Pascali's Island

Everywhere, in small things and in great, the world is rehearsing for violence, Excellency. Games on the beach, articles in newspapers, any casual conversation, all show the same impatience with peace. I saw it on the faces of people in church last night, mute, sad, a slow rage at inactivity – then the relief, the joy of hate, with which they turned to me. Everywhere a rising need for the gesture that shatters the glass.

Revelations, Excellency. I have just returned from the meeting with Mahmoud Pasha that Mister Bowles requested -it was not until this morning that we were able to go. Revelations. But I must get things in their proper order, must not allow Mister Bowles's amazing duplicity to throw my narrative into disarray. He is a trickster, Excellency.

He had the brown leather bag with him this time – the one I had seen him carrying when he descended from the ship. Worn, but of good quality. Of the type known as a Gladstone bag, I believe. I was curious about the reasons for this appointment and tried by various hints to draw Mister Bowles out, but he was obviously unwilling to discuss it. I did not tell him of Herr Gesing's proposition, thinking it more to my advantage to keep quiet for the time being.

The sentry offered no hindrance to our passing. The parade-ground, as before, was empty. We were met by an orderly, who showed us into the house – not this time into the reception room where we had been before, but into a much smaller room with a large desk, on which papers were scattered, and several upright chairs against the wall. There was no one here. The orderly asked us to wait. He seemed disconcerted at finding the room empty. He hesitated for some time at the door, then he went off down the passage, presumably to find some superior.

Mister Bowles and I had seated ourselves against the wall. But after a moment I got up again, moved casually over to the desk, and began glancing at the papers lying on it. I could feel his unspoken disapproval behind me – this was not the behaviour of a gentleman. However, I persisted. I have my own code of practice, and the acquiring of information ranks high in it.

There was not much of interest among the papers. Official correspondence for the most part, addressed to Mahmoud Pasha, some of it dated several months previously. It was obvious that the Commandant had no system for dealing with his letters. One I noticed because it bore the imperial seal, and contained a reference to a German firm, Mannfeldt GmbH, also the phrase 'terra rossa' which my eye hastily lighted on in the midst of the Turkish words. Beyond this was a map, with various marks on it in red ink. It was a local map, I realised after a moment: there was the line of Mt Laris, with the whole line of the coast on that side of the island, including the area containing Mister Bowles's temporarily acquired domain.

Mister Bowles coughed, I think to denote disapproval. At that moment I caught some flicker of movement outside. I glanced through the small window and was in time to see the figures of Mahmoud Pasha and Herr Gesing walking side by side in a direction away from me, the former in uniform, the latter black-suited. They were talking but not, it seemed to me, very amicably. In a moment more they had disappeared round the side of the house. Herr Gesing speaks Turkish, then – he has never admitted as much to me. Presumably taking his leave. I wonder what business brought him. On our previous visit, too, his name occurred, if you remember, Excellency.

I had only a few seconds more to look at the map, time enough, however, to see that a rough diamond shape had been traced out on it in red, lying horizontally, its eastern point beginning just above the ancient harbour.

I heard steps outside the door, Izzet's voice raised in anger. Instantly I moved away from the desk, and took up a position near the window – there was no time to regain my seat. I think Izzet was upbraiding the orderly for leaving us alone. A moment later he entered, looking not exactly flustered, but certainly less than calm. 'Please be seated,' he said, giving me a sharp glance. He went to the desk and looked over it quickly, but without touching anything.

Mahmoud Pasha entered, his bulk encased in dark blue dress uniform with silver brocade on epaulettes and sleeves. His face was dark red, congested-looking. Again I had the feeling that the interview with Herr Gesing had not been a friendly one.

When we were again seated, Izzet and Mahmoud Pasha looked in expectant silence at Mister Bowles. There was a short, uneasy pause, then Mister Bowles, in his usual plunging way, said, 'Well, the fact is, you'd better tell them I have found some objects on the site.'

'Objects?' I said.

'What does he say?' Izzet pointed his nose at me.

'On the site they leased to me.' Mister Bowles put one hand up, briefly, to his tie, and touched the knot. 'They are of considerable archeological importance,' he said. 'There's a lot of stuff there.'

