Cloud

1

The train I’d boarded that foggy morning I fled from Duncairn happened to be headed for London. It arrived at Euston Station in late afternoon in a thick fog, this one as dirty as anything the Tollgate could produce. In the course of the eight-hour train journey, I’d made my mind up that in London I’d look for any kind of work on a ship going to parts of the world that I didn’t know and didn’t know me. Perhaps the very act of travelling might counter the despair I felt at Miriam Galt’s rejection.

So when I got off the train, I found out that the docks were at Wapping and took a bus straight to them. At the Port of London Office, I was told that under normal circumstances my total inexperience as a sailor would have disqualified me from even applying for a position. But a problem had just arisen. The SS Otago, a freighter preparing to weigh anchor next morning with machinery bound for the port of Racca in West Africa, reported it was short of the legally required number of deckhands — the lowest ranking on board. Without a full crew, the ship would not be permitted to depart.

The Port Office was willing to issue me the appropriate certificate, no questions asked, if I agreed to sign on right away for the voyage out and back.

I didn’t hesitate.

At dawn next day when the Otago cast off and headed downriver, I was already on deck with a bucket and mop, swabbing dirt and oil stains from around the cargo bays.

DURING THE NEXT three weeks, any romantic notions I’d got from books about life at sea were dispelled. The Otago was reality. It was a rusty old freighter with a noisy coal-fed engine, the food in the below-decks’ mess was greasy and bland, and the sleeping quarters were cramped, smelly, and full of lice. Hence the Otago’s difficulty in finding crew and the Port Office’s willingness to let me, an admitted landlubber, sign on. Certainly, my crewmates could see that and made it clear they wanted nothing to do with me.

The sea itself, at first, appeared to mirror my sorrow over what had happened to me in Duncairn. The Atlantic Ocean with its vast grey emptiness was the perfect setting for a broken heart. Working alone out on deck, hour after hour, permitted me the luxury of wallowing in self-pity at Miriam’s betrayal. At times I allowed myself to believe she’d been playing me for a fool all along. Every detail of her behaviour could be seen in that light. Even that book she’d given me — about the man looking in vain for a pot of gold — was probably meant as a mockery of my gullibility.

But even my sense that the grey ocean sympathized with me turned out to be one more illusion. After two days a vicious storm hit and lasted for a week. The Otago plunged headlong into steep seas whipped up by gales that outdid anything I’d experienced on hilltops in the windy Uplands. The blinding squalls and bolts of lightning that seemed to roll along the deck didn’t excuse the crew from work — the Third Officer showed me how to rope a lifeline to nearby stanchions and continue scrubbing at those ingrained oil stains. Anxiety over the flimsiness of that lifeline did help put my broken heart out of my mind for long stretches.

Things got even worse when a queasiness in my gut developed into a full-blown seasickness. After a while even drowning seemed preferable to vomiting yet once more. Nonetheless, I had to keep working every day till the storm eventually passed.

My seasickness didn’t pass, however. Which led to my meeting with a Canadian medical doctor, Charles Dupont.

THE SS OTAGO, like many freighters, always tried to carry a few passengers to help defray the costs of a voyage. Dr. Dupont was one of only four passengers on board, the other three being businessmen. Since the Otago had no ship’s doctor, the purser had mentioned my chronic seasickness to Dupont, who volunteered to come out onto the deck one morning and see how I was.

This Dr. Dupont didn’t exactly match my idea of how a physician should look. He was quite young — in his mid-thirties, perhaps — with green eyes that always seemed to have a gleam in them as though everything in the world was amusing. He had long, thin brown hair that hung to his shoulders. More noticeable was his beard: it was quite short and was combed into two symmetrical parts that hung from his jaw like those stalactites I’d seen in the bat caves at Duncairn. Even more curious: the two points were tipped with green beads the same colour as his eyes. Woven into the hairy tufts were little silver bells that would tinkle when he talked, especially when he used words that required any amount of chin wagging.

My first conversation with him was memorable.

He asked a few questions about the symptoms of my seasickness. Then he gave me a little brown bottle he’d brought with him onto the deck, containing a half-dozen pills: I was to take one each night.

“It’s a pity you have to keep on working,” he said. “The pills are more effective if you’re lying down.”

I noticed he spoke with a slight accent and didn’t seem in any rush to leave. He began asking me sociable, non-medical questions about how I came to be a member of the Otago’s crew. I didn’t go into much detail, only that I was from Scotland, that I’d just finished university, and that I wanted to see more of the world.

“Ah,” said Dupont. “Another man trying to flee from his past.” He said this in a humorous way and seemed to be including himself in the category. He himself was on his way back to Africa where he was in his second two-year term at a remote hospital inland, at the meeting place of jungle and desert. He certainly didn’t seem like a man cut out for too much sun. He had light skin and his face was permanently rusted with freckles.

When he’d come out on deck, he’d been carrying a paperback book which he laid on an awning. I glanced at its cover while we talked — on it a young woman wearing a very short skirt was being stabbed in shocking colours by a man in a mask.

“It’s a whodunit,” Dupont said when he saw me looking at it. “I used to be embarrassed at being caught reading them. The truth is I enjoy them. They’re a pleasant break from the medical literature I normally have to read — and they’re not half so graphic. And, according to my good friend Clara, what genre could be more appropriate than mysteries for shedding light on the great mystery that is humanity?” He laughed and his beard tinkled.

I hadn’t yet taken one of his pills, but just having someone on the ship talk to me was already making me feel much better. I asked him about his accent — he didn’t sound quite like the North Americans in the movies.

“That’s because I’m from Quebec,” he said. “French is my first language and I spoke it almost all the time when I was young. Whenever I used English, I felt a bit like a squirrel obliged to walk on the sidewalk.”

I didn’t know much about Canada or Quebec, for that matter, except that they had always seemed to be very pleasant places compared to the Tollgate. Why would anyone choose to leave them and work in such a backwards and dangerous region as I’d heard Africa was?

He rolled his eyes.

“Ah, that’s a long story,” he said.

Just then the gong for lunch sounded from the passenger area.

“I’m afraid my story will just have to wait till another time,” he said. “Meanwhile, I hope those pills help. It’s been nice talking to you. I’ll come back tomorrow and see how you’re feeling.” Then he headed towards the companionway door and disappeared inside.

2

Dupont did come back to see me the next day and indeed every day of the voyage thereafter. He gave me the impression, without ever saying so, that his fellow passengers weren’t interesting companions and had as little in common with him as my crewmates had with me. We’d talk sometimes for as long as an hour, and the deck foreman never seemed to mind — there was an unwritten ship’s policy that paying passengers should have as much leeway as they wished.

Some nights after my duties were over we’d go to his cabin for a drink. The cabin was small but luxurious compared to my space in the crew’s quarters. Aside from his bed and desk, there were two chairs and even a little bookcase with some paperback novels alongside more austere-looking medical journals. We’d sit on the chairs at either end of the desk and he’d pour us each a hefty glass of scotch.

I hadn’t had much acquaintance with scotch, so on the first of these occasions, it opened me up and I told him a good deal about myself — about the deaths of my parents, about Jacob and Deirdre and their cats and how that had led me to Duncairn. My heart had been broken there by Miriam Galt. I suppose I must have gone on about that quite a bit, but he listened patiently.

“The place and that girl obviously left their mark on you,” he said after a while. “I’m afraid doctors don’t have any pills for a broken heart. I can’t even offer you some good advice. All I can say is, I know how you feel.”

Naturally I didn’t believe that. No one could have gone through what I’d gone through.

But it was now Dupont’s turn to talk, and talk he did.

“The other day you asked me why I chose to work in Africa,” he said. “I’ve met people who think it must be a saintly quality that would drive a person to give up the luxuries of Canada and go work in some dangerous backwater. But believe me, there isn’t a bit of the saint in me. No, the fact is, I actually enjoy working in dangerous places. Maybe that’s partly because they take my mind off something that happened to me twelve years ago. As in your own case, it was a matter of the heart.”

He poured us another scotch and explained what he meant.

DUPONT HAD ATTENDED medical school in Montreal with the aim of becoming a surgeon-cum-anthropologist. There he met and married the woman he loved. She was tall and delicate, with long black hair, a student in fine arts who worked during the summers in a little jewellery boutique. Between them, they’d very little money but were able to get along because of her part-time job.

One day when she came home from work she told him that the owner of the boutique, who had several others across the country, wanted her to forget about finishing her degree and come and work full time for his business. He’d heard from some of his wealthy clients that she had an eye for just the kind of items that appealed to them. So he wanted her to represent the chain at the big jewellery markets in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, where he bought his stock. The increase in her salary would be more than enough to make their lives very comfortable while Dupont went through medical school.

She and Dupont talked the offer over and eventually agreed that she should accept it. It was understood that, after Dupont completed his degree and established himself, she’d go back and finish her own studies.

So when the fall term began, instead of heading for the university together each morning as they once did, she began her new job. It involved spending a lot of time on planes and living in hotels. She’d be gone sometimes for a whole week, but whenever she was home they couldn’t get enough of each other and would spend every spare minute together. They’d bought a car by now, rented a big new fifth-floor apartment looking onto the mountain, and ate at the very best restaurants in town. She was able to buy expensive clothes, suitable to her new position. Indeed, as a form of advertising, she wore some of the firm’s costliest necklaces, rings, and brooches when they were out together. A little safe had to be installed in the apartment especially for these jewels.

In early December of that first year in her new position, she had to go to a dealers’ market in Boston. She’d already done a lot of flying and thought it might be a pleasant change just to drive the new car this time. Boston wasn’t that far from Montreal — just four or five hours on the highway.

Dupont was a little concerned because, even though there had been no sign of snow as yet, the weather at that time of year could turn bad very quickly. She assured him she’d be careful.

Around seven on the morning of the trip, he walked her to the elevator, kissed her, and told her how much he loved her.

“I wish I were staying here with you,” she said, hugging him tightly. “Always remember, I’m only doing this because I love you more than anything in the world.” Just before the elevator door closed, she promised she’d call him that night from her hotel in Boston.

Dupont’s phone did indeed ring at nine o’clock that night. But it wasn’t a call from his wife. It was a Massachusetts police officer, who informed him that his wife had been killed in a collision with a truck during a snow squall on the turnpike an hour out of Boston. The police had found his address in her wallet. The passenger in the car with her was killed, too. The officer gave Dupont the passenger’s name: it was the owner of the business. They’d both died instantly.

Dupont wondered why his wife hadn’t mentioned that her employer would be travelling with her. But he was too grief-stricken to dwell on it.

Grief or not, along with her sorrowing family he managed to get through the funeral. Then he had to deal with the sad business of winding up her affairs. An insurance company representative assured him that all the funeral expenses would be taken care of, but wondered if he wished to continue the coverage on her jewels.

Dupont was surprised to hear that. The only expensive jewels she ever wore belonged to her employer, so she wouldn’t have insured them.

The insurance agent assured him that yes, they were her property and she’d had them expertly evaluated at half a million dollars a month ago. She’d gone ahead and insured them for that sum and they were now Dupont’s, as her only beneficiary.

Over the following weeks, with grim determination to know everything, Dupont established the facts. Records showed that his wife had indeed been given the jewels as outright gifts by the owner. In addition, he discovered that the owner had accompanied her on several of her business trips — hotel clerks remembered especially the striking woman with the long black hair. The two shared planes and meals — and hotel rooms.

Dupont couldn’t believe what a fool he’d been not to have suspected. Now her sudden elevation within the firm made sense. His first instinct was to take those jewels of hers and throw them into the deepest part of the St. Lawrence.

Then he thought better of it and instead went to a dealer in jewels and sold them for half of what they were worth. But he couldn’t bear to be in Montreal anymore, so he transferred to the medical school at the University of Camberloo in the province of Ontario. There he was able to live very well on the money from the jewels.

He graduated as a physician and put in his years of surgical residency, but he couldn’t find a cure for himself. The wound caused by his wife’s treachery was now compounded by a deep sense of self-loathing at having allowed himself to live comfortably on its benefits. He’d left Montreal because of the one, and could no longer endure Camberloo because of the other. In the desperate hope of somehow cleansing himself, he volunteered to work as a medical generalist in whatever remote corners of the world could use his services.

DUPONT TOOK a big gulp of his whisky.

“So, here I am, headed for Africa again,” he said. “Not that I expect any longer that my service in such places will resolve my personal problems. I’m afraid it’s true that you always take yourself with you, no matter where you go.

“But things are much better for me now with the passing of time. For years, I tormented myself over what happened. Did she really love that other man? Was it the jewels she loved? Or did she really love me? Or maybe she thought it would be nicer for us to live in comfort while I finished my medical studies, and that what I didn’t know wouldn’t harm me? After all, the last words she said to me were ‘I’m only doing this because I love you more than anything in the world.’ I couldn’t get them out of my head.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“In the end, I came to believe she did love me and that everything she did — even giving herself occasionally to her boss — really was for me.” He looked at me sympathetically.

“Of course, after what you’ve been through, it’s hard for you to understand. When I was young, I felt the same. But now, what she did no longer seems so awful to me.”

I honestly couldn’t see any similarity between our situations. His wife’s infidelities, if she’d done them out of love, weren’t really all that treacherous. To forgive her didn’t require great generosity. But Miriam’s rejection of me was quite another matter. She’d let me fall in love with her, didn’t love me in return, and had all along intended to marry another man. It was my misfortune that I still loved her. In the matter of forgiveness, I was too mixed up to know where to begin.

Dupont, as I was contemplating these things, was fingering the two little green beads on the tips of his beard.

“I didn’t sell all her jewels,” he said. “These are sapphires from one of her rings. I’ve been told they’re the stones for remembrance. Whenever I touch them, I think of her.”

3

At night in the crew’s quarters, some of the men would lie on their bunks smoking what they called “kief.” They’d stuff little ornate pipes with a brownish substance, inhale it for a few seconds, then slowly exhale. The entire area would be filled with a sweet smell, for this kief was a mixture of rose petals and marijuana — naturally, I’d never heard of it in the Tollgate, where beer and whisky reigned supreme. Some of the crew, when they were smoking, became a little friendlier towards me. One of them even offered me his pipe.

But the whole scene brought to mind that horrible old man lying on his couch in Duncairn.

“No thanks,” I said.

My shipmate was in too good a mood to be offended.

I ASKED DUPONT about kief one night in his cabin over a glass of scotch.

“I occasionally smoke it myself,” said Dupont. “I’m one of those travellers who believe that participating in such local customs can be an important aspect of understanding other parts of the world.”

He saw I was interested in hearing about that.

“I’ll give you a useful illustration,” he said.

ONCE, HE WAS posted to a group of islands in the Pacific. He’d been sent there by a philanthropic agency to set up a clinic to treat the islanders’ ailments. But when the clinic was ready, they stayed away from it. Dupont discovered the reason in a roundabout way.

At some distant point in their history, it seems, the islanders had realized that the skin of little fish from certain mountain streams stored a type of narcotic. This fish soon became an integral part of various rituals. The men of the tribe would assemble at some holy place where the women would serve them the fish. The men would lick the skins of the fish and go into a state of religious ecstasy. The women could only watch as it was taboo for them to lick the fish.

Dupont, when he heard about the fish-licking, wanted to try it out. For him, it was his professional obligation as an anthropologist as well as a medical doctor. Fish-licking seemed to be intimately related to island culture. For a researcher not to try it out would be as foolish as a confirmed teetotaller attempting to grasp the essence of many Western forms of celebration.

One of the islanders he’d come to know told Dupont he’d introduce him to the drug itself. But since he was a stranger, the islander certainly couldn’t allow him into the secret religious rituals associated with the fish-licking — the drumming, the chanting, the costumes, the ceremonial trappings, and so on. So, for the demonstration, he brought Dupont to his own home and took him out onto the balcony after sunset.

The scene was quite domestic. The man’s wife had caught a fresh fish — a very small one, since Dupont wasn’t experienced with the drug — and she now brought it out on a saucer, along with a glass of water for cleansing the palate after the licking.

The fish was about six inches long, light green in colour, and plump for its size.

Following the islander’s example, Dupont slowly ran his tongue from the head to the tail of the fish, twice. Then they sat back in their chairs and let the drug do its work.

Dupont was almost instantly transformed into a swimming creature. He felt the chill of the highland stream as he patrolled its pebbled beds in search of food. His heart thudded at the sight of monstrous rats, eels, frogs, and even slit-eyed crocodiles prowling the water around him. Once, a huge bird swooped down from above and tried to grasp him in its claws. Not long afterwards, Dupont became a thing that crawled on its belly on the mossy shore, burrowing and eating, turning the earth into compost, tasting its world. Language by now had slipped away and his mind was filled with images so harrowing he feared he’d go mad.

Fortunately the effects of the drug were already beginning to ebb. Dupont was relieved but at the same time regretful as his perceptions shrank once more to those of a human being.

When his eyes were able to focus again, he saw that the islander had long returned from what, for him, had been a mild experience. Dupont wanted to talk about what he’d seen — what he’d been — but could barely find the words. The islander assured him that even if he were a master of language, it would be no more possible to reconstruct the fish-licking experience in words than to turn the bungalow in which they sat back into the vesi trees from which it was built.

After that introductory experience, Dupont spent two years on the island and participated in the fish-licking a number of times. He noticed that each time he came out of his ecstasy, he was equally speechless. But he also now began to feel a keen fellowship with the islanders and intuitively grasped something of their world view.

