Halliday was about to accept, but the chauffeur made no response to the suggestion. Halliday felt himself shiver in the cooler air moving toward the river out of the dusk. He bowed to Gabrielle Szabo and walked off past the chauffeur. As he stopped, about to remind her of the trip to Leptis Magna, he heard her say, ‘Gaston, there was a doctor here.’
The meaning of this oblique remark remained hidden from Halliday as he watched the house from the roof of the Oasis Hotel. Gabrielle Szabo sat on the terrace in the dusk, while the chauffeur made his foraging journeys to Columbine and the refineries along the river. Once Halliday came across him as he rounded a corner near the Fine Arts School, but the man merely nodded and trudged on with his jerrican of water. Halliday postponed a further visit to the house. Whatever her motives for being there, and whoever she was, Gabrielle Szabo had brought him the dreams that Columbine Sept Heures and his long journey south had failed to provide. Besides, the presence of the woman, turning some key in his mind, was all he required. Rewinding his clocks, he found that he slept for eight or nine hours of the nights he set himself.
However, a week later he found himself again failing to sleep. Deciding to visit his neighbour, he went out across the river, walking into the dusk that lay ever deeper across the sand. As he reached the house the white Mercedes was setting off along the road to the coast. In the back Gabrielle Szabo sat close to the open window, the dark wind drawing her black hair into the slipstream.
Halliday waited as the car came towards him, slowing as the driver recognized him. Gaston’s head leaned back, his tight mouth framing Halliday’s name. Expecting the car to stop, Halliday stepped out into the road.
‘Gabrielle… Miss Szabo—’ She leaned forward, and the white car accelerated and swerved around him, the cerise dust cutting his eyes as he watched the woman’s masked face borne away from him.
Halliday returned to the hotel and climbed to the roof, but the car had disappeared into the darkness of the north-east, its wake fading into the dusk. He went down to his suite and paced around the paintings. The last of the clocks had almost run down. Carefully he wound each one, glad for the moment to be free of Gabrielle Szabo and the dark dream she had drawn across the desert.
When the clocks were going again he went down to the basement. For ten minutes he moved from car to car, stepping in and out of the Cadillacs and Citro’ns. None of the cars would start, but in the service bay he found a Honda motorcycle, and after filling the tank managed to kick the engine into life. As he set off from Columbine the sounds of the exhaust reverberated off the walls around him, but a mile from the town, when he stopped to adjust the carburettor, the town seemed to have been abandoned for years, his own presence obliterated as quickly as his shadow.
He drove westward, the dawn rising to meet him. Its colours lightened, the ambiguous contours of the dusk giving way to the clear outlines of the dunes along the horizon, the isolated watertowers standing like welcoming beacons.
Losing his way when the road disappeared into the sand sea, Halliday drove the motorcycle across the open desert. A mile to the west he came to the edge of an old wadi. He tried to drive the cycle down the bank, then lost his balance and sprawled onto his back as the machine leapt away and somersaulted among the rocks. Halliday trudged across the floor of the wadi to the opposite bank. Ahead of him, its silver gantries and tank farms shining in the dawn light, was an abandoned refinery and the white roofs of the near-by staff settlement.
As he walked between the lines of chalets, past the empty swimming pools that seemed to cover all Africa, he saw the Peugeot parked below one of the ports. Sitting with her easel was Leonora Sully, a tall man in a white suit beside her. At first Halliday failed to recognize him, although the man rose and waved to him. The outline of his head and high forehead was familiar, but the eyes seemed unrelated to the rest of his face. Then Halliday recognized Dr Mallory and realized that, for the first time, he was seeing him without his sunglasses.
‘Halliday… my dear chap.’ Mallory stepped around the drained pool to greet him, adjusting the silk scarf in the neck of his shirt. ‘We thought you’d come one day…’ He turned to Leonora, who was smiling at Halliday. ‘To tell you the truth we were beginning to get a little worried about him, weren’t we, Leonora?’
‘Halliday…’ Leonora took his arm and steered him round to face the sun. ‘What’s happened — you’re so pale!’
‘He’s been sleeping, Leonora. Can’t you see that, my dear?’ Mallorys’led down at Halliday. ‘Columbine Sept Heures is beyond the dusk line now. Halliday, you have the face of a dreamer.’
Halliday nodded. ‘It’s good to leave the dusk, Leonora. The dreams weren’t worth searching for.’ When she looked away Halliday turned to Mallory. The doctor’s eyes disturbed him. The white skin in the orbits seemed to isolate them, as if the level gaze was coming from a concealed face. Something warned him that the absence of the sunglasses marked a change in Mallory whose significance he had not yet grasped.
Avoiding the eyes, Halliday pointed to the empty easel. ‘You’re not painting, Leonora.’
‘I don’t need to, Halliday. You see…’ She turned to take Mallory’s hand. ‘We have our own dreams now. They come to us across the desert like jewelled birds..
Halliday watched them as they stood together. Then Mallory stepped forward, his white eyes like spectres. ‘Halliday, of course it’s good to see you… you’d probably like to stay here—’
Halliday shook his head. ‘I came for my car,’ he said in a controlled voice. He pointed to the Peugeot. ‘Can I take it?’
‘My dear chap, naturally. But where are — ‘ Mallory pointed warningly to the western horizon, where the sun burned in an immense pall. ‘The west is on fire, you can’t go there.’
Halliday began to walk toward the car. ‘I’m going to the coast.’ Over his shoulder, he added, ‘Gabrielle Szabo is there.’
This time, as he fled towards the night, Halliday was thinking of the white house across the river, sinking into the last light of the desert. He followed the road that ran north-east from the refinery, and found a disused pontoon bridge that crossed the wadi. The distant spires of Columbine Sept Heures were touched by the last light of sunset.
The streets of the town were deserted, his own footsteps in the sand already drowned by the wind. He went up to his suite in the hotel. Gabrielle Szabo’s house stood isolated on the far shore. Holding one of the clocks, its hands turning slowly within the ormolu case, Halliday saw the chauffeur bring the Mercedes into the drive. A moment later Gabrielle Szabo appeared, a black wraith in the dusk, and the car set off toward the north-east.
Halliday walked around the paintings in the suite, gazing at their landscapes in the dim light. He gathered his clocks together and carried them onto the balcony, then hurled them down one by one onto the terrace below. Their shattered faces, the white dials like Mallory’s eyes, looked up at him with unmoving hands.
Half a mile from Leptis Magna he could hear the sea washing on the beaches through the darkness, the onshore winds whipping at the crests of the dunes in the moonlight. The ruined columns of the Roman city rose beside the single tourist hotel that shut out the last rays of the sun. Halliday stopped the car by the hotel, and walked past the derelict kiosks at the outskirts of the town. The tall arcades of the forum loomed ahead, the rebuilt statues of Olympian deities standing on their pedestals above him.
Halliday climbed onto one of the arches, then scanned the dark avenues for any sign of the Mercedes. Uneager to venture into the centre of the town, he went back to his car, then entered the hotel and climbed to the roof.