'What does he say?' Izzet's thin lips twisted. He was getting impatient.

'He has found certain objects in the course of his researches.' I said.

'What kind of objects?'

Mister Bowles leaned forward earnestly. 'It is an important discovery,' he said. 'The point is that I want to ask them to change the lease so I can have the right to excavate the site. Of course I am willing to pay more for it – whatever they think fit.'

Inwardly marvelling, outwardly impassive, I translated this.

'Valuable objects?' Izzet said.

'He asks if they are valuable,' I said.

'Yes, I suppose so,' Mister Bowles said. 'It depends on the material. Of course I shan't know what there is until I start digging.'

For an appreciable period after this no one said anything at all, and this I could well understand. The blinding correctness of Mister Bowles's behaviour was dazing them, as it had dazed me. He sat there before us, with his bag beside his chair, like a marvellous monster of rectitude.

'Large objects?' Izzet said at last. 'Buyuk dir? A natural question. If they were large, of course, it would go some way towards making Mister Bowles's behaviour human and explicable: large objects could not be pocketed, removed surreptitiously-time was needed.

'I have them here in my bag,' Mister Bowles said.

'Small objects apparently,' I said to Izzet. 'He has them in his bag.'

The eyes of both Izzet and the Pasha leaped at once to the bag.

'I would be willing to double the sum,' Mister Bowles said. I translated this.

Mahmoud Pasha shifted his bulk behind the desk, and his chair winced. 'Let us see the objects,' he said. His eyes were still on the bag.

Without waiting for me to translate this, Mister Bowles began to unbuckle the side strap of his bag. It seemed to take a long time. Finally, when the brass clasp at the top had also been undone, he opened the bag. Then he paused again, surely with a showman's instinct, and said, 'Perhaps I could put the objects on your desk?'

'Certainly,' the Pasha said. 'Buyurun.' I had never seen him look so alert and generally exhypnos.

Mister Bowles got up rather awkwardly, still holding the open bag. He moved over to the desk. His hand went into the bag and emerged, holding something. The others were looking only at his hands, but I glanced up at his face, and saw him lick his lips in two quick movements of the tongue. He placed the object on the desk.

It was the marble head of a woman, pale honey colour, the size of a smallish human fist. And I had seen it before.

Recognition was not immediate, did not come flooding into my mind, but was achieved in a series of incredulous stabs, or pangs. The head seemed to palpitate, so intently did I eye it. But of course there was no doubt: it was the same head.

'I think this is the most interesting of the finds to date,' Mister Bowles said. After that small betraying movement of the tongue his face was quite calm again. 'I thought at first it was Roman,' he said to the red-faced and astounded Mahmoud Pasha. 'A Roman copy, you know. But the workmanship is extremely delicate, particularly in the treatment of the hair. I think it is Hellenistic work, almost certainly from the corner of a sarcophagus.'

With the same feeling of incredulity I heard my voice translating, purveying information about this head for the benefit of Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet; this head I had seen in his room on the evening of his arrival, before he had so much as left the hotel; this head he had undoubtedly brought with him to the island.

'Early third century BC,' Mister Bowles said, with what seemed genuine interest and pleasure. 'And look at the marble.' He picked the head up and displayed it to us. 'That is not local marble,' he said.

I glanced at Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet. It was obvious that neither of them was at all interested in what the Englishman was saying. This lump of marble must have come as a distinct anticlimax.

'It is Pendelic marble,' Mister Bowles said, 'and you know what that means, of course. Then there is this. This is quite a different kind of object.' His hand was in his bag again. His voice, I noticed now, was calmer, more deliberate in falsehood than in the blurts of his everyday speech. 'Less interesting perhaps than the head,' he said.

He laid on the table, alongside the head, a thick circlet of metal, in which were set blue stones. The metal had a yellowish gleam. 'Roughly the same period, I should say,' he said. 'I have a theory about these things, actually.'

'He says it belongs to the same period,' I said, abetting Mister Bowles in the absurd pretence that Izzet and the Pasha were interested in the historical aspect. The circlet I had not seen before.