The reason they wouldn’t come to his clinic, for example, was that they believed in a form of reincarnation that completely negated Western ideas of medicine. Fish-licking had taught them that human life was only one of the innumerable life forms each spirit would inhabit and that nothing must be allowed to interfere with that continuity. Likewise, all afflictions of the physical sort must be endured. Indeed, if any attempt were made to moderate them, they’d have to be undergone again in subsequent lives in even more virulent forms.

Obviously, then, no islander with any sense had the slightest use for Dupont’s services. If the international agency that had sent him to build the clinic had first done the groundwork to grasp this basic tenet of island culture, they’d have saved themselves both time and money.

NOW, IN HIS CABIN aboard the SS Otago, Dupont concluded his story.

“I think if I’d stayed on that island a little longer, I might have become a total convert,” he said. “I just needed a few more fish-licking sessions to clarify my thinking.”

He laughed, and I laughed, too. I couldn’t always be sure what to make of him. He’d admitted before that his desire to work in various exotic parts of the world satisfied his love of risk and danger as much as any humanitarian impulse. No doubt, that conflicted with my idealistic notions about the kind of man a doctor ought to be.

“Well, Harry,” he said, “all this talk about the good old days makes me feel like having a smoke.” Then, in a stage whisper: “I just happen to have some kief handy.”

He went to his desk and returned with one of those pipes I’d seen the crew use. He filled it, lit it up, and sucked on it. Then, holding his breath, he offered it to me.

Not wanting to offend him, I took the pipe and inhaled. The smoke smelled fine, but the taste was awful. I choked and coughed until my lungs were clear.

Dupont’s beard jingled from laughing.

“Kief’s just like life,” he said. “Sometimes it takes your breath away.”

4

The Otago had been at sea more than two weeks now. The skies were still overcast for the most part, but the water was much smoother and the air was becoming so steamy that the crew worked on deck without shirts. My seasickness, if that’s what it was, hadn’t abated even with the pills Dupont had given me. One day on deck when he was talking about its persistence he made a suggestion.

“Look, why don’t you disembark at Racca,” he said. “You could travel with me to the hospital and see a bit of the country while you’re at it. If it’s just seasickness you’re suffering from, being on land for a while should get rid of it. If it’s something else, I can treat it properly when we get to the hospital.”

The hospital was a hundred miles inland from the port of Racca. Dupont had worked there for the last few years and brought it up to date. It had been built to cater to the needs of scattered tribal peoples on the fringes of the desert, mainly women with complications from childbirth.

“Clara’s the head nurse — you’d meet her if you come with me,” he said. His eyes softened at the mention of her name. He’d referred to her often, so I guessed he was very fond of her. “What do you think? It might be fun.”

The idea of leaving the ship appealed to me, as I was still an outcast amongst the crew. But there was the matter of my contract: I’d signed on for the return voyage, too.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Dupont said. “I’ll speak to the captain right away.”

HE WAS AS GOOD as his word. He advised the captain that it would be wise to release me from the contract because of my health problems.

The captain was quite agreeable.

“He’ll have no trouble replacing you,” Dupont told me. “It seems there’s no shortage of sailors in Racca looking for ships. They don’t like being stuck there, so they’ll sign on with any ship that’s leaving.”

I found that hard to believe, for by then I’d had more than enough of ships. Terra firma couldn’t possibly be worse.

THE DAWN AIR was stifling when the SS Otago arrived at the port city of Racca. Or, at least, near the port, which was on the northern outskirts of the city. Ships of our tonnage had to anchor in the deep water just beyond the breakers, a half mile out from the shoreline. The water inshore was too shallow for them.

The Otago came to a halt and the engine was cut. A welcoming party of a million mosquitoes and stinging flies came rushing aboard to greet us.

THE PERILOUS operation of unloading the cargo soon began. Everything had to be transferred into shallower draft rowboats that came out from the port and surrounded the Otago like kittens suckling on a restless mother cat. My shipmates disliked this transferring of cargo. There was a grisly history of mutilations and drownings that had occurred during the process.

As it turned out, my last job as a member of the crew was a good deal less dangerous. Instead of unloading the mute and uncooperative cargo, I was to help ferry Dupont and the other three passengers ashore in the ship’s boat.

Nonetheless, even that task was nerve-racking. The boat was lowered by a pulley to the sea thirty feet below. An experienced sailor climbed down the hull on a swaying rope ladder and jumped into the bow of the boat. He then fended it off the hull and kept it as steady as possible in the swell while I assisted the passengers and their luggage down. Last, I managed to lower myself successfully.

With the passengers all safely aboard and the luggage stowed, the veteran sailor took charge of the oars and rowed the boat through massive breakers, which were being patrolled by squadrons of sharks. Only Dupont, who’d been ferried this way several times before, didn’t seem too worried that we might breach and spill into the jaws of the sharks. To everyone else’s relief, we eventually reached the shore. Obeying my last order as a crew member, I jumped into the shallows and pulled the boat the last few feet onto the beach.

Standing at last on solid ground wasn’t quite what I’d expected. The sandy beach seemed to roll just as unpredictably as the ocean and I’d trouble keeping my balance. For a while I felt like an alien creature, at home neither on land nor sea.

THOUGH I’D HEARD from the crew that Racca was smelly and overcrowded, I wouldn’t have minded exploring it for a while. But Dupont already knew the city well and had no desire to linger. Instead, from the port he arranged places for us as passengers in the bed of an open truck that had wooden sides and rear. It was ready to leave and would transport us from the coast into the dense bush of the hinterland.

“Not that we have any choice, but a truck’s really the only way to travel if you want to get a sense of this country — it’ll be an education for you,” Dupont said as we squatted behind the truck’s cabin. “This one will take us right to the hospital door.” These trucks acted as buses, going from village to village along the way, picking up and dropping off passengers. With any luck, we’d arrive at the hospital before sundown.

Some other passengers boarded, the truck’s engine roared, the gears crashed, and we lurched on our way. At first we had to stop and start frequently as we traversed the messy sprawl of the suburbs around the port. Then we left modern life behind and entered the band of primeval jungle that separated us from the grasslands and the desert.

5

The roads had now become trails that were potholed and deeply fissured from lack of repair. Sudden violent rainstorms would turn them into rushing torrents with steep, muddy banks. The truck would have to clamber out of them and stop till the rains let up, which usually took only a few minutes. Then the water level would sink enough to make travel possible once more.

As we proceeded farther into the jungle, I sometimes felt slightly feverish. The huge trees leaning over the trail became an endless library with bookcase after bookcase full of the same tattered book, or a monotonous canyon of slums in an oddly sweltering Tollgate.

But in spite or because of my stupor, I was generally at ease. The jungle’s dark embrace, limiting our horizon to only a few yards in all directions, was at this point more comforting to me than the sea’s endless vistas.

I WAS FASCINATED by the passengers who got on and off at their villages along the way. Their smooth, dark complexions were noticeably free of the pimples, boils, and pockmarks of slum dwellers. The women, in their vivid floral dresses, were especially beautiful. When they spoke and laughed, their words sounded like a strange poetry.

The layout of most of the villages, aside from the fact that they were built in clearings in the middle of a vast forest, wasn’t all that different from the little Upland towns. In the centre of each village was the market where the spear makers, bakers, potters, and meat sellers displayed their wares. Also in this main area was a sort of high street with the compounds of chiefs and various members of their council. The less important people lived in smaller huts at the edges of the village where the jungle began, so, according to Dupont, they were easier prey for lions, wild boars, black mambas, and a host of other creatures much more deadly than those in the Uplands.

The flimsiness of the buildings surprised me at first — their walls were made of bamboo with slats you could see right through. Dupont pointed out that the climate here required that houses have as much ventilation as possible. Still, those slats in the walls didn’t allow them much in the way of privacy, in our Western sense.

“Maybe they have fewer secrets than those of us brought up in brick dwellings,” Dupont said. “Or maybe they have different kinds of secrets from us. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what those might be?”

Around noon, while I drowsed on, the truck halted for a while and a fire was built to enable our fellow passengers to cook their lunches. When I smelled roasted meat, I began to feel hungry and looked over the edge of the truck. The passengers and drivers were sitting around the fire holding individual bamboo skewers.

Impaled on each skewer was the roasted body of a tiny baby, complete with all its limbs.

Dupont saw I was aghast.

“They’re not what you think,” he said. “They’re actually little tree monkeys. They do look quite human though, don’t they? They’re supposed to be very tasty.”

The sight of the others stripping the meat from the tiny bodies as though they were chickens, together with the crunching noise of teeth on the little finger bones — these things became too much for me. I climbed out of the truck and, in a bush nearby, allowed myself to be sick. When I came back, Dupont gave me a little talk on the proper attitude of a wise traveller.

“You must understand, Harry, that these people aren’t violating some universal code of ethics by eating different foods from us,” he said. “Some travellers refuse to accept the basic dietary fact that, like it or not, we all have to eat other living organisms to survive. It’s pure chance whether you’re born in a place that eats pigs or one that prefers monkeys — rather than kale and porridge, as I suppose you did in Scotland.”

I didn’t like being lumped in with narrow-minded travellers. So although the idea of eating little monkeys was nauseating, I didn’t argue with him.

6

We now emerged from that area of heavy jungle onto a red dirt road that led us into a much more open landscape. It consisted of head-high thorn bushes and clusters of narrow-leaved gum trees on endless stretches of grass.

“We’re getting nearer the desert,” said Dupont.

Even in these less confined spaces, however, things were not always as they seemed.

For example, several times, what appeared to be carpets of fallen leaves on the road ahead would leap into life as the truck approached — the leaves were actually huge swarms of locusts, basking in the sun after their ravages.

The most remarkable instance occurred when the road— which was really just the ghostly trace left by previous vehicles on the red dirt — was taking us through an area full of blackened gum-tree stumps, the remnants of some past inferno. Dupont pointed out what looked like boulders standing precariously on top of some of the stumps.

These boulders matched the surroundings so well that I hadn’t even noticed them. But now that he’d brought them to my attention, I assumed they must have been put there by local tribes for some ritualistic purpose.

Dupont shook his head.

“Watch this,” he said, and asked the driver to stop the truck for a moment.

He got out, picked up a pebble at the roadside, and threw it in the direction of one of those stumps. Immediately, the boulder on top metamorphosed into a bird, sprouting heavy brown wings and taking off into the air with furious squawks.

Dupont then threw stones at other boulders, all of which turned out to be perching birds. They milled around in the air, protesting angrily.

Dupont got back in the truck.

“They’re called nightjars,” he told me.

The truck had barely got underway again when the birds settled back on their stumps, becoming inconspicuous once more.

“During the daytime, they’re so immobile against their background you’d never know they were living things,” said Dupont.

Even then, for some reason, witnessing these transformations filled me with a sense of foreboding. I told Dupont so.

“Probably there are human beings with the same talent,” he said.

Neither of us could have had any inkling of the ominous significance those words would have in a far-off day, in a distant hemisphere.

DUPONT WAS well known in some of the villages, having visited them on his previous trips. He was able to get by in pidgin and in several of the native languages. The chief or the shaman would sometimes come to greet him, having heard by means of the drum-telegraph that he was passing through. They’d fawn over him and beg him to use his alien magic on their behalf.

We stopped for a brief clinic at one of these grasslands villages. Dupont had told me I’d see someone of interest there, but wouldn’t say more.

“It’s a surprise,” he said.

From a hut near where the truck stopped, a man and several women came to greet us. The man was tall and thin, with big sad eyes. But what astonished me about him was this: he had a wispy grey beard divided in two parts, adorned at the points with green beads and little silver bells.

“I wanted you to see where I got the idea,” said Dupont, smiling and fingering his own beard. “This man’s the tribe’s shaman — their medicine man — and I’m our medicine man, so why not?”

He went to the tall man and shook his hand. They chatted in a strange language for a moment, their bells jingling as they talked. Dupont turned to me.

“Apparently almost everyone’s out harvesting crops, so there won’t be any need for a clinic this visit,” he said. “But there’s a woman who’s just given birth to her first baby in this hut — it’s the maternity hut — and he’s about to perform the initiatory rite. I’m going in to watch. Do you want to come along? I guarantee it’ll be quite educational.”

Knowing Dupont as I did by now, I tended to be cautious when he said something like that. He saw what I was thinking.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not as if they’re going to offer us anything weird to eat.”

Though I was feeling a little dizzy, I agreed to go with him. We all proceeded — the shaman, the women, Dupont, and I— into the hut.

THE MATERNITY hut was large and airy. Some other female villagers were already there, standing around a rattan mat on the floor. They made room for the shaman. One of them tied an elaborate multicoloured cloak around him.

On the rattan mat lay a naked woman with swollen breasts. The baby she’d just delivered was being held by an onlooker, who rocked it gently in her arms and crooned to it. The little body was streaked in blood and slime.

After Dupont and I took up our places watching, the sad-eyed shaman knelt down and bent over the woman who’d given birth. He then spread his arms dramatically and shook his multicoloured cloak. It immediately burst into a clamour of screeching and chirping. I saw that it wasn’t really a cloak at all, but a piece of netting with dozens of little birds of different colours attached to it by their legs in some ingenious way. The sound they made reminded me of those noisy flocks of starlings that would nest in the infrequent, skeletal trees of the Tollgate.

Soon the birds became silent. The shaman grasped the woman’s breasts in his hands and began to suck, taking a few minutes at each. Then he straightened up and looked with his sad eyes at all of us gathered there. His mouth was open wide, milk dripping from his chin. I could see he had no teeth, only bare, pink gums.

The birds again began their shrieking and the baby, perhaps sensing the milk, howled even louder than the birds. The child was handed down to the mother. She put it to her breast and it sucked furiously.

ON OUR WAY back to the truck, Dupont asked whether the experience had been as educational for me as he’d hoped.

In fact, I’d felt queasy even from the first sight of the baby— especially that horrible slime and blood.

“All human beings enter this world covered in slime and blood — even if they’re born in palaces,” Dupont said. Then he explained the meaning of the ceremony. “In this tribe, the cloak of little birds is supposed to prevent the baby’s soul from leaving its body. But what’s particularly interesting is that mother’s milk is the only food a shaman is ever allowed. So, for him, women are the most important members of the tribe — he depends on them completely for his survival. This is very good for the women and elevates their status. For new mothers, it also has a practical benefit: the shaman makes sure the breast milk flows for their babies. Contrary to what most men think, that’s not always a simple matter.”

It was certainly news to me. What with that and the sight of the revoltingly slime-covered baby, I was curious as to why any woman in her right mind would ever want to have one.

“All it takes is the right man to talk her into it,” said Dupont with a laugh that set his beard tinkling merrily.

I was too queasy to laugh. Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking: surely it was just as important for a man to find the right woman? But hadn’t I already done that, and she’d broken my heart?

7

At a certain point in the journey, the truck became our private taxi. There were no other passengers and we stopped at no other villages. Trees of any kind were now rare as we drove hour after hour through great expanses of undulating grasslands. The wind was steady, bending the tall grasses before it. Then the truck crested a hill and the grasslands abruptly ended. Before us lay the desert, like an ocean that had been miraculously turned into sand, with huge waves in suspended motion.

A final check had to be done on the truck’s engine before entering a place so hostile to machinery, so Dupont proposed that we take advantage of the break.

“Let’s go for a short walk,” he said. “Your first time on foot in the desert will be something to remember.”

I didn’t at all mind getting out of the truck bed for a while, though the air was like the blast from a hot oven. We walked about half a mile, navigating sand dunes, our feet sinking deep at every step. With Dupont’s help I was able to scramble to the top of one of the highest dunes.

“Let’s sit here for a while,” he said.

We could see for miles around us.

“The hospital’s only about an hour that way,” he said, pointing to the northeast where the desert seemed to stretch to infinity. A fine powder of sand fell on us, carried by a wind that howled eerily.

“It’s called the harmattan,” said Dupont. “Before I came here, I used to think winds made a noise only because they were blowing through trees and wires and buildings. But there are no such things in the desert, so you almost feel it’s the voice of the wind itself you hear.”

We were silent, listening to it. It had such an unsettling, mournful quality that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought back to those Upland winds Miriam and I used to listen to when we wandered the moors around Duncairn. They were bracing and often chilly, but I loved their voice because I myself was in love. Up here on the dune, the wind’s lamentation again seemed to reflect the state of my own mind.

In my feverish condition, even this amount of thinking tired me out. I could hardly get to my feet again when, after a while, Dupont said we’d better walk back to the truck.

8

We advanced into the desert along the vaguest hint of a road. It was now four in the afternoon. We had to swath our heads in our shirts to keep from breathing in the sand, so I felt more ill than ever.

Dupont eventually nudged my arm.

“Look,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

Over the edge of the truck I could see a compound consisting of three white-painted, modern-looking buildings glimmering and floating on the far shore of a lake of the bluest colour. I blinked several times. I’d no idea there were lakes in the desert.

“The lake’s just a mirage,” Dupont said. “You get used to them. But the buildings are real. When the hospital was built this whole area was grasslands. The desert’s been encroaching for years now. That’s one of the big problems here, but not the worst. Some of the human beings around this area are determined to outdo the havoc caused by nature.”

Feeling so ill, I was intent only on finding a less painful position in our bumpy, mobile oven. So I didn’t ask him what he meant by that last comment.

