than a single frustrated farewell, a search for a means to an end which their own strengths of character had always prevented.

Looking up at Louise’s sun-grazed but still handsome profile, at her fading blonde hair swept back off her angular shoulders, Gifford realized that his dislike of her was in no way personal, but merely part of the cordial distaste he felt for almost the entire human race. And even this deeply ingrained misanthropy was only a reflection of his own undying self-contempt. If there were few people whom he had ever liked, there were, equally, few moments during which he had ever liked himself. His entire life as an archaeologist, from his early adolescence when he had first collected fossil ammonites from a nearby limestone outcropping, was an explicit attempt to return to the past and discover the sources of his self-loathing.

‘Do you think they’ll send an aeroplane?’ Louise asked after breakfast the next morning. ‘There was a noise then…’

‘I doubt it,’ Lowry said. He gazed up at the empty sky. ‘We didn’t ask for one. The landing field at Taxcol is disused. During the summer the harbour drains and everyone moves up-coast.’

‘There’ll be a doctor, surely? Not everyone will have gone?’

‘Yes, there’s a doctor. There’s one permanently attached to the port authority.’

‘A drunken fool,’ Gifford interjected. ‘I refuse to let him touch me with his poxy hands. Forget about the doctor, Louise. Even if someone is prepared to come out here, how do you think he’ll manage it?’

‘But Charles—’

Gifford gestured irritably at the glistening mudbanks. ‘The whole delta is draining like a dirty bath, no one is going to risk a stiff dose of malaria just to put a splint on my ankle. Anyway, that boy Mechippe sent is probably still hanging around here somewhere.’

‘But Mechippe insisted he was reliable.’ Louise looked down helplessly at her husband propped against the back of the stretcher-chair. ‘Dick, I wish you could have gone with him. It’s only fifty miles. You would have been there by now.’

Lowry nodded uneasily. ‘Well, I didn’t think… I’m sure everything will be all right. How is the leg, sir?’

‘Just dandy.’ Gifford had been staring out across the delta. He noticed Lowry peering down at him with a long puckered face. ‘What’s the matter, Richard? Does the smell offend you?’ Suddenly exasperated, he snapped: ‘Do me a favour and take a walk, dear chap.’

‘What—?’ Lowry stared at him uncertainly. ‘Of course, Doctor.’

Gifford watched Lowry’s neatly groomed figure walk away stiffly among the tents. ‘He’s awfully correct, isn’t he? But he doesn’t know how to take an insult yet. I’ll see that he gets plenty of practice.’

Louise slowly shook her head. ‘Do you have to, Charles? Without him we’d be in rather a spot, you know. I don’t think you’re being very fair.’

‘Fair?’ Gifford repeated the word with a grimace. ‘What are you talking about? For God’s sake, Louise.’

‘All right then,’ his wife replied patiently. ‘I don’t think you should blame Richard for what’s happened.’

‘I don’t. Is that what your dear Dick suggests? Now that this thing is beginning to smell he’s trying to throw his guilt back on to me.’

‘He is not—’

Gifford petulantly thumped the wicker elbow rest. ‘He damned well is!’ He gazed up darkly at his wife, his thin twisted mouth framed by the rim of beard. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, you will too by the time this thing is finished.’

‘Charles, please..

‘Who cares, anyway?’ Gifford lay back weakly for a moment, and then, as he recovered, a curious feeling of lightheaded and almost euphoric calm coming over him, began again: ‘Dr Richard Lowry. How he loves his doctorate. I wouldn’t have had the nerve at his age. A third-rate PhD for work that I did for him, and he styles himself "Doctor".’