Mahmoud Pasha picked it up, looked at it against the light, weighed it in his palm. 'Alti' he said. 'It is gold.' His voice sounded changed to me, everything seemed changed, voices, light, above all Mister Bowles, standing upright before the desk – by 'upright' I am describing only his posture, Excellency, not his character as I now viewed it.

'The Vali remarks that it is gold,' I said.

'Oh, yes, it's gold all right,' Mister Bowles said, with studious seriousness as if this mere utterance of avarice on the Pasha's part had been a contribution to the discussion about the date. 'Yes, that is quite true, and I take your point that gold was not mined here, but the workmanship, you will notice, is Greek. These islands were importing gold from Africa in the third century. The stones, of course, are turquoises.'

Clever of him to produce this valuable object only second, showing that his interests were scholarly, not grossly material; thus maintaining at these culminating moments the pose that had deceived us all.

Izzet Effendi leaned forward, passing a thin hand over his mouth and jaw. 'Gold?' he said.

Mahmoud Pasha passed the circlet over to him and he peered closely at it for several moments with various exclamations of piety – his religious feelings roused by the sight of such wealth. He was making as if to pass it back to his overlord, but Mister Bowles politely intercepted it, laid it back on the table, alongside the head. 'Then there are these few things,' he said, ferreting once more in his bag. He placed on the table various shards of pottery and a small terracotta jar with a broken handle. 'They were all together in the one place,' he said. 'Red-figured, the fragments. Corinthian, by the look of it.'

This said, he returned quietly to his seat. There ensued a heavy silence among the four of us in that room. Mister Bowles looked politely at the window. Izzet and the Pasha looked at each other and at him. They were handicapped, of course, fatally handicapped from the start. A prospect of great wealth was being opened out before them, with dazing suddenness – if the Englishman were the mooncalf he seemed. And he was, he must be. Who but a mooncalf would have been willing to pay so much for the lease? And now, declaring his finds in this way… You begin to see, Excellency, the beauty of the conception?

'How did you find these objects?' Izzet wanted to know. He peered at Mister Bowles as if scenting carrion.

Mister Bowles explained, with my assistance, that he had been exploring the remains of the Roman villa up there, that he had in his scrambling happened to dislodge some loose stones and rubble immediately below the arch of the doorway – there was only this one arch left standing. Perhaps they did not know, he said in parenthesis, that the Virgin Mary was said to have spent her last days here, after the death of Christ? He did not think this could be so, the villa being of too early a date, though it was possible, certainly it was possible. He had gone head over heels himself, he said. When he picked himself up he saw that the fall of stone had revealed a cavity in the hillside which narrowed into what looked like a vertical shaft, or perhaps part of another house, built lower down. He had not been able to explore this because of the danger of further landslips. But he had found the objects in question just inside the opening, lying all together.

'My theory is,' said Mister Bowles, 'that the villa was built on or near the site of an earlier house, by that time in ruins. They probably used the same foundations, without looking at what was underneath. There was a sanctuary to Artemis there from very early times. That argues a certain population. I think these objects are part of a collection formed by the owner of the earlier house, probably sometime during the period of the Attalids. Someone very wealthy. Perhaps from Ephesus or Pergamum.'

'And the rest of the collection?' Izzet said.

'I think it is there,' Mister Bowles said, without a tremor. 'There, underneath the villa, you know.'

There was another, longish pause. Then Mister Bowles said, 'Tell them I will double the money, if they will agree to let me excavate the site.'

I put this offer to the Pasha, who rested for a full minute in profound immobility. Then he said, 'I wish to confer with my land-agent. Will you wait outside for a little while?'

Mister Bowles sauntered casually to the table and slipped the circlet into his pocket. The other things he left there. Then we obediently filed out. We left them there together, Excellency. Mahmoud Pasha obese and torpid, Izzet delicate and peering. Turk and Arab – physically they could not have been more dissimilar; but the contrast was only superficial: they were two men in the toils of an identical dream.

They did not keep us waiting long. Standing at his desk the Pasha delivered the answer that I – and I am sure Mister Bowles too – had expected.

'We cannot extend the lease,' he said.

'Amend,' I said. 'Not extend.'