SOON WE WERE coasting along a much smoother surface — an occasional landing strip for small planes — and came to a halt in a courtyard in the midst of the three buildings we’d seen. The middle block ran east to west and was larger than the other two, which were like prongs in a fork, pointing north. All three buildings had long, shaded verandahs facing onto the central courtyard. Some beds had been pulled out onto the verandahs, and patients were propped up in them, watching our arrival. The sheltered area contained a number of garden plots full of vegetables and flowers — a welcome sight in this arid landscape.

As Dupont helped me down from the truck, a straggle of house cats that had been lying in the shade wandered out to meet us, their tails erect — for a moment, in my fever, I thought of Deirdre’s herd of cats in her house in Glasgow, and I half expected to see her here, too.

But these desert cats were accompanied by several whiteuniformed female nurses. The welcoming party, cats and nurses, appeared as delighted to see Dupont as he was to see them. He greeted each of the nurses by name and stooped to pet each cat.

The last of the nurses, the only European, was a tall, thin woman with cropped black hair that was greying a little. Her face was lined from the sun. She wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses that gave her the huge stare of an owl.

She and Dupont hugged each other for quite a few moments while the others looked on, smiling.

Dupont, holding her hand, introduced us.

“Clara, this is Harry,” he said. “He has a persistent fever, so he’ll be with us for a while till he feels better.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said to me. “I do hope you’ll enjoy your stay with us.” She sounded like an Englishwoman.

Dupont wasted no time in assigning me to a little guest room at the back of the staff quarters in the main building. The window had no glass, only a fly screen, and the bed was protected by a tented mosquito net. He immediately injected me with something and ordered me to rest.

FOR THE NEXT forty-eight hours I lay in bed, sleeping off and on, nibbling on snacks of fruit and bread. Occasionally I’d awake to a soothing noise, like a machine running quietly. It turned out to be a little black and brown cat that had found a way under the mosquito net and would lie near me, purring happily. I was comforted by its presence when I drifted in and out of sleep.

Early on the third morning, Dupont came into the room a few minutes after I awoke. He lifted the net and felt my forehead.

“Your temperature’s very high,” he said. “The fever should break any time now.”

The little cat was at the bottom of the bed, watching and purring. Dupont stroked its fur.

“I see you have little Sadie looking after you,” he said. “The hospital’s cats were Clara’s idea. We got them at first just to keep down rodents and insects, but then we discovered that some of patients recovered faster with them around.”

I assured him that Sadie was the best of company.

“Speaking of which, I’m here with a dinner invitation for you,” said Dupont. “If, and only if, you feel a bit better tonight, Clara would like you to dine with her at six. Normally I’d be there too, but I’m afraid I’ll be gone till at least tomorrow. A village a hundred miles east is reporting an outbreak of yellow fever. I’ll go over and see what I can do. Clara will keep an eye on you till I get back.”

9

I dozed most of that day and got up around five. I wasn’t at all hungry, but I was feeling much stronger, so I shaved and put on my freshly laundered clothes.

At just before six o’clock, darkness, as usual, fell like a stone, and not long after that a nurse appeared at the door of my room to lead me to wherever I was to dine. She took me along dimly lit corridors, past rooms with open doors in which I could vaguely see patients settling down for the evening.

One door we passed bore the sign Delivery Room. The door was ajar and we could hear a bustle of activity and the sound of moaning from inside.

“One of our patients is having some difficulties,” said the nurse.

SHE BROUGHT ME to another well-lit room with a dining table set for two. A ceiling fan whirled silently as the nurse set off back down the hall. I had barely seated myself when Clara came in.

“I’m so glad you felt well enough to join me,” she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s eat.”

The meal consisted of a spicy stew made from some kind of desert deer, followed by figs and various fruits. Clara encouraged me to try a little of each, so I did.

While we were at the table, aside from brief comments on the food, the state of my health, and the expected progress of my recovery, we didn’t talk much. Afterwards, we moved to a side room that had more comfortable chairs and drank some hot tea.

As she sipped her tea, Clara relaxed and became much more talkative. I discovered, amongst other things, the reason Dupont had been on the Otago in the first place. He’d been returning from a short visit to London where he’d been called to advise the ministry on the political situation here in the desert. Apparently it was worsening, daily.

“We can sometimes hear artillery in the distance at night,” said Clara. “It’s frightening for us all. The patients and the staff have to be prepared for instant evacuation if the hospital comes under threat.”

Now I understood what Dupont had been hinting at as we were approaching the hospital.

“We hope we won’t actually have to leave,” said Clara. “But we have to be realistic and acknowledge that an attack on the hospital isn’t out of the question.” She then gave me a brief history lesson.

Vicious intertribal wars had been going on in these regions for centuries. When the various colonial powers took over, they enforced an artificial peace amongst the tribes and put them together in equally artificial countries. The borders of the new countries were strictly for the foreigners’ administrative convenience and often lumped together peoples of the jungle, the savannah, and the desert — traditional enemies who didn’t share the same languages or world views. Naturally, when the colonial powers left, or were thrown out, the benefits of the peace and order they’d imposed were quickly replaced by instinctive, traditional animosities. Violence flared up over and over, usually aimed at not-quite-legitimate governments.

“Hence the artillery fire at night,” said Clara. “We try to carry on as best we can, but who knows how it will all end?”

NOW, AS THOUGH to signal a change of subject, she took off her glasses. Her huge owl eyes were restored to normal size, green and lively.

“I hope you don’t mind that Charles has told me all about you and your unhappy love affair,” she said. “I must say — and he agrees with me — that it’s to your credit how deeply you were affected. But you’re young and have the whole world before you. Rest assured, in time, you’ll find happiness.”

Here we go again, I thought: Dupont’s told her to give me some advice.

“The main thing is not to retreat, not to fear getting involved again in future,” she said. “Some of us swear off any entanglements after we’ve been hurt. But that isn’t a virtue. It’s just a form of cowardice — a fear of being wounded again.”

That comment hurt a little.

“Of course, in your case I don’t mean right now,” she said, to make me feel better. “You’re still in your period of mourning. But you must never become a cynic about love. If you do, the very women who are worth loving will sense an emptiness in you and will stay away. They’ll understand you can’t take root in their hearts, nor they in yours.”

She was enjoying very much having someone new to tell her theories to, I suspected. I wondered if advice to a novice like myself would culminate in some revelations about her own life and experiences in the matter of love.

I couldn’t have been more right.

“As a matter of fact, I myself know exactly what you’ve been through,” she said. “Yes, I married a man two decades ago, now. Just one week after our wedding in England, my new husband and I came to Africa. We were both twenty-one and quite a pair of innocents. I’d barely finished my nursing training and he was an adventurous, idealistic schoolteacher — that’s why he wanted to work in a part of the world that was most in need.”

I did my addition: twenty-one, twenty years ago would make her now forty-one. Her skin was so wrinkled by the sun I’d thought she was much older. Yet in other ways she might still have been twenty-one: her green eyes were so youthful and lively and there was an energy about her that seemed somehow out of place in that worn face.

“My husband died unexpectedly just four years ago,” she said. “Physically he wasn’t a strong man, so the climate and various tropical diseases killed him though he was quite young. He was the first District Education Officer in the region of the Basio people, five hundred miles south of here. I was in charge of nursing at the local hospital. I was very much in love with him when we came here — I wouldn’t have left England otherwise. But the man I loved turned out not to be the same as the man I married. I don’t suppose that’s too uncommon.”

Clara sipped her tea and I waited to hear more.

“You see,” she said, putting down her cup, “during that period of almost twenty years when he was on his various official education tours — they lasted for weeks, sometimes months — he’d been intimate with a variety of Basio women. I’d never have known if he hadn’t confessed it to me just six months before he died. I’d have been in blissful ignorance and broken-hearted at his death.”

She’d caught my interest now and wanted to make the situation quite clear.

“The way he behaved wasn’t entirely his fault,” she said. “It was one of those cultural things neither of us had been aware of when he took the position. In much of the Basio region there’s no such concept as fidelity in marriage. Everything’s communal. Property belongs to the people as a whole and all children are raised communally. Aside from those specific occasions when husband and wife get together for the purposes of propagation, sexual activities are communal too, based on what the Basio regard as the quite normal desire of a husband or wife for a variety of partners.

“The fact that my husband was a handsome man, as well as a stranger from another race and a guest in their territory, made him very much in demand. If he’d refused the advances of their women, not only would it have been a huge insult to the Basio culture, it would have made his work as Education Officer quite impossible. So he didn’t refuse.

“When he eventually confessed to me, I understood his predicament on an intellectual level, and I didn’t really blame him. He insisted he still loved me and had loved me all along— that his activities with the Basio women had nothing whatsoever to do with love. But inwardly I was very disappointed in him.”

It was so silent in the room now that we could hear the cicadas in the flower beds outside. Clara sipped her tea, choosing her words carefully.

“The fact was, after he confessed, I just couldn’t find it in myself to love him anymore,” she said. “Still, we made a decision never to raise the subject of his extramarital activities again. During his final months — of course, we didn’t know that’s what they were — whenever he came back from one of his trips, we’d pretend nothing questionable had gone on while he was on the road.”

I thought that must have been a very hard act to keep up.

“You’re right,” she said. “The time came when I couldn’t bear it anymore and I’d made up my mind to leave him and go back to England. But before I could tell him my decision, news came that he’d died of a heart attack in one of the villages he was visiting. After his death, I wanted to get away from the Basio region as quickly as possible and applied for the position here.”

I nodded sympathetically and she again sipped her tea.

“I was sure I’d had quite enough of men,” she said. “Then Charles appeared. Funnily enough, he reminded me of my husband in some ways — certainly with his adventurous spirit. Probably these are always the kinds of men who’re willing to come to such dangerous, out-of-the-way places. A woman can fall in love with them but she can’t fully trust them, as I’ve learned from experience. I’m sure Charles isn’t faithful either, but somehow that’s not as important to me as it once was. Which tells me something about myself I hadn’t quite understood before.”

She could see I looked puzzled.

“You see, the main thing is I love him, and he loves me, too,” she said. “He’d never lie to me about that. It’s what counts most of all between a man and a woman.” She nodded her head in satisfaction at the idea.

I was beginning to feel unwell again, but I wanted to ask her how she could be so sure her conclusion was valid. Before I could ask her anything, however, she returned to my own love problem.

“From what I gather,” she said, “you fled from Scotland before you really had a chance to find out why that girl rejected you.”

Again, I didn’t like to hear someone else use the word “fled” to describe my action, no matter how accurate it might be. Also, I was feeling really unwell.

Clara hadn’t noticed and kept talking.

“You don’t really know what was going through the girl’s mind,” she said. “Maybe she had very sound reasons for what she did. But, of course, you’re still at the stage in life when you think that if the world lets down a good person like you, you can never trust it again. When you get older, you’ll see that’s not the way it is.”

My head was so befuddled by that stage, I wasn’t really sure what she meant.

JUST THEN THERE was a knock at the door, followed by the entrance of the nurse who’d brought me to the dining room. She was carrying a newly born baby wrapped in a little shawl. She didn’t say anything, but looked worried. Clara put her glasses on again, got up, and took the baby from her. She opened the top of the shawl and looked inside for a moment.

“How’s the mother?” she said.

“She’s not wide awake yet,” the nurse said.

“Did she see it?”

“No, I kept it away from her.”

“That’s good,” Clara said. She looked over at me.

“This is the kind of thing that can happen because of malnutrition, or genetics, or any number of causes,” she said.

I was feeling really dreadful, but she wasn’t to know that and brought the baby over. She opened the shawl a little more so that I could see clearly.

The baby, if it could be called a baby, had no head, only shoulders and a neck. From a plateau on top of the neck a little pink tongue protruded through a narrow opening, and two little brown eyes stared up at me alertly.

I was now sweating heavily and feeling so queasy I thought I was going to vomit.

“I have to go,” I said, and quickly made my way back to my room.

I’D BEEN IN BED no more than five minutes when there was a brief knocking at the door and someone came in. I’d left the bedside light on and saw Clara through the mosquito net.

She came over to the bed and looked down at me.

“I’m sorry I showed you the baby,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were feeling so sick.”

I wished she would just go away and let me sleep.

She reached under the net and put a cool hand on my brow.

“Your fever’s ready to break,” she said. She then picked up my scattered clothes from the floor and put them on the chair. “Never leave clothes or shoes on the floor,” she said. “Scorpions and other creepy-crawlies can get into them during the night.”

Through the veil of the mosquito net I saw she had begun to undress. She put each piece of clothing, then her shoes, on the chair on top of mine.

My heart was beating very fast, both from the fever and from the sight of her through the net. Her brown, wizened face didn’t seem to belong to her body. Its startling white smoothness took my breath quite away.

She now put her glasses on the bedside cabinet, switched off the lamp, lifted the mosquito net, and slid in beside me. Very deliberately, she leaned into me and put her arms around me. The coolness of her against me was a wonderful sensation. In spite of my fever, I became aroused.

She moved my hand away gently.

“I’m here for medicinal purposes only — this is a local custom to help cool down a fever, and it’s generally quite effective,” she said, pressing her body once more against me. “Now try and sleep.”

AND I MUST have slept deeply, for when I opened my eyes again it was morning. Clara and her clothes were gone. I was feeling much better and was very hungry, so I got myself ready and went along to the nurses’ dining room for breakfast. On the way, I passed the nurse who’d brought in the little headless baby the night before.

I now wondered if the whole incident, together with Clara’s visit to my bed, hadn’t been figments of my delirious imagination. But I asked tentatively about the baby.

The nurse shook her head sadly.

“It was a little girl,” she said. “She died during the night. It was the best thing for all concerned.”

I couldn’t help but agree with that.

Clara was leaving the dining room as I came in. The owl eyes blinked at the sight of me and she reached her hand out to mine.

“Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “I only want to take your pulse.” She encircled my wrist with her fingers and after a few moments, nodded with satisfaction. “Near normal,” she said.

I told her I was feeling much better.

“There you are then,” she said. “Sometimes these traditional cures do seem to work.”

DUPONT CAME BACK sometime during that day. He dropped by my room after doing his round of the wards.

“I’m glad your fever’s down,” he said. “I was afraid I’d have to take my own clothes off and lie down beside you for a while.” He laughed at my embarrassment. “I hear from Clara you got a little overexcited last night. Maybe it’s a sign you’re recovering from your broken heart, too.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We all wish love would be eternal and exclusive,” he said. “But it rarely seems to be the case. We lose one love, find another, and we’re sure this time it’ll last forever. And so on and so on. Lovers are supreme optimists at heart.”

But I refused to feel optimistic. Though my fever had definitely receded, I was certain a cure for my broken heart was just as remote as before.

10

Some weeks went by and all signs of my fever were completely gone. To pass the time, I’d begun helping out the nurses around the hospital, changing beds, polishing floors, working in the little garden, and trying to be useful generally. Dupont and Clara were busy during the days, but we’d usually get together for dinner at night. We all got along well. Sometimes we talked about the Tollgate and Duncairn. I didn’t even mind talking about Miriam, and they were careful to be respectful of my broken heart.

One morning as I was watering the garden, two military jeeps came hurtling into the compound, clouds of sand trailing behind them. They carried six soldiers and an officer. Dupont came out to see what was going on, and I heard the officer ask if he’d go with the patrol to a nearby place where a rebel group had recently attacked a platoon of government soldiers. Apparently Dupont often accompanied these patrols in case medical help was needed.

He came back into the hospital for his medical kit, saw me, and wondered if I’d keep him company.

“It’s bound to be interesting,” he said. “These rebels have a reputation for doing odd things with their victims.”

That should have been enough to make me hesitate. But I was so full of pent-up energy now that my fever had disappeared I said I’d really like to go.

ROOM WAS MADE for me in the jeep beside Dupont and we sped away, generating our own sandstorm. After five or six miles, the jeeps slowed down for a moment. The officer, who was in the front passenger seat, pointed ahead.

A few hundred yards off to the north, thick black columns of smoke were rising from the ground.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Dupont shook his head.

“Not smoke,” he said. “Flies.” Oh no, I thought.

WE GOT OUT of the jeeps at the edge of what looked like a volcanic crater, fifty yards or so wide. This was the area where the battle had occurred. Now that the jeeps’ engines were switched off, the noise from the seething black pillars of flies was as loud as an express train hurtling past. The columns towered over heaps on the ground that weren’t yet identifiable, though it was easy to guess. The soldiers threw rocks and the flies scattered, buzzing angrily. Then the soldiers, Dupont, and I scrambled down into the crater.

The withdrawal of the flies revealed an awful sight: not just dead body after dead body but each of the bodies eviscerated, their intestines draped around them like carnival decorations. A few had been dismembered and their various parts then grotesquely reassembled. Some had been given four legs, or four arms. In one case, a bloody head protruded from a split stomach, as though in an agonizing birth. Desert plants had been stuck in mouths and eyeholes.

The body parts weren’t all human. A herd of goats had been cut up, too. Goats’ heads and limbs had been put on human torsos. Human heads and limbs were attached to goats’ bodies. Some of these hybrids had been propped up with sticks so that from a distance they looked alive.

Dupont didn’t have to spend too much time on his examination. The victims, twenty in all, were quite dead and the flies were aggressively reassembling around their banquet.

The officer ordered us all back into the jeeps. He feared the rebels might be hiding nearby watching our movements, ready to attack if we lingered. So we quickly drove away from that awful place.

After a mile or so, the jeeps paused on top of a hill and we looked back. We could see no movement, only the faint outline of the columns of flies again.

