"Why try?" Suzanne looked up at Sanders. "Shouldn't we be grateful to the forest for giving us such a bounty?"

Max finished his drink. "Suzanne, you're moralizing like some missionary. All Edward wants at this moment is a change of clothes and a meal." He went over to the door. "I'll be with you in a moment, Edward. There's a room ready for you. Help yourself to another drink."

When he had gone, Sanders said to Suzanne, as he filled his glass with soda: "You must be tired. I'm sorry to have kept you up."

"Not at all. I sleep during the day now-Max, and I decided we should keep the dispensary open round the clock." Aware that the explanation was not wholly convincing, she added: "To be frank, I prefer the night. One can see the forest better."

"That's true. You're not frightened of it, Suzanne?"

"Why should I be? It's so easy to be more frightened of one's feelings than of the things that prompt them. The forest isn't like that-I've accepted it, and all the fears that go with them." In a quieter voice, she added: "I'm glad you're here, Edward. I'm afraid Max doesn't understand what's happening in the forest-I mean in the widest sense-to all our ideas of time and mortality. How can I put it? 'Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.' I'm sure you understand."

Carrying his glass, Sanders walked across the darkened room. Although his eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, Suzanne's face still remained hidden in the shadows behind the blackwood cabinet. The faintly quizzical smile that had hovered about her mouth since his arrival was still there, almost beckoning to him.

As he drew closer to her, he realized that this slight upward inclination of the mouth was not a smile at all, but a facial rictus caused by the nodular thickening of the upper lip. The skin of her face had a characteristic dusky appearance, which she had managed to hide by her long hair and a lavish use of powder. Despite this camouflage, he could see the nodular lumps all over her face and in the lobe of her left ear as she drew back fractionally in her chair, raising her shoulder. Already, after his years of experience at the leper hospital, he recognized the beginnings of the so-called leonine mask.

Confused by this discovery, although he had halfanticipated it since Suzanne's first letter to him from Mont Royal, Sanders moved away across the room, hoping Suzanne had failed to notice the telltale way in which he had spilt some of his drink on to the carpet. His first feelings of anger at this crime of nature against someone who had already spent much of her own life trying to cure others of the disease, gave way to a sense of relief, as if this particular disaster were one for which both of them were psychologically well prepared. He realized that he had been waiting for Suzanne to catch the disease, that for him this had probably been her one valid role. Even their affair had been an unconscious attempt to bring about this very end. It was himself, and not the poor devils in the _léproserie_, who had been the real source of infection for Suzanne.

Sanders finished his drink and put it down, then turned to face Suzanne. Despite their previous closeness, he found it almost impossible to express himself to her. After a pause, he said lamely: "I was sorry you left Fort Isabelle at the time, Suzanne. In fact, it was an effort to stop myself following you straightaway. I'm glad you came, though. It may seem a strange choice to some people, but I understand. Who could blame you for trying to escape from the dark side of the sun?"

Suzanne shook her head, either puzzled by this cryptic reference or preferring not to understand it. "What do you mean?"

Sanders hesitated. Although she appeared to be smiling, Suzanne was in fact trying to control this involuntary movement of her mouth. Her once elegant face was twisted by a barely concealed scowl.

He gestured. "I was thinking of our patients at Fort Isabelle. For them-"

"It's nothing to do with them. Edward, you're tired, and I have to be at the dispensary. I mustn't keep your supper any longer." With a brisk movement, Suzanne stood up, her slim figure taller than Sanders. Her powdered face looked down at him with the skull-like intensity he remembered in Ventress. Then once again the deformed smile supervened.

"Good night, Edward. We'll see you at breakfast, you have so much to tell us."

Sanders stopped her at the door. "Suzanne-"

"What is it, Edward?" She half-closed the door, shutting out the light from the corridor that cut across her face.

Sanders fumbled for something to say, and in a kind of half-remembered reflex raised his arms to embrace her. Then, as much attracted as repelled by her injured face, but knowing that he must first understand his own motives, he turned away.

"There's nothing to tell you, Suzanne," he said. "You've seen everything here in the forest."

"Not everything, Edward," Suzanne told him. "One day you must take me there."

11 The white hotel

The next morning, wearing the dead man's clothes, Sanders met Louise Peret. He had spent the night in one of the four empty chalets that formed the sides of a small courtyard behind the Clairs' bungalow. The remainder of the European medical staff had left the hospital, and before breakfast Sanders wandered through the deserted chalets, trying to prepare himself for the coming meeting with Suzanne. The few books and magazines left behind on the shelves and the unused cans in the kitchen were like the residue of a distant world.

His new suit had been the property of a Belgian engineer at one of the mines. The man, roughly his own age, he assumed from the cut of the trousers and jacket, had died some weeks earlier of pneumonia. In the pockets of the jacket Sanders found small pieces of bark and a few dried leaves. Sanders speculated whether the man had caught his final chill while gathering these once-crystallized objects from the forest.

Suzanne Clair did not appear at breakfast. When Sanders arrived at the Clairs' bungalow and was shown into the dining-room by the houseboy, Max Clair greeted him with a raised forefinger.

"Suzanne is sleeping," he told Sanders. "She had quite a night, poor dear-a lot of natives are hanging around in the bush, hoping to reap themselves a harvest of diamonds, I suppose. They've brought their sick with them, incurables for the most part. What about you, Edward? How do you feel this morning?"

"Well enough," Sanders said. "Thanks for the suit, by the way."

"Your own is dry now," Max said. "One of the boys pressed it earlier this morning. If you want to change-?"

"That's all right. This one is warmer, anyway." Sanders felt the blue serge fabric. The darker material in some way seemed more appropriate to his present meeting with Suzanne than his cotton tropical suit, a fitting disguise for this nether world where she slept by day and appeared only at night.

Max ate his breakfast with relish, working with both hands at his grapefruit. Since their meeting the previous night he had relaxed completely, almost as if Suzanne's absence gave him his first chance to lower his guard with Sanders. At the same time, Sanders guessed that he had been deliberately allowed his few minutes alone with Suzanne, to make his own brief judgment, if any, on why she and Max had come to Mont Royal.

"Edward, you haven't told me yet about your visit to the site yesterday. What exactly happened?"

Sanders glanced across the table, puzzled by Max's air of detachment. "You've probably seen as much as I have-the whole forest is vitrifying. By the way, do you know Thorensen at all?"

"Our telephone line goes through his mine office. I've met him a few times-that suit belonged to one of his engineers. He's always up to some private game of his own."