On the fifth day we leave the lake-floor behind and pass through a belt of smooth crystalline salt which soon gives way to sand and stone. Everyone is heartened, even the horses, which during the crossing of the salt have had nothing but a few handfuls of linseed and a bucketful of brackish water. Their condition is visibly deteriorating.
As for the men, they do not grumble. The fresh meat is giving out but there remain the salt meat and dried beans and plenty of flour and tea, the staples of the road. At each halt we brew tea and fry little fat-cakes, delicious morsels to the hungry. The men do the cooking: being shy of the girl, unsure of her standing, unsure most of all what we are doing taking her to the barbarians, they barely address her, avoid looking at her, and certainly do not ask for her help with the food. I do not push her forward, hoping that constraint will disappear on the road. I picked these men because they were hardy and honest and willing. They follow me as lightheartedly as they can under these conditions, though by now the brave lacquered armour the two young soldiers wore when we passed through the great gate is strapped in bundles on the pack-horses and their scabbards are full of sand.
The sand-flats begin to modulate into duneland. Our progress slows as we toil up and down the sides of the dunes. It is the worst possible terrain for the horses, which plod forward a few inches at a time, their hooves sinking deep in the sand. I look to our guide, but all he can do is shrug: "It goes on for miles, we have to cross it, there is no other way." Standing on a dune-top, shielding my eyes, staring ahead, I can see nothing but swirling sand.
That night one of the pack-horses refuses its feed. In the morning, even under the severest flogging, it will not rise. We redistribute the loads and cast away some of the firewood. While the others set out I stay behind. I can swear that the beast knows what is to happen. At the sight of the knife its eyes roll. With the blood spurting from its neck it scrambles free of the sand and totters a pace or two downwind before it falls. In extremities, I have heard, the barbarians tap their horses' veins. Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?
On the seventh day, with the dunes finally behind us, we make out against the dull grey-brown of the empty landscape a strip of darker grey. From nearer we see that it stretches east and west for miles. There are even the stunted black shapes of trees. We are lucky, our guide says: there is bound to be water here.
What we have stumbled on is the bed of an ancient terminal lagoon. Dead reeds, ghostly white and brittle to the touch, line what were its banks. The trees are poplars, also long dead. They have died since the underground water receded too far to be reached by their roots years and years ago.
We unload the animals and begin to dig. At two feet we reach heavy blue clay. Beneath this there is sand again, then another stratum of clay, noticeably clammy. At a depth of seven feet, with my heart pounding and my ears ringing, I have to refuse my turn with the spade. The three men toil on, lifting the loose soil out of the pit in a tent-cloth tied at the corners.
At ten feet water begins to gather around their feet. It is sweet, there is no trace of salt, we smile with delight at each other; but it gathers very slowly and the sides of the pit have continually to be dug out as they cave in. It is only by late afternoon that we can empty out the last of our brackish lake-water and refill the waterskins. In near dark we lower the butt into our well and allow the horses to drink.
Meanwhile, now that there is an abundance of poplarwood the men have dug two little ovens back to back in the clay and built a roaring fire on top of them to bake the clay dry. When the fire abates they can rake the coals back into the ovens and set about baking bread. The girl stands watching all this, leaning on her sticks to which I have fastened discs of wood to help her in the sand. In the free and easy camaraderie of this good day, and with a day of rest promised, talk flows. Joking with her, the men make their first overture of friendship: "Come and sit with us and taste what men's baking is like!" She smiles back at them, lifting her chin in a gesture which perhaps I alone know is an effort to see. Cautiously she sets herself down beside them to bathe in the glow from the ovens.
I myself sit further away sheltered from the wind in the mouth of my tent with one of the oil-lamps flickering beside me, making the day's entry in the log-book but listening too. The banter goes on in the pidgin of the frontier, and she is at no loss for words. I am surprised by her fluency, her quickness, her self-possession. I even catch myself in a flush of pride: she is not just the old man's slut, she is a witty, attractive young woman! Perhaps if from the beginning I had known how to use this slap-happy joking lingo with her we might have warmed more to each other. But like a fool, instead of giving her a good time I oppressed her with gloom. Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers! Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets! I blow out the lamp, sit with my chin on my fist staring towards the fire, listening to my stomach rumble.
I sleep a sleep of utter exhaustion. I barely emerge into wakefulness when she lifts the edge of the huge bear-fur and snuggles against me. "A child gets cold in the night"-that is what I think in my bemddle-ment, hauling her into the crook of my arm, dozing away. Perhaps for a while I am fast asleep again. Then, wide awake, I feel her hand groping under my clothes, her tongue licking my ear. A ripple of sensual joy runs through me, I yawn, stretch, and smile in the dark. Her hand finds what it is seeking. "What of it?" I think. "What if we perish in the middle of nowhere? Let us at least not die pinched and miserable!" Beneath her smock she is bare. With a heave I am upon her; she is warm, swollen, ready for me; in a minute five months of senseless hesitancy are wiped out and I am floating back into easy sensual oblivion. When I wake it is with a mind washed so blank that terror rises in me. Only with a deliberate effort can I reinsert myself into time and space: into a bed, a tent, a night, a world, a body pointing west and east. Though I lie sprawled on her with the weight of a dead ox, the girl is asleep, her arms clasped slackly around my back. I ease myself off her, rearrange our covering, and try to compose myself. Not for an instant do I imagine that I can strike camp on the morrow, march back to the oasis, and in the magistrate's sunny villa set about living out my days with a young bride, sleeping placidly by her side, fathering her children, watching the seasons turn. I do not shy at the thought that if she had not spent the evening with the young men around the campfire she would very likely not have found any need for me. Perhaps the truth is that it was one of them she was embracing when I held her in my arms. I listen scrupulously to the reverberations of that thought inside me, but cannot detect a plunging of the heart to tell me I am injured. She sleeps; my hand passes back and forth over her smooth belly, caresses her thighs. It is done, I am content. At the same time I am ready to believe that it would not have been done if I were not in a few days to part from her. Nor, if I must be candid, does the pleasure I take in her, the pleasure whose distant afterglow my palm still feels, go deep. No more than before does my heart leap or my blood pound at her touch. I am with her not for whatever raptures she may promise or yield but for other reasons, which remain as obscure to me as ever. Except that it has not escaped me that in bed in the dark the marks her torturers have left upon her, the twisted feet, the half-blind eyes, are easily forgotten. Is it then the case that it is the whole woman I want, that my pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is it the case (I am not stupid, let me say these things) that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find, do not go deep enough? Too much or too little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears? For a long time I lie staring into what seems pitch blackness, though I know the roof of the tent is only an arm's length away. No thought that I think, no articulation, however antonymic, of the origin of my desire seems to upset me. "I must be tired," I think. "Or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put." My lips move, silently composing and recomposing the words. "Or perhaps it is the case that only that which has not been articulated has to be lived through." I stare at this last proposition without detecting any answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The words grow more and more opaque before me; soon they have lost all meaning. I sigh at the end of a long day, in the middle of a long night. Then I turn to the girl, embrace her, draw her tight against me. She purrs in her sleep, where soon I have joined her.