“Just as well no one lived,” Dupont told me. “Sometimes we find survivors in such a state the only humane medical treatment is to shoot them.” He looked at me. “That may sound like a violation of ethics, but in my view it would be a crime to keep them alive.”

BACK AT THE hospital, we sat together over a cup of coffee.

“I used to wonder why they mutilated the bodies that way,” said Dupont. “Then last year I had a chance to talk to one of the rebel leaders. He’d been shot in the stomach during an ambush and captured by government troops. They were taking him to the capital for a show trial and were afraid he’d die of his wound on the way. They stopped in at the hospital and asked me to give him a shot of morphine to keep him alive.

“That’s when I asked him why his men treated the bodies of soldiers this way. His dialect was hard to follow, but I understood him to say that people of the region had been doing this to their enemies, and vice versa, since time immemorial. Yes, there was an element of pure terror in it, but it was more than that. The combining of parts of animals, humans, and plants was to show off the superior creativity of the rebels — that they could come up with forms even the gods hadn’t thought of.” Dupont hesitated. “That’s if I understood him properly. He was in a great deal of pain and I didn’t know the language well. Anyhow, I gave him the morphine and it kept him alive long enough to be taken to the capital, where they hanged him in the city square a few days later before a big crowd.”

I was shocked at how cruelly human beings could behave. I said so to Dupont and he thought for a while.

“It’s true we do inflict a lot of pain on each other,” he said. “But it’s nothing compared to the suffering in this world that we’re not responsible for. As a physician, I’ve seen decent, kindly people in agony from cancers, snakebites, diseases, malarial fevers, and so on. Not to mention schizophrenia and a host of mental torments that make life unbearable for the sufferers and their families. Even children who haven’t had time to do anything wrong aren’t spared. What about that little baby born without a head? Who’s to blame for that? Clara says you were a bit upset over it.” He frowned. “If there is indeed a Creator, it’s easy to understand why some people think He’s either the torturer-in-chief or has a very sadistic sense of humour.”

Those words reminded me of my father scoffing at the Theory of Intelligent Design, and of Miriam Galt describing the cruelty of nature. Dupont would have seen eye to eye with each of them on that matter.

EARLY ON THE morning after the massacre, Dupont knocked at the door of my room and came in, looking upset.

“All foreign nationals have been ordered out of the country immediately,” he said. “The government can’t guarantee our safety any longer.” Apparently this official decision had been brought on by a rash of rebel attacks not far from the hospital. It would have to be evacuated. Dupont and Clara, along with the rest of the staff, would be permitted to stay on for another week to wrap up affairs and ensure that all the patients were transported back to their villages. Dupont had tried to persuade the authorities to let me stay on, too, and help with the evacuation. They wouldn’t hear of it since I wasn’t a medical professional.

“So I’ve just radioed the coast and arranged a plane to come for you,” he said. “It would be too dangerous for you in a truck, on your own. The plane should be here around noon and will take you directly to Racca. After that, I’m afraid you’ll be left to your own devices. With any luck, you should be able to get on a ship to some place that’s safe. I’m so sorry now for bringing you into this mess in the first place.”

I came here of my own free will, I assured him. And the fact that I was healthy again was thanks to him. Anyway, he had enough problems without dragging me around. I was much more concerned about his own fate, and Clara’s. Would they be all right?

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “This is just another of the hazards of working in these places.”

I looked at little Sadie, the cat, lying as usual at the foot of my bed. I stroked her fur and she purred. Dupont read my mind.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be giving all the cats a shot of morphine just before we go,” he said. “It’s better than leaving them to starve. Or worse.”

AROUND NOON, a four-seater plane appeared overhead and settled down on the landing strip. The pilot waited for me on board with the engine running. All morning I’d been helping Dupont and Clara prepare for the general evacuation, and we hadn’t had much of a chance to talk. They took a few minutes to come and see me off at the plane.

Dupont shook my hand and wished me well.

“I’m so sorry about this,” he said. “I hope we’ll run into each other again.”

Clara gave me a peck on the cheek and looked at me with her huge eyes.

“Remember,” she said. “You can’t run away from love. It’s the baggage we carry with us on all our travels.”

Dupont laughed.

“Advice, right till the last minute,” he said.

He helped me climb up onto the wing and I took my place in the little cabin behind the pilot, who shut the door. He began to rev the engine, making the plane shudder so much I feared it might fall to pieces. After just a few seconds, it leaped forward and raced along the strip for a hundred yards or so before soaring upwards abruptly. As it banked westwards towards the coast, I looked down. The hospital was already so far below that Dupont and Clara were only the tiniest dots.

I’d never been in a plane before, but after the terror subsided, I felt pure exhilaration at hurtling through the air. That sensation was quickly erased by the realization that I had just left behind the only people who cared about me on this huge continent, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. I knew I’d never see them again and suddenly felt empty and lonelier than I had at any time since my parents died.

BARELY AN HOUR LATER, I was in Racca again. The pilot, a gaunt German national who’d barely spoken to me in the plane and whom I’d had difficulty hearing anyway because of the noise, hadn’t much more to say when we landed. He directed me to an airport truck that took me to the Seamen’s Union Hostel at the docks.

I stayed there for just two nights then found a berth as a deckhand on an outgoing freighter. Being hired was easier than I’d expected, thanks to my “previous experience” at sea, but even more because ships were recruiting crew quickly so that they could get clear of the region in case of general civil war.

“You were lucky,” said the bosun of my new ship, the SS Charybdis, bound for South America. “We were about to sail short-handed, never mind maritime law.”

That was how he greeted me after I’d climbed the rope ladder onto the ship’s swaying deck. The ride out on a small boat through huge breakers with attendant sharks had seemed even more dangerous than when I’d first came ashore with Dupont.

“Yes, the Fates are on your side,” said the bosun.

I was beginning to doubt that some great power was watching over every human move, including the last-minute appearance of a deckhand to satisfy official requirements. But Fates or no Fates, here I was on a sea-going vessel, the most junior member of the crew once more. I didn’t at all mind when the bosun informed me that the ship wouldn’t be sailing directly to South America but would be zigzagging along the way, taking on and depositing cargo at various remote spots in the Atlantic. The more zigzagging the better, as far as I was concerned: no one was desperately awaiting me and I wasn’t desperate to arrive anywhere.

Much later that day, when the anchor of the Charybdis was securely nestled in its bed in the hawse pipe, I realized that ever since Dupont had awakened me that morning I’d barely given a thought to Miriam Galt, the cause of my broken heart.

1

Early in this voyage I felt sick again, but it seemed to be only plain old seasickness and I got over it quickly. Even though my job kept me busy on deck most of the day painting, scraping rust, and swabbing salt from exposed surfaces, I spent a lot of my free time up there, too, enjoying the ocean’s various moods. When strong winds and whitecaps meant a storm was coming, I was no longer overanxious — I now had more faith in ships and their ability to stay afloat.

Socially, too, things were better for me this voyage. The crew now regarded me as something more than a complete novice. After nightfall, I was often invited as a matter of course to join the other deckhands at poker in their quarters in the fo’c’sle.

Mainly, though, when I was off-duty I read constantly, for the SS Charybdis had its very own library under the rear deck. It consisted of two large cabins, whose well-filled bookcases were a feast to my eyes. Most of the books had suffered some degree of water damage but were still quite readable. A sticker on their inside covers indicated they’d been donated by the Mariners’ Guild for the purpose of providing seamen, over the course of a life at sea, with a basic education.

The top shelves contained a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries as well as a variety of general fiction and poetry. Some of these were “great books” I hadn’t got round to at university, such as War and Peace, Dead Souls, The Magic Mountain, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Charterhouse of Parma, Religio Medici, Remembrance of Things Past, Samson Agonistes, Leviathan, and The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

The books in the middle shelves had no Mariners’ Guild stickers and were the most water-damaged. Surprisingly, considering the crew of the ship consisted of masculine types of men, these books were mainly paperback novels of the popular romance genre. They had dramatic covers and such memorable titles as Sweet Passion of the Prairies, Brides of Belladonna, The Gallant Gambler and the Lively Lass, A Man for the Kissing, The Star-Spangled Mistress, Her Temptress Tongue, Cherished Foe, Blue Moon Blonde Lady, Amazon Amy, Lovelorn My Love, Apache Woman, True Love and the Parson from Moose Jaw, Wife for Rent, The Neurosurgeon and the Nymph, Savage Embraces, Whisper Love in My Earnest Ear, Cupid’s Tangled Heart, Island of Love’s Flame, Lure That Lady, and Affaire Immemoriale.

The bottom shelves contained a number of obscure books of fiction that looked as though they’d never been read. Early in the voyage I skimmed through the pages of some of them and must have stumbled on the worst — even their titles still haunt me: Inspecting the Faults, The Paladine Hotel, The Wysterium, Last Blast of the Cornet, and A Dutch Life. Each of them was as incoherent as dreams.

THE DAY I DISCOVERED the library, no one else seemed to be around, so I took my time looking over what was available. In the midst of my browsing, a woman’s voice startled me: “Would you like to check anything out?”

The voice’s source had been in the library’s other cabin. She now came towards me and shook my hand. She was a short, elderly woman in a flowery dress, her hair short and grey, her face rather serious.

“I’m Mrs. Pradhan, the ship’s librarian,” she said. “So you’ve been having a good look round?”

THAT WAS MY FIRST of many meetings with the librarian of the Charybdis. She was a Londoner and the wife of the first mate, whom she’d met at the Mercantile Law Ministry in London when she was a research assistant there. He’d come to do some work on an impending inquiry and had asked for her help.

“Love at first sight,” she told me.

After their marriage, she sailed with him on all his ships and voluntarily looked after their libraries, which were usually in a state of utter neglect. “My labours of love,” she called her work.

IN MY SUBSEQUENT visits to the library, she grilled me about my life. She was a sympathetic listener and, of course, before long I’d told her my whole story. She was especially fascinated by what she called my “tragic love affair” with Miriam Galt and would ask me to repeat the details of it over and over.

“Talking about it will make you feel better,” she’d say.

In my view, if just talking about a broken heart made the sufferer feel better, it obviously wasn’t all that serious a blow in the first place. But I didn’t tell Mrs. Pradhan that. To keep her happy, I did talk about those days in Duncairn as often as she wished.

“How sad,” she’d say. “But how wonderful!”

By then I’d discovered that she was the one who’d acquired the collection of popular romances for the Charybdis, two years before. They were so noticeably water-damaged because they’d been on a ship that had run aground on a dangerous shoal off Plymouth. A major part of the cargo had been books headed for bookstores abroad. A salvage company had subsequently retrieved whatever it could and auctioned them off by the hundredweight.

“The boxes of love stories were the cheapest,” said Mrs. Pradhan. “I thought they might be especially good for lonely men at sea and help preserve their idealism about love. Don’t you agree?”

To be polite, I did agree. But as far as I could tell from listening to their tales about the various brothels they’d visited, my shipmates were anything but idealistic about love. Nor did I ever see any of them reading her romances, or much else for that matter — aside from the comic books and erotic magazines they’d brought aboard with them.

HER HUSBAND, First Mate Srinivas Pradhan, seemed about the same age as his wife. He was a small, dapper man from Calcutta, with silver hair slicked back. He was always impeccably dressed, unlike many of his fellow officers, who looked more at home in dungarees.

Because I’d become his wife’s favourite client, I was invited on several occasions to either dinner or high tea with them in their cabin. Mrs. Pradhan herself would prepare the meals in the ship’s galley, then bring them to the cabin where a formal table was set up with tablecloth, napkins, wine glasses, and silver cutlery.

The food was always extremely bland, out of regard for the first mate’s stomach. He’d been diagnosed as having a stomach ulcer, which he attributed entirely to the stresses of his job. He often reminisced about the delightful spicy foods of his youth, but his stomach could no longer stand them. Now he was condemned to boiled rice, liver cooked in milk, and custard pudding. His wine glass was used only for water.

So I much preferred it when they asked me to high tea. Then the food was much more palatable, with jam sandwiches and apple tarts specially baked by Mrs. Pradhan.

At all these meals, she would wear her floral dress and the first mate would put on his best uniform. I’d change into a fresh shirt and make sure I shaved. In the stifling heat of the cabin, we’d talk about this and that in the most civilized way, as though we were in some vicarage in the southern counties of England and not sweating it out on a dirty freighter in the southern ocean.

AS I GOT TO KNOW the Pradhans better, I could see how important his ulcer was in both their lives.

“How does it feel, Srinivas, dear?” Mrs. Pradhan would ask her husband if he was noticeably quiet during dinner or high tea. He didn’t need more encouragement than that to launch into a description of his ulcer’s fluctuating moods in the course of a given day. We’d listen respectfully.

I foolishly mentioned that I sometimes had slight headaches that might be the aftermath of malaria, or whatever my original fever had been. Thereafter, when the first mate had finished talking about his ulcer, he’d inquire about my headaches. He may have thought he’d sound like less of a hypochondriac if I made a contribution. If so, I let him down, and my motives were quite self-centred: talking about those headaches sometimes brought them on, or made them worse.

All in all, the Pradhans seemed a happy enough couple. Though I wondered if it wasn’t The Ulcer that held them together as much as love.

Love, true love. I often thought about that once-in-a-lifetime rarity I was sure I’d possessed, then lost. In the course of the voyage I actually did read dozens of those popular romances from Mrs. Pradhan’s library — she recommended them as therapy for a broken heart. But the heroines in them were so unconvincing they only made me feel, even more deeply, the loss of the real thing — Miriam Galt.

2

After calling in at several small coastal islands to deposit and pick up cargo, the SS Charybdis headed out into the Atlantic, leaving the sultry air of Africa in her wake. Three days later, a high column of cloud began to appear on the distant horizon. Under the column, in time, we could make out a smudge, which became in due course the outline of a mountain. Finally, the Charybdis took us close enough to see the shores and forests of the island on which the mountain stood: Isla Perdida.

Of the islands we’d so far visited, this was the first one I could find an article about in one of the library’s encyclopedias. Isla Perdida had an occasionally active volcano, four thousand feet high. The island had belonged over the centuries to Portugal, Spain, and France before becoming part of the British Empire. The main town had had a variety of non-English names but was now known as Stopover. It had served as a base for fishing fleets, a slaving station, a military outpost, and a penal colony. The town’s prison, in fact, had only lately been closed down. The present small population of the island reflected its history: African, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and British bloodlines were mingled, the descendants of prisoners had intermarried with the children of former wardens, and so on. Socially, life on Isla Perdida was apparently quite harmonious. Any havoc now was caused only by occasional eruptions of the volcano.

WE SAILED RIGHT UP to Stopover’s dock, which lay at the narrow end of a deep fissure in the cliffs, safe from the Atlantic’s storms, though this day was perfectly windless anyway. As the Charybdis nestled alongside the high seawall a team of local stevedores, burly men with close-cropped hair, tied the ship to huge bollards. Aside from these stevedores, none of the local population came out to greet the ship.

First Mate Pradhan was on an upper deck beside me, keeping an eye on the docking operation.

“We’ll only be in port twenty-four hours,” he said. “We’re picking up some cargo dropped off here a few weeks ago for delivery to South America. The ship’s engines will get some routine maintenance, too.” He looked at me as though he’d just thought of something. “You should take the opportunity to see the island’s medical officer about those headaches of yours.”

I was reluctant, he persistent.

“Once we’re tied up I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs,” he said. “You can come along with me and I’ll show you where the Medical Office is. I visited it when we were here last year. Some of these out-of-the-way places have homegrown cures, so I thought I’d give it a try. Of course, I’d no luck — nothing seems to help this ulcer of mine.” There was a touch of pride in the way he said that.

SO, SHORTLY AFTERWARDS, Pradhan and I walked into the town of Stopover itself, about a quarter mile from the dock. Along the way, we were assaulted by armies of mosquitoes and biting flies enjoying the windless conditions. We swatted at them in vain.

As for the town itself, it was an odd place. It was built in that narrow crack between the huge walls of black rock and seemed to consist of a single street of paintless and weather-beaten clapboard buildings, including a post office, a general store, and a bar. Several ancient-looking passenger cars and trucks were parked on the potholed road. As we walked along, we passed some of the townspeople. The men were all of that burly, short-haired type we’d seen tying up the ship. The women wore black headscarves and baggy dresses with flowery designs. Pradhan observed how, though we surely stood out as strangers, these islanders ignored us, just as they’d paid no attention to the ship’s arrival.

“Now you know quite literally what ‘insular’ means,” he said.

As we walked on, I noticed that the street didn’t have any trees, only a few shrubs and little plots of grass, no bigger than graves, outside some of the clapboard houses.

“The volcanic rock’s just below the surface, so trees can’t take root,” said Pradhan. “Most of the soil here is imported, and sometimes it’s blown away by storms.”

WE EVENTUALLY CAME to the only noteworthy building in town, a cube-shaped structure made of stone blocks and filling an entire corner at the upper west side of the street.

“Here we are,” said Pradhan. “The building’s all that’s left of the old prison. See where the cell blocks were dismantled when it was closed down?” Heaps of rubble stretched over a wide area behind the building. No effort seemed to have been made to remove them.

The heavy wooden front door bore a brass plate:

PRISON MEDICAL OFFICER

DR. MACHLA CHAFAK

“Just give the door a rap,” said Pradhan. “I’ll get on with my walk and see you back at the ship.”

After he left I knocked and a small elderly woman came to the door. She had eyes that were astute but small on either side of quite a large nose. I told her I’d like to see the medical officer.