It was my care for words that led me to the foolishness of thus correcting him. He looked at me steadily and without expression for some moments. I felt a chill in the region of the spine. My superior vocabulary will not help me, if once I fall into his hands.

'Neither,' Izzet said. 'We can agree to neither. These objects are the property of the government.'

Mister Bowles rose and moved with apparent casualness towards the desk. 'I am aware of that,' he said. 'And I intend to see that they are handed over to the proper authorities in Constantinople.' Without haste, watching Izzet and Mahmoud steadily, he returned the objects to the depths of his bag, adding to them the circlet from his pocket. He used only his left hand for this. The right remained by his side. 'I shall see to it personally,' he said. 'As I am sure you know, a collection is currently being formed by the Ministry at Gulhane, as the nucleus of a National Museum.'

I translated these remarks to them, watching as I did so Mister Bowles take up the bag, again using only his left hand. The right remained by his side, hanging loosely, fingers open. I glanced round the room for places of cover, but saw none.

'Has he told anyone else of this?' Izzet said. No, it appeared that he hadn't.

'And the papers, has he them with him?' Izzet looked quickly at his master. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'if we could see the papers…'

Mister Bowles's blue gaze was expectantly on me. I felt the perspiration break out on my body. If once they got their hands on the papers it would be all up with us.

'They want to know if you have the documents with you,' I said. 'For God's sake, say no.'

'You can tell them,' he said, very coldly, 'that the contract, and the receipt, are deposited under seal, with instructions for forwarding, in the event of my non-return, to the British Consul at Smyrna. Together with a note setting out the circumstances.'

I should have known, of course, that he would not fall into such a trap. Not the man before me, with his hand ready by his side. The trouble was that I was still seeing him partly as the victim, the dupe – so strong had been that earlier impression of his simplicity.

'He will never get a permit,' Izzet said. 'It would need a firman, from Constantinople. That would take longer than three weeks. The lease will have expired.'

'In that case, I will simply have to report my discoveries to the Ministry,' Mister Bowles said. 'They will do the excavating, I suppose. A pity, because I should have liked my name to be associated with the discoveries, especially if they turn out, and I think they will, to be of first importance.'

'The lease must revert to us,' Izzet said. His eyes were moist with rage.

'But it has three weeks to run,' I said. In spite of my fear some relish at their discomfiture must have showed in my voice, because Izzet looked at me with sudden intensity. 'You,' he said, 'I advise you to be careful.'

'The land is my property,' the Pasha said, and his voice was thick with contempt for the foreigner, contempt for all restriction, law and limit. 'My property,' he repeated. He raised one heavy hand and loosened his tunic at the neck. A vein had become prominent at his temple.

Still holding the bag in his left hand, Mister Bowles moved towards the door, keeping them both within his sight. I rose with alacrity and followed. He was at the door when Izzet spoke.

'We will buy it back,' Izzet said. 'We will buy back the lease from you.'

'They say they will buy it.' I translated quite mechanically -past all astonishment now.

'Buy it?' Mister Bowles paused, as if this was quite a new idea. 'I dare say they want to see their names associated with the exhibits when they appear in the new museum at Gulhane,' he said. 'Well, it's natural, I suppose.'

I translated this.

'Yes, yes,' Izzet said eagerly. 'That is the reason.'

'Well, now,' Mister Bowles said. 'This puts a new slant on things, you know. Naturally, in view of the inconvenience, the disruption to my research and so on, I should have to ask rather more than I gave. I think seven hundred liras would be a fair figure.'

Seven hundred liras, Excellency. That is a good sum of money, even in these days. It is considerably more than my yearly income. I saw Izzet's eyelids fluttering.

'They have till noon tomorrow,' Mister Bowles said. 'I will wait at my hotel.'

We left them sitting there. No move was made to hinder our departure, no sound came after us. In the fiacre, on the way back, neither of us said much. Once or twice, at the beginning, Mister Bowles breathed deeply and audibly, the only sign of tension that he showed. Once I saw a smile on his face. I myself was silent. Vistas were opening before me, a way at last of breaking out. I was content to wait, plan my tactics. I have him in the hollow of my hand, Excellency.