“I am the medical officer,” she said. “I’m Dr. Chafak.”

Pradhan hadn’t said anything to indicate the medical officer was female. I’d assumed from her appearance that this woman was the maid — she wore one of those baggy dresses like the other townswomen we’d seen. She didn’t, however, wear a headscarf to cover her shoulder-length grey hair.

“Come in,” she said.

I followed her into a large, well-illuminated room. A big window with bars on it looked out onto the ruins we’d seen at the back. The room had a desk, an examination table, various rubber tubes, a sink, and some medicine cabinets — the usual items in a doctor’s consulting room. Usual, but for one thing: an elderly German shepherd lay on a rug in the corner. When I came in, it slowly got up, growling and baring its fangs.

“Pongo! Don’t be silly!” Dr. Chafak said to the dog. “Am I not allowed visitors?” She spoke with an accent similar to that of some of the Eastern European sailors I’d met.

The dog reluctantly crouched back down on the rug and the doctor indicated a chair for me by the examination table. She then put on a white labcoat from a hook on the wall, hung a stethoscope round her neck, and sat in the chair opposite. Now, looking much more the part, she asked me who I was and what was troubling me.

I explained that I was from Scotland, now a deckhand on the Charybdis, that I’d contracted some kind of fever either in or on the way to West Africa, and that although I was feeling much better now I still had occasional headaches.

She took my pulse and checked my back and chest with her stethoscope. She peered into my eyes with another device.

“You do show signs of having had malaria,” she said. “In that case, your symptoms aren’t unusual.” She went to the biggest medicine cabinet, which had shelves of pills and liquids. Then she poured some yellow pills into a paper pillbox and gave them to me. “Take one of these each morning for the next week. That should help clear up the headaches. If they continue, see a doctor at your next port of call.”

I took out my wallet to pay for the medicine.

“No charge,” she said, and before I could thank her, she went on: “By the way, if you don’t mind my saying so, you have a most interesting nose.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. She’d been looking at my nose all through the examination. She’d even allowed her fingers to touch it gently for no apparent reason.

“The nose is an unjustly neglected area of medical research,” she said. “I had the good fortune to study in Edinburgh under a famous physician — Dr. Cornelius MacVittie?” She was sure someone Scottish, like me, would know the name.

Of course, I’d never heard of him.

“He was renowned for his pioneering work in phrenology— that’s the study of the shape and size of the cranium,” she said. “Dr. MacVittie believed that the human skull can reveal the psyche of its owner. A highly trained phrenologist, like a perceptive art critic, should be able to grasp precisely what the exterior characteristics convey about the inner person.”

She paused a moment, smiling while I took that idea in.

“At the suggestion of Dr. MacVittie,” she said, “I myself moved from the general study of anatomy into phrenology, and from there into a subspecialty: rhinology. That’s the technical name for a specialization in the nose alone. Dr. MacVittie was convinced that through the use of various methods he’d developed, nose studies would inevitably come to replace psychology — which he regarded as a dangerously unscientific discipline.”

As she talked, I couldn’t help but notice again how conspicuous her own nose was. I wondered if it was possible for a rhinologist to do a self-analysis. But I was afraid I might laugh, so I didn’t dare ask.

“Now, in the case of this nose of yours,” she said, “I wonder if you’d allow me to schedule a few sessions to give it a careful examination?”

I told her that wouldn’t be possible, for we sailed the next morning.

“That’s a great pity,” she said. “But if you like, perhaps I could make a few general observations right now — though you mustn’t put too much stock in them. A nose is as individual as a fingerprint, and the nuances are everything. After a rigorous scientific analysis complete with follicle samples I might arrive at quite different conclusions over the course of a few meetings.”

I thought this experience might be amusing, and I was in no rush to get back to the ship. So I told her I’d be most interested in her findings.

“Very well,” she said. “Sit back and relax.”

I did sit back, and Dr. Chafak began to run the tips of her first two fingers along the contours of my nose. Her nails were clean and rounded, her touch delicate. She spoke, almost to herself, as she worked. “Nostrils: medium wide, conducive to adequate inhalation. Bridge: a little on the large side in proportion to cheekbones and brow. Septum: notable deviation from rectilinearity. Skin: tending to desiccation.”

At that point, she stood back for a moment, thinking. Then she took a pencil-thin flashlight from her labcoat pocket. She pushed my head gently back and shone the light up each nostril.

“Well, well,” she said, in that same meditative way. “What a very pleasing interior architecture. Caverns: unusually capacious. Nostrils: narrow and absolutely symmetrical. Olfactory bulb: globose and delicate as could be wished. How paradoxical that the deviation of the septum has had no effect on the inner harmony.” She put her flashlight back in her pocket, smiling admiringly at my nose. “All in all,” she said, “a most instructive first inspection.”

By now I really was curious about her findings.

“Now remember, I can’t be definitive, but I’m willing to pass an informed opinion,” she said. “Physically, you have nothing whatever to worry about concerning your nose. All the parts are in exceptionally good order and will continue to be of service throughout your life. If, as we believe, a healthy nose is an excellent predictor of longevity, you will certainly live to at least three score years and ten — accidents aside, of course.”

I supposed that was good news. Dr. Chafak had more to say, however.

“But psychologically, what your nose tells me is another matter.” She considered her words carefully. “The interior and the exterior are in surprising conflict with each other. You remember I noted that extreme aridity of the outer skin? Yet the inner surface is totally humid and lubricious. What this generally implies in an individual is extreme difficulty in reconciling conflicting elements of the psyche.”

This sounded to me as vague as the horoscope section of a newspaper. But she was obviously serious, and what she said next caught my attention.

“Within the last year, you’ve apparently suffered a great emotional shock,” she said in a gentle voice. “On the one hand, you’ve had to deal with the death of at least one of those you loved most. But your condition has been exacerbated by something else, almost certainly an affair of the heart.”

On hearing this I was, to put it mildly, surprised. I’d told Dr. Chafak nothing whatever about the deaths of my parents, and certainly not about Miriam Galt.

“You see, the first thing I noticed,” she went on, “was that the interior veins of the exumenta, which were already quite fragile, have slight ruptures in them. In my experience, it takes the double emotional trauma of a death and a tragic love affair to cause this kind of damage.” She looked at me with great compassion. “I’d guess it’s because of these things you’ve wandered so far from your native land.”

She asked for no confirmation from me and I volunteered none.

“But there is very good news, too,” she said. “Those inner vestibulants are already healing noticeably. In other words, you’re gradually getting over your emotional hurt. Your mind may not be fully aware of that yet, but your nose is.”

With those consoling words, the session was over. As Dr. Chafak was showing me to the door, Pongo the dog rose from his rug and hobbled along at her side.

“Pongo used to act as a guard dog when I had to treat violent inmates from the prison,” she said. “Now he’s just a pet.” She fondled his ears.

Pongo then came to me, sniffed at the back of my hand, then licked it. I made some comment about the infallibility of a dog’s nose.

“That’s true,” she said. “But who knows what a dog’s thinking? When the prison was still in operation, he’d sometimes lick the hands of monsters.”

I thanked her for seeing me and went outside. I walked fast all the way back to the Charybdis but not fast enough to outpace the stinging flies and mosquitoes.

FIRST MATE PRADHAN was at the top of the gangway, waiting for me.

“Well, what did you think of her?” he said. “I presume she insisted on analyzing your nose? Was it illuminating?”

I answered somewhat vaguely. Then he told me about his own experience with Dr. Chafak and about her analysis of his nose.

“She claimed my nose indicated that no medicine would do my ulcer any good if I didn’t really want to be cured,” he said. “Have you ever heard such nonsense?”

Of course, I nodded sympathetically.

AT TEN THE NEXT MORNING, the Charybdis sailed out of Isla Perdida. Aside from the stevedores who cast off our lines, the islanders paid no more attention to our departure than they had to our arrival. Having already resumed my major duty of swabbing the deck, my work took me alongside two big wooden crates that had been loaded at the island and were tied down on the foredeck. The canvas shroud on one of them flapped loosely, so I was able to see these words stencilled in large block letters:

SMITH’S

HYDRAULIC PUMPS & VENTILATOR SYSTEMS

CAMBERLOO

CANADA

Camberloo? Wasn’t that the name of the university where Dupont had studied for his medical degree? How curious it was to see, stencilled on this wooden box on the deck of a rusty freighter in the middle of a southern ocean, the name of the Canadian town I’d first heard from Dupont’s lips. What a small and strange world.

DURING THE FOLLOWING weeks, as the Charybdis made its slow and steady way towards La Guaira, the seaport of Caracas, I made my own way slowly and steadily towards a decision regarding my future: that when we reached port, I would retire from the life at sea. It had been enjoyable in some ways, but its rituals were too confining. By definition a sailor touches only the margins of the real world. I felt I was now ready for the hinterland.

Accordingly, I warned the bosun I’d be signing off at La Guaira. He was grateful for the courtesy. Crew members would often just quit without notice, giving him problems in finding replacements.

“It’s a pity you’re leaving,” he said. “You’ve got the makings of a real sailor.”

First Mate Pradhan and his wife were sorry to see me go, too, and I felt sad about that: they’d been very kind to me. Some of the first mate’s sadness was no doubt on behalf of The Ulcer, which had been like a silent fourth guest at all our meals.

The night before we sailed into La Guaira, we shared a farewell dinner and talked about what I might do ashore.

“Your money won’t last long, you know,” said the first mate.

“So you should find some useful work quickly,” said Mrs. Pradhan. “If you don’t find something that keeps your mind occupied, you’ll start moping. That’s the problem with life at sea — it gives you too much time to think.”

She was referring, of course, to my tragic love affair. I didn’t dare tell her that now sometimes when I tried to remember Miriam’s face, it almost completely evaded me.

“There’s always a need for English-language tutors,” said the first mate.

“Srinivas is right about that,” said Mrs. Pradhan.

Why not? I thought. After all, I’d almost become a teacher once before, in another world, in what seemed another century. Maybe I’d give it a try.

3

And, indeed, after a few restless, lonely days in a cheap Caracas hotel room, I ventured out and managed to get myself hired on a three-year contract as an English tutor with InterMinas, a big mining conglomerate. My job was to travel to the sites of various mines and teach advanced English to Spanish-speaking mine managers and supervisors. They already knew fundamental English but needed to improve their skills to communicate better with their mainly gringo owners and the big investors who occasionally flew down from the north to inspect their fiefdoms.

Those hours of class preparation I’d done at Duncairn and never used now proved useful.

The mines themselves were often located in the most inhospitable areas of the southwest, where jungle ran into mountain. The scorching sun, drenching rains, and hostile insects together made life especially hard for the mine workers.

I became the most itinerant of teachers, travelling between assignments mainly on small planes, or diesel trucks, or occasionally on narrow-gauge railways that had been converted from use in sugar-cane fields to the task of transporting ore. But the most relaxing mode of travel for me was in dugout canoes. I’d just lie back and rest as I was paddled along muddy jungle rivers. Like my earlier journey on those roads in Africa, I imagined these primal forests sliding by on either side like bookcases in some endless library filled with lookalike books.

As for the types of mines: most were open-pit or strip mines because the minerals were near the surface and tunnelling wasn’t required. Hundreds of miners would crawl around, day and night, picking at the red earth in the broiling heat like flies on a massive sore.

Some of the mines, however, were underground. The miners who worked in them were of that universal type I’d seen on their way to and from work in Duncairn. They were small, wiry men doing a dangerous job that made them a close-knit group. But to the owners, the men’s safety seemed of little importance, so deaths and maimings were daily affairs.

No matter the type of mine, the administration offices and the supervisors’ bungalow residences all had the same cinderblock walls and corrugated tin roofs. As a visiting tutor, I was usually allocated a room in one of these bungalows for the length of my visit.

In proximity to each mine, a shantytown of sorts would spring up, consisting mainly of long bamboo huts that were split into flimsy apartments for the married men and dormitories for those without wives. Hospitals and churches were really just adaptations of the same bamboo structures, as were the entertainment establishments: movie theatres, brothels, liquor stores, cockfighting rings, and mescaline dens.

I sampled some of the offerings now and then.

THAT FIRST CONTRACT passed slowly, and I soon began to wonder if I was the right kind of man for this work. I didn’t mind the teaching, but I couldn’t help being afraid I might die of some exotic illness, as so many did in this part of the world. If so, my body would probably be buried in a shallow grave in the jungle, where it would be disinterred and ripped apart by nightmare creatures. Soon the weeds would protrude from the gaps in my bare, gnawed ribcage.

The thought of such an end led me on jungle evenings, to the accompaniment of a billion chirruping insects, to write a journal for the first time in my life. In it, I recorded the true story of myself: my upbringing in the Tollgate, the violent deaths of my parents, my love for Miriam Galt and the breaking of my heart in Duncairn, my subsequent illness — or whatever it was — in Africa, my voyage of recovery on the Charybdis, then this present work as a tutor. If I were to die in obscurity, someone might stumble on the journal and know I once existed. The thought of that consoled me to such an extent that I might have resigned myself to my lot.

Then Gordon Smith appeared.

1

I’d just spent several weeks at the La Mancha gold mine conducting conversation tutorials when he arrived, late one afternoon, in a company jeep used to bring passengers from the little airfield that had been slashed out of the jungle a few miles away. From the open-walled hut where I held my class, I saw the mine’s general manager get out of the jeep, then this other man.

He looked about fifty, of middling height, with thin, grey hair swept back. There was something hawkish about his face, with bent nose, noticeable eyebrows, and eyes that took in everything as he walked past — including my little classroom and me, looking out at him. He had a neatness about him, not just because of his spotless tropical whites but in his entire bearing. In this part of the world where everything tended to be sweaty and sloppy and ready to revert at the first opportunity to chaos, he seemed utterly in control of himself.

One of the students in my class that day was the mine office clerk. He told me that the man passing by was the Canadian engineer, Gordon Smith. Smith had been visiting another mine in the region when InterMinas asked him to help with a problem that had arisen. He had a special knowledge of the conditions at La Mancha, for his firm had supplied its specially built pumps.

I remembered the big crate the Charybdis had picked up on Isla Perdida and the stencilled name on its side. Could this man be that Smith?

“That’s right,” said the student. “Señor Smith, of Smith’s Pumps.”

I’D ALREADY HEARD about the problem Smith was being consulted on. In fact it had been the talk of my students for a week now, and had to do with the location of the La Mancha mine. The mine workings were at the base of a low mountain, only a thousand feet high. The mountain seemed misplaced in a region of flat swamplands and thick jungle. It had even been designated a holy place by the traditional forest people. None of these original inhabitants were around anymore, though. They’d long ago been wiped out by tuberculosis, syphilis, and the usual cluster of imported diseases for which they’d no resistance, as well as by alcohol, which to them was just as deadly.

This mountain lay right on top of the La Mancha mine. Three crude tunnels had been burrowed a hundred feet deep into the earth beneath it. The first two tunnels were no longer in production — the vein of gold in them was exhausted. The third, most recent tunnel was still quite profitable. Then the problem arose.

An early sign that something wasn’t right was the exodus of all the bats and cave iguanas that had taken up residence in the tunnel, as they always did at these jungle mines. The tunnel was a half-mile long when the animals disappeared. Then one day, shortly after the morning shift had begun blasting a new section, the miners themselves came rushing up out of the tunnel in a panic. They’d been attacked by “evil spirits,” they said — the old forest people who’d once worshipped in this area must have laid a curse. The miners refused to go back down, despite threats of firings.

One of the foremen, a tough old Argentine named Juarez who’d been in the administration office at the time of the panic, volunteered to go down on his own. He wasn’t at all superstitious and would show the men there was nothing to worry about. The miners stood watching at a distance as Juarez entered the mine. They didn’t have to watch long. After a few minutes, they heard a scream and saw Juarez come stumbling back out of the tunnel entrance. His eyes were wild and he kept glancing back over his shoulder as though being pursued by something awful.

The general manager now had no option but to suspend all work. He got in touch with InterMinas headquarters and was told the Canadian engineer, Gordon Smith, would come to the mine and diagnose the problem.

THE NIGHT OF SMITH’S arrival, the general manager asked me to a special dinner with his visitor, who was staying in the guest room at the big bungalow. I was surprised at the invitation and delighted at the prospect of a good meal.

Around seven, I went over to the bungalow and met Gordon Smith formally. His eyes were shrewd and his handshake firm. As we sipped aperitifs and chatted before dinner, he said he’d spotted me in my classroom when he’d arrived and had asked the general manager who I was.

“I told him he should invite you over for dinner,” he said. “I didn’t want the entire evening to be nothing but business.” From close up, his face was a mesh of tiny wrinkles — like one of those paintings that look solid from a distance. And his brilliant blue eyes had, perhaps, a certain weariness behind their gleam.

I thanked him for asking me to dinner and mentioned the curious coincidence of seeing his name on wooden crates a thousand miles away on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. I also told him I’d heard of the town of Camberloo, too, before seeing it on the crates, for I’d met a doctor who had trained at the university there. It was as though there must be some other law of gravity that brought certain people together, from halfway round the world, in a most unlikely way.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said with a little smile. “It’s just that the world’s not so immense as we sometimes think.”

I mentioned Dupont’s name in case he might know him. But he shook his head.

“I can’t say I’ve heard of him,” he said. “Though, who knows, I may have passed him often enough on the street.”

He spoke in the calmest of voices and looked so neat I felt refreshed by his presence. In the jungle, I’d become accustomed to passionate outbursts and extravagant displays of emotion over even the most trivial of matters. Clearly, it would take a lot to ruffle Gordon Smith’s composure.

We talked for a while about Scotland. He asked this and that about my life in Glasgow and told me that, like many early Canadians, his ancestors had been exiled from the Highlands several generations back. But although he’d travelled widely he’d never been to the land of his forebears.

I wasn’t ready for his next question.

“Are Scots trustworthy?”

Some of them were bound to be, I said, meaning to be amusing.

He didn’t smile but just watched me with those hawk eyes so that I began to feel less than comfortable. I was relieved when the general manager, who’d been in another room answering the telephone, came back in. He asked Smith if he’d any preliminary notions about this problem at La Mancha.

“Well, I’ve heard what some of the men have reported,” said Smith. “I’ll have to go down the mine myself and find out whether there’s a scientific explanation for what happened.”

The general manager looked surprised.

“Señor Smith, you’re a scientist,” he said. “Could there be an unscientific explanation?”

“I’m a scientist by training — that doesn’t mean I’m a cynic,” said Gordon Smith. “Anyway, after the discovery of quantum physics, scientists should perhaps be more open-minded.” He looked at me. “I’ve seen so many weird things in my travels, I’m not superstitious about not being superstitious.”

I had to think about that one — my father would have enjoyed the double negative.

THE DINNER OF pineapple chicken was excellent and the wine tasted good. The general manager had other business to attend to and excused himself right after the coconut cream dessert.

Gordon Smith and I stayed at the dinner table for a while longer, but he didn’t drink much. I made up for that and, inspired by the wine, I needed no encouragement to talk. Before long I was telling him all about Duncairn and Miriam Galt and my broken heart. How I often dreamt about her, and when I woke to her absence, it was as if my heart had been broken again.

“These matters of the heart can be so complicated, especially when you’re young,” said Gordon Smith. “I hope in time you’ll get over her.”

We sat silent for a few moments, then again he said something unexpected.

“I’ve never been much of a dreamer myself,” he said. “I used to think that was good. I was under the impression that when you dream, you see the world the way a madman sees it. So maybe it’s better not to dream in case the dreams, or nightmares, or whatever they are, start to affect your waking life.”

I’d never heard that before. I assured him that, speaking from personal experience, it was just nonsense.

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “In fact I read somewhere recently that dreams are a natural way of clearing out the mind’s overflow. You know, like a kind of mental Smith’s Pumps system. If you don’t dream, the unpleasant things stuffed in there have no way of getting out.”

I wondered what kinds of unpleasant things a man like him might have in his mind. But he didn’t enlarge upon it and once more changed the subject.

“Do you enjoy tutoring?” he said.

I explained how I’d just drifted into the job, and, for that matter, lacked the skills to do anything else. But from what I’d seen, I didn’t really like how the mining industry acted in some of these out-of-the-way places. They polluted the earth and the air, were located where they’d no right to be, and destroyed the native cultures while they were at it. Nor did I much like the fact that I was helping them conduct their unpleasant business in good English.

The hawk eyes were locked onto mine.

“Maybe you should try another line of work,” Gordon Smith said.

I suggested that wouldn’t make any real difference to me. After what I’d been through — I meant, of course, my broken heart — I doubted I’d ever find contentment in any job, anyway.

As I said this, my voice was fuzzy from the wine and I knew I sounded melodramatic.

He nodded his head in sympathy, but his eyes were still taking my measure.

2

We moved to a screened verandah and sipped brandy. Above, the moon was breathtaking in the midst of a billion stars. The buzz of insects and the piping of tree frogs were all at once silenced by the scream of some animal in pain. But in a few seconds, everything returned to normal.

Gordon Smith remarked that these tropical regions involved perils not just for animals, but for human beings too. He himself, for example, had been smitten by a variety of illnesses in the era before modern drugs and vaccines were available.

“Yes, I caught my share,” he said. “Malaria, several times. Yellow fever, too — no one in that era knew it also came from mosquitoes. Believe me, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And no matter how careful you were in some parts of the world, you couldn’t really avoid all the sand flies, black flies, fleas, ticks, and lice. Because of them I caught things I’d never heard of — a lot of Greek-sounding medical terms like onchocerciasis and leishmaniasis.

“Then of course there was cholera — if you had to drink unpurified water, you inevitably got it. And even if you didn’t drink the water and only used it for washing yourself, the bug went through the skin and gave you schistosomiasis. Unless you completely stopped washing yourself, as some people did, which led to even worse problems, aside from just the smell. Like most travellers, I contracted hepatitis — it was as normal as sunburn and there were so many possible causes you’d have had to stay home to be safe.” He sighed and sipped his brandy. “Just running off the names, it sounds as though I’m boasting, but believe me they took quite a toll. Thank goodness I at least managed to avoid bubonic plague — as you know, it’s not so good. Or hemorrhagic fever, where your whole body starts to bleed — if I’d run into that, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”

After listening to this catalogue, I knew I should be grateful for only having had to deal with malaria, or whatever it was, in my own brief travels. I told Gordon Smith I’d be much more careful in future.

“Very wise,” he said. “Things are a lot safer now if you’re careful with the water and keep up with your vaccinations. In the old days, it was much riskier. I used to be strong as an ox, but I’ve paid the price.”

HE NOW BEGAN talking about his home and the home of Smith’s Pumps — Camberloo, in Southern Ontario, more or less in the middle of Canada. He lived there with his only child, a daughter, his wife having died many years ago.

“It’s a town with no remarkable landmarks, or works of architecture, or any of that sort of thing,” he said.

I’d already heard about Camberloo from Dupont: he too had thought it quite a bland place.

Gordon Smith considered that.

“Yes, I suppose Camberloo looks about as bland as a place can be,” he said. “Bland on the surface, that is.” He gestured out beyond the verandah. “Here, in the tropics, everything’s exotic and hits you over the head like a hammer, demanding to be noticed. In Camberloo, things are more subtle. The town has its quotient of drama, too, but you have to be astute and patient to spot it.” The night insects were so noisy that his voice barely rose above them. “These tropical countries have an immediate appeal to some area of the mind that’s adolescent and unformed. Whereas a place like Camberloo — it’s for adult, mature tastes. I have to admit, I’m still not sure which I prefer.”

After another drink he said he needed to get some sleep, for he had a busy day ahead. I took the hint. Before I went out the door, he invited me to join him for breakfast at seven in the morning. I thanked him and staggered across the compound to my own sleeping quarters.

THE SCREECHING of parrots and a host of noisy morning birds woke me not long after sun-up. I could have slept much longer despite the noise, but I remembered my breakfast appointment, got up, showered, and went over to the big bungalow. The general manager had already eaten and gone to his office. Gordon Smith had waited for me. We didn’t talk much as we munched orange slices and banana along with corn bread. I drank four or five cups of coffee.

“Feeling a bit better now?” he said.

I assured him I did.

“I’m just about to head for the mine and see if I can pin down whatever has been causing the problem,” he said. “I’ll have to use a machine for measuring air quality. I’d like to check in case there’s some kind of gas down there.”

The hawk eyes were on me and I could guess what was coming.

“I was wondering,” he said. “If you’re feeling up to it, would you mind helping me carry some things down into the mine? I can’t really trust any of the locals in their present state of mind— even if I could persuade one of them to come with me, which I very much doubt. Besides, I wouldn’t mind having someone else along to act as a witness, or a second pair of eyes.”

I hesitated. I didn’t feel at all brave.

“Maybe you’re a bit under the weather?” said Gordon Smith, watching me. “I’d quite understand if you don’t want to.”

I told him I just needed one more coffee. To my satisfaction, my hand was quite steady as I poured.

3

We wore coveralls and miners’ hats, Gordon Smith and I, as we went into the La Mancha mine. He had a small backpack that ticked loudly and a shoulder bag for rock samples, and was carrying a trowel. I brought a pickaxe and a long-handled shovel.

I was hoping there might be a few spectators at the mine entrance to witness my bravery. But since the incident, the workers had thought it best to stay well away from the mine, and this day was no different.

As we entered the gloom of the tunnel the sultry morning sun was cut off. By the time we’d advanced about thirty paces, a sharp bend almost eliminated any remnants of natural light, so the occasional electric bulbs strung overhead now became our main illumination. The silence was broken only by the crunch of our boots on the gravelly floor and the metallic ticking from Gordon Smith’s backpack.

Soon we could no longer walk side by side, for the tunnel began to narrow, with many sharp rocks protruding. Gordon was in the lead and had become more cautious, pausing every few moments and peering ahead. I walked a couple of paces behind.

This single-file advance went on for about a hundred yards into the mountain. The tunnel widened again and we could see the rock face where the work had stopped. A dozen wheelbarrows, some of them full of gravel and ore, had been left by the fleeing miners. In the light of the bulbs, veins of gold gleamed in the half-excavated wall. Power drills and discarded shovels lay around.

Gordon Smith stopped beside one of the wheelbarrows. He bent over it and began to trowel up some of the smaller pieces of ore into his shoulder bag. All at once, he stiffened and then straightened up, head cocked, as though to listen to something.

The little hairs on my neck tingled.

He was about ten feet away and had begun to make a peculiar, growling sort of noise. He turned very slowly towards me.

The face that looked at me was no longer Gordon Smith’s but rather seemed like parts of a number of faces superimposed on one another, with noses, mouths, and ears all misplaced and distorted. A huge pair of eyes dominated in the midst of that awful face, bulging and cold like a predator’s.

I knew this transformation was illogical and impossible, but my heart was pounding nonetheless. I tried to say something when the thing that had replaced Gordon Smith started to shuffle towards me with its claws reaching out.

That was enough for me. I threw my shovel and pickaxe at it then turned and ran as fast as I could. The thing scuttled along behind me, its breath rasping horribly. When I reached the narrower part of the tunnel, I had to slow up because of the protruding rocks. I was terrified it might catch up to me, but it too was having trouble avoiding the rocks. At last, glimmerings of daylight appeared ahead. I raced round the final corner of the tunnel and out into the open air.

The thing was right on my heels. I could run no more, so I turned with my fists raised, ready to defend myself to the death.

The monster slouched over in front of me, gasping, was Gordon Smith. He was the only living creature around, aside from myself, and he was trying to smile.

BACK AT THE big bungalow, I drank some coffee and gradually got my nerve back. The general manager, like me, was wondering what exactly had happened. Gordon looked at me.

“I was taking a sample of some of the ore and I turned to ask you for the shovel,” he said. “To put it mildly, you didn’t look at all like yourself. In fact your face was so ugly, it frightened the wits out of me. You threw your tools at me as though you wanted to kill me, then you turned and ran. So I just grabbed my sample bag and ran out after you. See, this is where you hit me with your shovel.”

He slowly unbuttoned his shirt and we could see, on the left side of his chest, a red and purple welt. He flexed his left shoulder gently and winced. “This is real enough, anyway,” he said.

I was shocked that I’d done this to him. I told him he’d seemed to me to be transformed into something awful and I’d only been defending myself.

Gordon addressed himself now to the general manager.

“Clearly we both experienced some kind of hallucination,” he said. He took out the ticking instrument that had been in his backpack. The arrow on one of the dials pointed at a red zone. “You see, it’s registering a high quantity of some kind of gas other than methane or carbon monoxide or any of the usual things you find in mines. My guess is it’s from some vegetable component in the rock. The miners may have released it into the air when they were boring deeper inside the mountain. If so, it’ll be in the rock samples I brought out.

“If I’m right, there’s no miracle involved. Though whether you’ll be able to convince your miners of that is another problem.”

“Claro,” the general manager said.

Throughout, Gordon Smith had seemed more amused than anything else about what had happened. I really had thought he’d somehow been turned into a monster.

“For a moment, I thought the same about you, too,” he said. “But I knew that couldn’t be. One of the advantages of being a scientist is that we’re loath to consider the impossible as the cause of anything.”

As for me, I should have been reassured by his rational explanation of the event, sitting there in the orderly calm of the bungalow, with a cup of coffee in my hand and the sound of birds through the screens. But I wasn’t quite at ease. The entire incident reminded me of too many weird things I’d come across — in the Tollgate, in Duncairn, and in Africa — that never seemed quite resolved by common sense.

LATER THAT DAY when the rocks were analyzed in the mine laboratory, Gordon found traces in them, in various concentrations, of a hallucinogen.

“It has the same makeup as various peyote mushrooms,” he told me and the manager. “Perhaps they were petrified in some ancient upheaval of the earth in this region. The original inhabitants may have stumbled on this place, had their visions, and decided the mountain was holy.”

Now he got down to business. He recommended that the manager advise the owners to invest in a ventilator system. Smith’s Pumps would, of course, be happy to custom-build one for them. In the meantime, the wearing of oxygen masks by the miners would be adequate protection.

Even as he talked about business matters, I could still catch glimpses in his face of that monstrous image I’d seen in the cave. And from his sideways glances, I knew he could still see aspects of it in me.

We even joked about it.

But I wondered if perhaps we’d each seen a truth about the other, the kind of truth no one would want to believe about himself. And, having seen it, would two people ever be able to look at each other in the same old, relatively innocent way?

At any rate, the next morning, he took a jeep to the little airfield. From there he’d fly to the capital, and then on, back to Canada. The last thing he said to me was that he hoped we’d meet again.

GORDON SMITH’S scientific analysis made no difference to the fate of the mine. In the weeks that followed his departure, the unscientific view of the incident spread and intensified. It was believed that any miner who went down into the La Mancha mine, and any gold extracted from it, would be accursed. The owners went so far as to hire a local shaman to come and perform some ceremonies to placate or exorcise the spirits. But that did nothing to reassure the miners. So eventually it was decided that the entrances to all three tunnels should be dynamited over and the workers deployed to other mines.

Almost overnight, the shantytown that had grown up around La Mancha was depopulated. The townspeople were now convinced that after the shaman’s intervention some of the mountain spirits might flee the mine and, instead, take up residence in the town.

One way or another, “ghost town” soon became an apt description of that collection of shacks.

MY TUTORING TOOK ME to other mines. But those few moments of terror down the La Mancha tunnel had a lasting, if not permanent, effect on me. Certainly, from that point in my life I felt I became less naive about people, less reliant on first impressions.

Which, surely, was a good thing.

4

InterMinas had sent me to tutor a group of administrators at the Segura strip mine, which was located in a low-lying region of thick jungle. I’d been warned that the climate there was very humid and especially hard on gringos. After a few weeks, just when I was congratulating myself on my strong constitution, I suddenly came down with a high fever and upset stomach. Within a day or two, I’d developed severe pains in all my muscles and a severe rash.

InterMinas arranged for me to be transported by jeep to a regional hospital. It had been established by the company exclusively for its workers.

“HOSPITAL” WAS A grandiose name for what was a large bamboo hut in a jungle clearing. It had a tin roof, fly screens instead of glass windows, and mosquito nets over each of the twenty beds. In spite of the window screens, the place was abuzz with flying insects that didn’t seem to grasp the difference between indoors and outdoors. The only sort of cooling in this hospital consisted of three ceiling fans. These depended on an electrical supply that seemed to fizzle out regularly during the stickiest part of each day.

Three nurses took turns looking after the patients day and night, and a physician did a morning round. He diagnosed my problem as a case of dengue fever, a quite painful form of malaria inflicted by a species of daytime mosquitoes. He assured me that although the illness was painful — it was known as “break-bone fever”—it wasn’t likely to recur.

I was relieved to learn I had a mere case of dengue, which I’d heard about before. I’d been worried it might be the dreaded Guinea Worms. These worms got into the intestines from drinking untreated water. They were as thin as wire and grew to several feet long, popping their heads out through the belly of the sufferer from time to time. At other mines, I’d seen afflicted miners wind the worms out of themselves on twigs.

Only five other patients were in the hospital, all noticeably bandaged from such work injuries as fractured skulls, legs, and arms. You’d never have suspected any of these patients were in pain. Like all the miners I’d met, no matter how awful their condition, suffering in silence was the only acceptable behaviour. I did my best to muffle my own groans.

IN ABOUT A WEEK, I was starting to feel much better. One afternoon I’d had a good lunch of small meat-filled burritos, with mangoes and other fruit for dessert. I must have nodded off.

I dreamt one of those strange dreams in which I was aware I was dreaming. I was standing at the entrance of a tenement in a crowd of people, their faces as detailed and memorable as those of any strangers you see in any real street in the waking world. A man came through the entrance and looked out over the crowd. It was Gordon Smith. He eventually saw me, raised his right arm, and pointed towards me. His eyes were bulging and cold, the way they’d been that day in the La Mancha mine. I knew that was impossible, that there was a scientific explanation, and that this must therefore be a dream.

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side I tried to run away. I couldn’t move my limbs so I attempted to say something, and the sound of my own voice awakened me.

There, by my bed, looking down at me in a friendly and concerned way, stood Gordon Smith himself. I blinked to be sure I wasn’t dreaming still.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” said Gordon Smith. “May I sit down?” He pulled a cane chair towards the bed and sat. “I happened to be down in this region checking the pumping system over at the Segura mine and one of the managers mentioned that the young Scottish tutor had been brought here sick. I realized it was you he was talking about, so I borrowed a driver and a jeep and came over to pay a visit. Unfortunately, I only have fifteen minutes then I have to get to the airport — I’m flying out tonight. How’re you feeling?”

I didn’t mention just seeing him in my dream and told him instead about the dengue.

“I know it well,” he said. “It’s not the most pleasant thing.”

A nurse appeared with two cups of coffee for us. I almost thought I was dreaming again, that was so unusual. Clearly we were being given special treatment.

As we sipped, Gordon Smith asked about my work and we talked about the various mines where I’d been tutoring since I last saw him, nearly six months before. We chatted for a while about some of the managers he knew. He kept checking his watch and eventually gave me one of his keenest hawk stares.

“I don’t have much time so I’ll get to the point,” he said. “When you’re fit to travel why don’t you come to Canada and stay a while at my place in Camberloo? The change will help you recuperate properly.”

I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say.

“Look,” he said. “This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea. I’ve been thinking about it since we met at La Mancha — and my motives aren’t entirely benevolent. The fact is, I’m getting a bit too old myself for all this travelling, and I badly need a reliable assistant. I’ve had my eye out for someone suitable for quite a while, and I have a notion you might be just the man for the job. You’d still see lots of the world if that’s what you want — and you’d have a good income and a home base to come back to.”

He could see how stunned I was.

“If you do come and visit Camberloo, you can find out for yourself what’s involved at the business end of Smith’s Pumps,” he said. “I’m quite aware that you’re not a scientist or an engineer, and that you’re not really familiar with pumps or air-exchange systems. But your job wouldn’t be building the machinery. That’s already taken care of. All you’d need to learn is how to persuade potential clients to consider our products. And I can teach you how to do that.” He checked his watch again. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but give it some thought. Whatever you decide in the end, it’ll be a few months’ holiday for you.”

What could I do but accept his generous offer? The idea of a holiday, with no strings attached, was very appealing — and I’d certainly think over what he’d said about working with him at Smith’s Pumps.

He seemed pleased enough at that, for he shook my hand warmly. Then he reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed me an envelope bulging with banknotes. “This’ll cover your expenses.”

I protested that I could pay my own way.

“Not at all,” he said. “This is a business matter. As soon as I get home, my travel agent will arrange an open first-class ticket in your name on any ship of your choice from Panama to Quebec City. A sea voyage’ll give you another few weeks to relax in the fresh air — and this time you won’t be a deckhand. From Quebec, you can catch a train to Camberloo. I’ll look forward to seeing you there in the not-too-distant future.”

We shook hands again and he rushed off to his jeep. No sooner had he gone than the hospital doctor, in the best of spirits, came to see me. Apparently Señor Smith had slipped him a few thousand pesos in return for taking especially good care of me till I was ready to leave.

He did take good care of me. Two weeks later, I was fit to travel.

1

During the three-week voyage from Panama to Quebec City on a recently built cargo ship, the SS Gardeyloo, I avoided my fellow passengers as much as possible. It was easily done, for there were only a dozen or so and they didn’t seem all that interested in socializing with a walking skeleton. I read and ate and drank in the privacy of my cabin, which was as big as the combined living quarters of the Charybdis’s entire group of deckhands.

Some remnants of my bout of dengue fever persisted in the form of occasional dizziness and a fear of the mosquitoes that made half the voyage with us. But I’d started to put on a little weight again, despite how emaciated I might have looked to others. I was feeling alert by the time the ship was sailing up the Gulf of St. Lawrence. That sensation of slowly entering the gullet of a great beast, which must have affected centuries of immigrants, moved me too.

In the end, the Gardeyloo moored at the docks in Quebec City. Passengers and cargo alike were deposited at the harbourfront on a hot and windy July day. From there, I went to the railway station and caught the train for the ten-hour journey westwards.

THE LAST HUNDRED miles of the approach to Camberloo were through a landscape with no lakes and no mountain ranges, in fact scarcely a hill of note. The near-empty train rolled past enclosed fields, some with stone farmhouses that might have been imported from the pastoral Lowlands of Scotland, and neat little towns with glimpses of quiet streets and church steeples. There were occasional patches of forest, some of the trees quite ancient-looking — relics, perhaps, of the original great forests that had once covered the land.

At last, the train slowly crossed an iron bridge over a placidlooking stream — the Grand River, according to a flaking sign on the bridge — and came into the outskirts of Camberloo, which seemed to be a larger version of the other towns we’d passed. A mile or so of further reluctant slowing down and the train squealed to a halt at Camberloo station.

The time was three o’clock.

I WAS THE ONLY passenger to climb down onto the sunny, deserted platform. The overwhelming heat surprised me — I’d expected the summer weather here to be nothing to me, after being so long in the tropics. Perhaps I’d become too used to the air-conditioned climate of the train, so this dry, stifling heat made me feel a little dizzy. I’d trouble sucking in oxygen and my knitted sweater bought especially for Canada’s arctic chills prickled my flesh.

Behind me the train slowly began to move away from the station. In the background of all its roaring and hissing and thumping, a mad voice was howling. But there wasn’t another person around. When the train had passed, I realized the howling was actually the noise of another, higher-pitched machine. It came from just across the tracks where an old factory with hundreds of sooty windowpanes vomited yellow smoke into the blue sky.

As I stood in the awful heat, I couldn’t help wondering why I’d ever agreed to come to such an unprepossessing place. Yet here I was and it was too late for second thoughts.

Nor was there any point in just standing there broiling in the sun, for no one would be coming to meet me. Gordon Smith had telegraphed the Gardeyloo the day before it arrived at Quebec City to say a room was reserved for me at a place called the Walner Hotel. Whenever I arrived, I was to make my own way there and he’d be in touch with me. So I picked up my canvas holdall and went into the station waiting room.

Immediately I felt much better. This waiting room wasn’t air-conditioned, but after the heat and glare of the platform it was quite refreshing. There was no one around except for a ticket clerk who looked up from his wicket when I came in. He was a middle-aged man with lank, sparse hair, carefully draped over his skull in a way that drew attention to his near-baldness.

I asked him how to get to the Walner Hotel.

“It’s about a ten-minute walk,” he said, looking me over doubtfully. “It’s a fairly expensive place, you know.”

With my unsuitable wool sweater and canvas bag I must have seemed an unlikely guest for the hotel in question. I told him that a room had been reserved for me there.

His eyebrows rose.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, it’s just along King Street. I can call you a taxi if you like.”

I felt a walk might be good for me after sitting so long in the train. So I asked him for directions to the hotel, went outside again, and with my bag in hand — it had nothing in it but a change of clothes, some paperbacks, and the jungle-stained notebook that was to be my epitaph before Gordon Smith came on the scene — I began to walk.

To get to King Street, I followed a side street the clerk had told me to take. It was lined with trees and big houses built in what I took to be the Gothic style, many of them with fake turrets and cupolas. They were so alike they might all have been designed by the same architect. But the old oaks and maples, which in some places formed a leafy archway over the street, grew according to their own rather individual plans. These trees, like many of those I’d seen from the train, must have already been huge long before Camberloo came into existence.

Eventually I got to King Street, which was treeless. The architecture here was of a different type, too — though, again, there was a sameness about it. Red-brick buildings of a commercial sort dominated. Some were big and square, some were small and square, but otherwise they were mainly distinguished from one another by such overhead signs as Grimm’s Tailor, The Hardware Company, and The Pig’s Eye Pub.

The buildings all seemed to be of much the same age — as though on a given day eighty years ago, perhaps, King Street in its entirety had been plopped down here. If any of the buildings were more recent, it was hard to tell, they’d been made to fit in so unobtrusively.

No sooner was I on King Street than I began encountering flies. These Camberloo flies were big and unpredictable, so it was hard to avoid bumping into them. After these collisions, they’d just buzz a little louder and continue on their way. In that sense, they were unlike those persistent little jungle flies I’d learned to hate — flies that howled and never missed an opportunity to bite or sting.

On this first walk along King Street I didn’t see a great number of pedestrians. Most of those I did pass were ordinarylooking and forgettable and avoided eye contact.

Except for one couple. The man’s face shone red in the sun and he clutched a walking cane with which he jabbed at the sidewalk viciously. She, a little woman with a black headscarf and thick glasses, staggered along some feet behind him. As they came closer I saw, quite clearly, that they were connected by a studded leather leash roped round both their waists. I couldn’t tell if he was pulling her along by it, or she was trying to hold him in check.

Naturally, I gave them lots of room to pass.

The only children I saw on that walk weren’t pedestrians.

They were two boys of maybe ten years of age playing in an alleyway between buildings, kicking a ball made of some scraps of black cloth bound loosely together. As I passed by, one of the boys kicked the ball towards me in what looked like a friendly gesture. I made to kick it back then saw it was actually a dead crow, trussed up with string. I shrank from it, causing the boys to laugh in a most unpleasant way.

I NOW ARRIVED at the junction of King Street and Princess where, just as the railway clerk had promised, stood the Walner Hotel. The structure was certainly the tallest and most imposing on the entire street, jutting out prominently into the junction like the prow of a ship built of red brick that had somehow become beached in this landlocked place.

I pushed open the brass-bound swing doors and stepped into the hotel lobby. Away from the brilliant sun, all colours became muted. The lobby was long with a floor of green tiles. Couches and reading tables with the usual scattering of newspapers and magazines took up much of the space. I could see a large mural on the wall alongside the reception desk. It looked like a nineteenth-century country scene: men in black hats and trousers with suspenders seemed to be at work bringing in the hay, or doing other agricultural tasks, with horses and wooden wagons in the background.

How charming, I thought: probably a depiction of pioneer days, part of Camberloo’s history.

But as I walked towards the desk, a startling feature of the painting caught my eye. In a remote corner of the field where the work was going on stood the figure of a naked man with upraised arms. His entire body was impaled on a stake that exited from his mouth. I could hardly believe that such a horrific scene would be displayed in a hotel lobby.

Of course, when I looked at the painting more closely, I saw that what I’d taken for an impaled man was only an upended red wheelbarrow leaning against a post, its handles reaching in the air.

THE RECEPTION DESK itself was a long, polished mahogany counter backed by a framed mirror and the usual pigeonholes for keys and mail. No one was there, so after a moment I palmed the “Ring for Service” bell.

Immediately, from a room to one side of the mailboxes, a small man in uniform with swept-back grey hair emerged. He was quite handsome, except that where his nose should have been he wore a black leather cone tied behind his head with a lace. That made quite an impression on me, but I tried not to stare at the cone and concentrated on his eyes as I told him who I was.

“We’ve been expecting you,” he said. He had a pleasant smile and a lilting, nasal voice. Everything about him was pleasant except for that sinister cone. “Mr. Smith has reserved a room for you on the second floor. He’s left a message.”

He took a folded paper from one of the boxes and gave it to me. It was a brief note from Gordon, welcoming me and saying that a car would pick me up at six.

The little man now handed me my room key.

“The elevator’s in the hallway by the door, just past the mural,” he said. He smiled. “What do you think of our mural? It usually makes a big impression on visitors.”

I glanced towards it and made some flattering comment, happy not to have to avoid looking at his cone. I picked up my bag and began walking towards the hallway.

“The elevator’s around the corner to your right,” he called cheerily after me.

When I automatically looked back to thank him, I saw the man with his cone and then my own image, distantly reflected in the mirror behind him. I quickly found the elevator and pressed the solid brass number two.

MY ROOM IN THE Walner Hotel turned out to be cool and luxurious, with a big bed and heavy, expensive furniture. The bathroom had a dozen towels as well as soaps and shampoos. I lay down on top of the bed, enjoying the silence after the constant noise of travelling, and soon dozed off.

2

The bedside phone woke me: the voice of the little man with the nose cone informed me that the time was six o’clock and a car had arrived for me. I quickly pulled myself together and went down to the front door where a black limo with darkened windows waited. A chauffeur in a cap with a shiny visor showed me into the back seat. We drove west for a few miles into an area that gave glimpses of old trees and the manicured grass of a golf course. The houses were of a modern design and looked even bigger than those in the town. At one of these mansions the limo pulled into a long driveway and stopped beside a white-pillared portico.

I was halfway up the set of marble steps when the double doors were opened by Gordon Smith himself. He wore a dark formal suit rather than the tropical whites I associated with him. His hawk eyes that had seemed quite at home in the jungles of the south didn’t quite fit this civilized setting.

“Harry!” he said. “Good to see you.” His handshake was firm and cool.

He led me into a large white-painted hallway with a high skylight and open doors through which I could see spacious rooms. On the right was a wide stairway to the upper floor. Several discreet-looking paintings that might have been landscapes done in some abstract, geometrical style adorned the walls.

“This way,” said Gordon Smith.

We went through one of the doors into a room with fulllength windows looking out onto a neat lawn with trees and shrubs of the unobtrusive sort. The main furnishings of the room consisted of leather armchairs and white rugs. The paintings on the walls were watercolours of palm-clad tropical islands. Both the vegetation and the ocean were muted and tamed.

From a cabinet Gordon poured us both a glass of wine and we sat opposite each other on the leather armchairs. He inquired about my health and I assured him that I felt fine and was almost completely recovered from my sickness. I thanked him for his kindness in arranging the voyage for me.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” he said. “I’ve always found travel by sea to be a great way of relaxing.”

I understood what he meant. Being a passenger was very different from voyaging as a crew member, swabbing the decks, polishing brasses, doing anything that needed done, in no matter what weather.

“And the train from Quebec City?” Gordon said. “Was it comfortable?”

I told him how much I’d enjoyed the cleanliness and the spacious compartments. It had been worlds away from those little jungle trains crowded with people carrying babies or chickens or even pigs for the market, with the claustrophobic jungle on either side of the tracks and the glassless windows that allowed in insects as well as engine smoke.

Gordon Smith knew those experiences well, and smiled his agreement.

“And now, what about Camberloo?” he said. “What’s your first impression?”

I was honest in my answer. I mentioned the two people on the street who seemed to be leashed together and the boys playing with the dead bird. Then that I’d misperceived the wheelbarrow in the hotel mural, which had made me wonder if perhaps the lingering effects of my fever had distorted my grasp of things. I couldn’t even be sure now if the little man with the nose cone actually existed.

“Oh, he exists all right,” Gordon said. “The rumour is he lost his nose because of syphilis. But your general confusion is quite natural. You’ve been through a lot and it’ll take time for you to be completely at ease. That’s what you’re here for.”

OFTEN THROUGHOUT this conversation he’d been glancing towards a doorway to his right. Now his eyes lit up as we heard the tapping of high heels on polished wood, followed by the entrance of a young woman in a blue silk dress.

Gordon Smith stood up and so did I.

“I’d like you to meet my daughter, Alicia,” he said.

The young woman held out her hand and shook mine lightly.

“How nice to meet you,” she said in a soft voice. Her eyes were dark brown, not blue like her father’s. But they were just as unflinching, looking me over quite frankly, the way you’d appraise a photograph.

For my own part, I was certainly appraising her, though I was trying not to make that too obvious. She was of middling height, with an oval face. She was carefully made up, with black mascara framing those brown eyes. Her hair was dark brown, too, and striking in the way it hung over the left side of her face, like a veil. The more I looked at her, the harder it was to spot her father in her aside from that quality of her eyes. She was one of those children whose physical resemblance to a parent isn’t all that obvious even when you see the two of them together.

I was about to make some such remark to Gordon when I saw he’d been watching me closely, as though anxious about my impression of his daughter.

I suddenly understood.

From perhaps the time of our very first meeting at the La Mancha mine, Gordon Smith had been assessing me not just as a potential employee, but as a possible husband for his only daughter.

I BEGAN, THEREFORE, to look quite differently at this Alicia Smith, who, after pouring herself a glass of wine at the cabinet, came and sat down on the couch opposite and made polite conversation.

I guessed she’d heard all about me. I, on the other hand, didn’t know much about her. Had she lived in Camberloo all her life, for example?

“Yes. I love it here,” she said.

“In fact, she’s always lived in this very house,” said Gordon Smith. “I had it built before she was born. It was meant to be my gift to her mother but she died without ever seeing it.”

They both smiled sadly at this private allusion.

“However,” said Gordon, “Alicia doesn’t mean she’s been confined solely to Camberloo. Right, Alicia?”

Thus prompted, she began to tell me more about herself, in the course of which I realized she’d had an altogether different kind of life from mine. She’d attended a private girls’ school in Toronto and spent a year at the Sorbonne studying fine art. And, of course, every year she’d go “roughing it” at their cottage in the north country, sailing on the Great Lakes, skiing in Vermont, or basking in the sun at their apartment in Key Biscayne.

Not that her entire life was play. She was a member of the board of the Camberloo Art Gallery where she spent several mornings a week as a volunteer. Gordon, it turned out, was a major supporter of the gallery. The muted paintings on the walls around us were part of the collection he was allowed to borrow.

I asked if she’d ever travelled with her father on any of his business trips.

She shook her head, and because of the head-shaking, I realized she kept that veil of hair over the left side of her face to partly cover some sort of discoloration on her cheek.

“I much prefer to stay here and look after the house,” she said.

“And I always look forward to coming home to her,” said Gordon Smith.

They looked at each other with great fondness.

Of course, I couldn’t help noticing that her account of her life had made no mention of a husband or boyfriend.

DINNER WAS SERVED in the dining room by an Asian maid who was also, I gathered, their cook and cleaning woman. They complimented her upon the main course — a dish that was one of Gordon’s favourites from his travels in the East. It consisted of tofu, eggs, shrimp, and rice done in various exotic spices.

I tried to look as though I enjoyed it.

The entire dinner took more than an hour, with short course after short course. The Smiths only pecked at them, as though this was more of a daily ritual than a means of sustenance.

I’d been feeling rather nervous, but the wine loosened my tongue and I did a lot of the talking, mainly about my life as a sailor and my experiences in Africa and South America. I wanted to be amusing, and they seemed amused. Even after the remnants of the meal were cleared away, we stayed at the table a while, drinking coffee and chatting.

Then Gordon Smith glanced over at Alicia, they nodded to each other, and she stood up. We stood too.

“I’ll leave you two now to talk business,” said Alicia. She kissed Gordon briefly on the cheek. She shook my hand again, perhaps a little more warmly than at our introduction.

“I’ve enjoyed meeting you,” she said. “I do hope you’ll visit us again.”

She seemed about the same age as me, so her enormous selfpossession impressed me all the more. I mumbled something to the effect that I’d no idea how long I’d be in Camberloo but I hoped I’d be invited to dinner again.

“I’m sure you will be,” she said. Then she left the dining room.

3

Gordon Smith now said, “Time for brandy and cigars.”

He led me into an adjoining room lined with bookshelves and let me have a look around. He called the room “the library” and indeed it was full of books, mostly matched sets of classical works as far as I could see — Plato and Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy and so on — that looked as though they’d never been opened but were for decorative purposes. Near the fireplace, a smaller bookcase beside two comfortable armchairs with reading lights was clearly dedicated to books that were actually read. I glanced at a few of the titles: A History of Technology Throughout the Ages, The Hydraulic Deep Earth Pump, Clear Thinking in a Complex World, and Business: Strategic Approaches. I didn’t notice any fiction. A number of what appeared to be catalogues from galleries and large-sized art books were lying flat on the bottom shelves.

When the maid came in carrying a tray with a bottle and glasses and a box of cigars, we sat down in the armchairs.

She placed the tray on a little table near Gordon and silently retreated. He poured two sizable brandies then picked out two cigars. He snipped the tops off and handed me one.

“Cuban,” he said.

He lit them, we puffed, then we sipped the brandies. It was a most enjoyable sensation.

“Harry, it really is a pleasure to have you here,” he said.

We clinked glasses, puffed and sipped some more, then Gordon put down his glass.

“You remember when I came to see you in the hospital?” he said. “As I told you then, it wasn’t simply an act of kindness. I’d been looking for someone I could have complete trust in to represent the firm overseas. We’re doing very well, but I ought to be spending the bulk of my time here in Camberloo dealing with our expansion plans, not gallivanting around the world. In addition my doctor says my heart isn’t as good as it used to be and it’s time I cut out the rigours of long-distance travel.” The hawk eyes narrowed on me. “When I met you, I came to the conclusion that you were a fine young man, wasting your talents in those mining camps. I really think you could do a great job for us.”

I’d been thinking about this moment for weeks now and answered him carefully, letting him know I was very flattered by his interest in me. But, equally, I didn’t want him to put his faith in the wrong man. How could someone as ignorant as I was— even of basic science — be of any use as the representative of a highly technical, specialized firm like Smith’s Pumps?

“You probably don’t realize how refreshing it is to hear that,” he said. “It’s a quality we don’t often find in business. Some people would claim they were experts on pumps and ventilators because they’d lived for a few months in a town that had a coal mine — what was it called? Duncairn?”

We both laughed.

“Look, as I told you before, it’s not another engineer we need,” he said. “It’s someone who’s smart and adaptable and doesn’t mind travelling. Our clients have their own engineers and they’re the ones who decide whether our design and performance specifications will do the trick for them. But they’d much rather deal with someone they can trust. If they buy one of our machines, they want to be sure they can rely on us if problems arise during the warranty period and that we’ll be fair and helpful thereafter. Clients appreciate that kind of commitment.”

I was still worried about my lack of technical expertise and reminded him that he’d only been at the La Mancha mine that day because he could handle the technical equipment for testing the air. His ease with that weird device was something that had impressed me deeply at the time.

He shook his head.

“Honestly, in twenty years in the business, I’ve never had to do anything like that,” he said. “I went down to perform the test, not because I was an engineer, but because their own engineers were too superstitious to go down and do it themselves. One of them actually had to show me how to switch the testing machine on and off. A child could have done that.”

He saw I was still hesitant, so again he tried to allay my fears.

“If you agreed to give the job a try, I wouldn’t just send you off on your own,” he said. “No, naturally I’d go along with you on your first few trips to show you the ropes and let you see for yourself what’s involved. I’d go with you till you were totally confident.”

I still couldn’t make up my mind, so he tried another tack.

“Back then, when we first met,” he said, “I remember you gave me a little sermon on the failings of the mining industry, with its pollution of nature and destruction of cultures. If you took this job, you’d have the opportunity to do something about those things — at the very least by providing machines that do the minimum damage.”

WHILE I WAS THINKING about that, he got up out of the armchair and went to the window, puffing at his cigar, looking out onto the lawn. I looked out too — it was getting dark now. Bats, or maybe small birds, flickered in and out of existence in the light cast by the window.

After a while, he turned to face me and I sensed he was about to play what he hoped would be his strongest card.

“Alicia’s a great girl,” he said. “Her mother died just after giving birth to her and her brother. He was stillborn and that made Alicia’s birth very difficult. I’ve never told anyone about this, but did you notice the blemish on her cheek? It was damaged getting her out of the womb and it’s never quite cleared up. She’s very conscious of it and adjusts her hair to cover the mark.”

I was a little embarrassed at how he was confiding in me. I pretended, of course, that I hadn’t noticed any blemish. He had more to say, however.

“I never remarried but tried to be both father and mother to Alicia,” he said. “I’m very proud of how she’s turned out. As you can guess, over the years, a number of men have wanted to marry her.” He paused a moment. “We didn’t approve of any of them.”

I couldn’t help but notice the “we.”

He now sat down opposite me and, as he talked, his eyes glinted like one of those jungle hawks when it’s about to strike its target. Indeed, that was how he seemed to me: outwardly a scrawny creature, but with startling energy when focused on his prey. What nimbleness and willpower it would take for me to counter him. If, that is, I’d even wanted to counter him. He hadn’t said outright that he wanted me to be the husband of his beloved daughter, but I’d no doubt about it.

What a temptation his implied offer was to one whose dreams were still haunted by the slums and oppressiveness of the Tollgate. The job might not be ideal, but if I accepted, I could travel the world, I’d live in comparative luxury for the rest of my life — and I’d have Alicia. Not long ago the idea of such treachery, such a betrayal of the memory of my love for Miriam on such mercenary considerations, would have been quite unthinkable. But, after all, wasn’t it Miriam who’d broken my heart? Was I to mourn the loss of her forever? Alicia certainly was beautiful— might I not, in time, fall in love with her?

“Well,” said Gordon Smith. “What do you think of my proposition?”

I came right out with it: yes, I’d really like to give it a try.

His eyes widened momentarily in pleasure, or triumph. He stretched out his thin hand.

“Great!” he said. “I’m delighted. I really am.”

I knew he meant it.

4

For two months following that conversation, Gordon Smith oversaw much of my life. He arranged a work visa for me as well as a furnished apartment. It was on the top floor of a building he owned, overlooking Camberloo Park with its fine old trees and elaborate flower beds.

Most weekdays, wearing one of my newly bought business suits, I’d walk the half mile from my apartment to Gordon’s office in the city square. He or Lew Jonson, his business partner and right-hand man, would coach me in the characteristics of the various types and sizes of the company’s pumps and ventilators.

Some days, we’d go to the factory a few miles west of Camberloo where the machines were assembled from the parts made at various steel foundries. The factory was quite small, with only a dozen skilled employees headed by Jonson. He was a plump, balding engineer and co-designer, with Gordon, of the pumps. As he showed me the various machines, he’d pat them affectionately as though they were dogs. His temperament was of the placid sort and clearly he’d have been unable to take Gordon’s place as a salesman.

My head was soon bursting with unfamiliar terminology: centrifugal and positive displacement, radial, mixed, or axial flow, single and multiple rotors, circumferential pistons, diaphragms and progressive cavities, pneumatic and centrifugal exhaust fans. Gordon Smith assured me that a display of my expertise in the language of our products was the passport to acceptance by future clients. To my surprise, it didn’t take too long for me to understand what the words meant and where the parts they named were located in the machines.

MOST EVENINGS after work, I’d eat in a little steakhouse in Camberloo Square then walk the mile or so back to my apartment and settle down with a book. But once or twice a week, Gordon Smith would bring me home with him for dinner.

Alicia always looked pleased to see me. I soon realized she wasn’t much of a talker — it was as if she’d said most of what she had to say on that day we first met. But I was flattered by the fact that she seemed to enjoy hearing me talk and would listen attentively, nodding her head in such a way that her curtain of hair gave only occasional glimpses of the blemish on her left cheek.

Not that we were alone together very much. Mainly, all three of us would eat dinner, then Gordon and I would adjourn to the library for brandies and cigars and he’d instruct me in the business. When he dealt with the profit-and-loss side of Smith’s Pumps, those eyes looked as though they could shatter glass. But when he talked about the art of selling, the human side of him would dominate and his eyes would soften.

Sometimes, these talks would go on so late that he’d insist I stay overnight in the guest room at the top of the stairs. Indeed, the overnight stays became frequent enough that I even left a change of clothes there. I’d often fall asleep in the guest room thinking of Alicia, who was just a few doors away.

In the mornings, her father and I would have breakfast and be on our way to the office before she was up and about.

ONE NIGHT when we were sitting in the limo on our way to his house for dinner, Gordon told me he’d be leaving for Toronto immediately after we ate.

“I have to catch the overnight train to Montreal,” he said. “I’m having problems with a major supplier there so I’d better go and see what’s going on. I probably won’t be back till tomorrow night, at the earliest. Jonson will keep you busy at the factory. He wants to show you some of the latest components.”

The dinner was pleasant. Gordon was, naturally, somewhat preoccupied. I talked quite a bit and Alicia was, as usual, the perfect listener. When we’d finished eating, we accompanied Gordon out to the limo. He ducked into the back seat and, before closing the door, spoke directly to me.

“Harry, why don’t you stay overnight and keep Alicia company?” he said. “It’ll give you both a chance to talk without me in the way.” He said goodbye to us, shut the door, and the limo took off down the street.

SO, FOR THE FIRST TIME, only Alicia and I went into the library. We sipped brandy and I puffed away at one of the Cuban cigars. Gordon’s parting words had been ambiguous enough to make me feel nervous and uncertain, so the conversation was rather stilted and general. After a while, the maid put her head in for a second to tell us she’d finished tidying up and was on her way home.

Now that we were completely alone in the house I felt even more nervous. To my relief Alicia put on some classical piano music that was being considered for background at the art gallery. We sat listening and smiling approvingly. Around ten, when the music ended, Alicia finished the one small glass of brandy she’d been sipping all along and put it down.

“Well, it’s time for bed. Goodnight,” she said, looking into my eyes calmly. She left the library and I heard her climb the stairs.

Now that she was gone, I felt quite depressed. I poured some more brandy and glanced without much interest through the illustrations in The Hydraulic Deep Earth Pump. At about ten-thirty, I thought I’d better go to bed myself if I was to get up in the morning. I switched off the library light and climbed the stairs to the guest room.

ALICIA’S DOOR at the end of the little hallway was ajar, showing the muted light of her bed lamp. I was halfway inside my own door when I decided to take a chance and call out goodnight to her.

“Why don’t you come in for a while?” she called back.

My heart began pounding. I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror: an anxious and nervous-looking stranger. So I took a deep breath, went along to her room, and pushed the door open.

She was lying on top of the bed in her nightdress. As I came in she closed the book she’d been reading and put it on the nightstand. She was still wearing her makeup, her eyes mascaraed, her lips red. Her hair had been brushed back, so I could see the flawed left side of her face — a kind of bruising on the skin.

“You took a long time coming up,” she said. She held out her hand.

I could hardly breathe as I went to her. I murmured her name.

“Don’t talk,” she said in the softest of voices.

WE DID TALK LATER, long after midnight, lying in each other’s arms. The bed lamp was still on and I was admiring her.

“I was beginning to think you didn’t like me,” she said.

I protested that she couldn’t have been more wrong, that I’d been in a state of tension all night, that I’d kept thinking about telling her how much I wanted her, that I’d kept quiet only because I was afraid if I tried to take advantage of the situation she’d be deeply offended.

She snuggled against me.

“Men know so little,” she said. “Most women are quite flattered to be asked — after all, the worst that can happen is that they’ll say no. I mean if a man doesn’t ask, how is he ever to find out?” Her brown eyes, dark in the low light of lamp, were on me. “I’ll bet there are women in all those places you’ve travelled wishing you’d asked them,” she said, laughing softly. “Aside from just the fun of it, if a man and a woman don’t spend some time in bed together, how are they to know whether they’re compatible?”

This down-to-earth approach to something I’d always tended to think of in a semi-mystical way astonished me.

She hugged me tightly for a while then let me go.

“You’ve got to be up for work in a few hours,” she said. “You’d better go to your room if either of us is going to get any sleep.”

Of course, she was right. It was a hard thing to do, but I went back to my own bed and lay there for a while wondering what it would be like to be married to such a woman. I had just decided it might be a very good thing when I did indeed manage to fall asleep.

5

Next afternoon I was at the factory with Jonson, studying the specifications of a variety of spare parts, when Gordon Smith phoned and asked for me. He’d arrived back from Montreal earlier than he’d expected and gone straight home. He’d had a successful trip and wanted to discuss something.

“Would you be able to come over again for dinner?”

I said I would.

“By the way, I’ve chatted with Alicia,” he said. “She tells me you both had a good talk last night.” He sounded amused, but I couldn’t be sure. I made some inconsequential reply about how we’d stayed up too late.

“Anyway, we’ll both look forward to seeing you at dinner tonight,” he said.

I ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE by taxi around seven. The conversation over dinner was quite normal. I tried to behave towards Alicia in a way that wouldn’t give any hint of what had happened the night before, difficult though it was with Gordon watching. His eyes seemed more than ever impossible to deceive.

Yet he was clearly in the best of moods, talking about Montreal in general and the various fine hotels and restaurants he usually frequented on his trips there. He didn’t say much about the reasons for this latest journey — he rarely discussed business at table. I gathered there had been a problem with the production of valve linings in a Montreal factory, but it was now satisfactorily resolved.

Later, he and I went into the library, drank brandies, and puffed on Cuban cigars. After a while he talked about the reason he’d wanted me to come for dinner.

“You’ve been with the firm now for about three months,” he said. “I know that’s not very long and I don’t want to press you unduly. But you’ve seen for yourself how much I have to do at the office, keeping on top of the running of day-to-day business affairs. Then there are trips like the one to Montreal that are symptomatic of the kind of thing that’s been happening more and more as we’ve expanded. The truth is, from now on I’m going to have to spend the bulk of my time dealing strictly with the business end, especially making sure we get the highest-quality parts. In other words, I need to be here in Canada. Jonson and I believe it’s high time someone else took over the travelling part of the job.”

I knew what was coming.

“We both agree you’re the man for it,” he said. “You’ve worked hard and Jonson’s been very impressed by how quickly you’ve come to have a sound grasp of the ins and outs of the machinery. So, what do you think? Could you see yourself dealing with our customers abroad? As I promised you before, I’d keep you company at first to make sure things go smoothly. If you say no, we’re back to square one.” I could hear the anxiety in his voice, so I immediately put him at his ease: if he thought I could do it, I’d like to give it a try.

I’d never seen him look so happy.

“I couldn’t be more pleased,” he said. He shook my hand warmly. “Alicia will be thrilled, too. You should go up and tell her.”

AS OPPOSED TO the night before, this time I ran up the stairs straight to Alicia’s room. I knocked on her half-open door.

“Come in,” she called.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at me expectantly. I told her Gordon had asked me to take over the foreign travel, and that I’d agreed to do it. She came to me and we hugged each other.

“What wonderful news,” she breathed. “How wonderful, wonderful.”

I held her out at arm’s length and looked resolutely into her eyes. I told her that this day could only be bettered if she’d consent to become my wife. Though I’d rehearsed my little speech, hearing my own mouth utter the words shocked me a little.

She was not at all shocked.

“Of course I will,” she said.

Her body leaned into mine, her dark eyes gleaming. My heart was beating at the thought of last night and all the other nights to come.

Did she think Gordon would approve?

“He most certainly will,” she said. “He talked and talked about you when he came back from South America that first time he met you. I heard your life story, even the part about your tragic love affair. We thought it was so romantic. I was dying to meet you, and when I did I liked you right away. Then, after last night …” She said no more, but snuggled against me.

I was a little surprised to hear that Gordon had told her about my love for Miriam — I’d thought it best not to mention that to her. This father and daughter were such a strange pair, I wondered if they kept any secrets from each other. Fortunately, in this case, it was clear that Alicia not only didn’t hold my confession of undying love to another woman against me, she actually regarded it as a point in my favour.

After a few more moments of tenderness, she stood back, rearranged her hair, and looked into my eyes.

“Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?” she said. I assured her I was.

“Then let’s go downstairs and tell him.”

I did notice neither of us had once said that we loved the other. If I had any misgivings about that omission, I put them aside. Somehow, in a very short period of time, I’d come to the conclusion that perhaps all those notions I’d once had about undying love were probably no more than the delusions of an immature mind. I was, at last, on my way to becoming a realist.

We went downstairs hand in hand.