I have slept, woken, slept again – both sleep and waking filled with the wondrous events of yesterday. Early still – the dawn prayer has just sounded. Hot already, and absolutely still. The imbat which has been troubling us lately has dropped. Striations of light across the sea, paling with distance, continuing into the long motionless plumes of cloud on the horizon. The verge so ethereal that cloud above seems denser, like further masses of land. Then the true land, the shapes of islands, glimpsed beyond. Layer upon layer, zone upon zone. Most beautiful and bewildering – liquid and solid, reality and illusion, form and light all confounded.

Through these soft distances, as it were through the hems of light, I hear the cries of sheep. The slaughter has begun. Today is the tenth day of Zilhijje. Throughout your possessions, Excellency, wherever the green flag of the Prophet is flown, they will be sharpening their knives. Thousands upon thousands of beasts bleeding their lives into the earth, their heads held towards Mecca. Killed soberly, in the Turkish fashion.

Today too – and now I am making Your Excellency privy to my criminal projects – today I intend to extort money from Mister Bowles. Did I not say at the outset that I would hide nothing from you? I must have money, my life is impossible here. I must get to Constantinople, make full enquiry into the neglect of my reports…

When I saw him lay the head on the desk, after the first shock at his perfidy, my real, my overwhelming feeling was one of identity with him. No, more intimate than that, an effect of fusion. I remember again Herr Gesing's hands locked together.

Eng verbunden. Artist and trickster. I know he despises me, has done so from the very start. But it is the me in him that he despises. Adepts both at the partial lie, blends of reality and illusion. Now I understand better my distress when I saw him sporting with Lydia. Mister Bowles produced a real head in an imaginary setting. What more can art do?

Think of the beauty of the idea, Excellency. Everything he has done, everything he has said, has been essential to his effect. No gesture has been superfluous. No doubt afar off he got wind of things here, a whiff of the pickings, so to speak. He must have arrived with the project already formed in his mind-with some room for improvisation, of course. Never was there wolf in better tailored sheep's clothing. Touch by touch he created himself for us, allowed us to create him, an image of forthright-ness and simple decency. The disapproval with which he greeted my chatter about my poor mother; the crashing rectitude of the sentiments he expressed to Herr Gesing about morality in politics; his ethical approach to painting: – all part of his design.

Seeing so quickly the use he could make of me was perhaps the most brilliant part of his whole campaign. He had recognised my corruption at once-seen himself in me, Excellency, though despising it. It was a faiblesse that made me the perfect agent for dealing with people like Izzet and Mahmoud Pasha. Subtle enough, crooked enough, to convince men so dishonest of his total honesty.

And they, what can they do? Publicity of any kind would be the death of their hopes. They dare not leave him long on the site. They can neither act against him, nor wait. All they can do is pay.

Excellency, since I wrote those last words, not more than three hours ago, I have got on to a new footing with Mister Bowles, our relationship has changed greatly. I am now, up to a point, his partner in this enterprise. One hundred and fifty liras is promised me, more money than I have ever had in my possession. I shall save my skin, get off the island. Not only that. The money will be sufficient for me to stay in Constantinople, find out – at last – what has been happening to my reports. It is many years since I felt such joy, Excellency, such pure joy.

Izzet came punctually to the hotel. We sat amid the potted palms, beneath the scenes of Jove's loves, in the otherwise deserted lounge. The abundant charms of the nymphs above his head made Izzet, in fez and alpaca jacket, seem even more shrunken and diminutive than usual. After the usual polite preliminaries Izzet offered to buy back the lease for double what Mister Bowles had paid – or not paid, rather, since in fact he has paid nothing so far but the ten liras deposit.

Mister Bowles rejected this offer very firmly. 'That just isn't good enough,' he said. 'They really cannot expect me to -' His blue eyes full of expostulation, a note of strong indignation in his voice. 'My research,' he said. 'The whole progress of my book has been held up. And then, you know, there is the disappointment… I mean, I should have liked my name to be associated with these finds. They could affect our knowledge of the whole period.'

Had I not known the truth I would have sworn he was in earnest. There was a blaze of true feeling, true injury in his tone, in his whole manner. Obviously he is a perfectionist, a true artist, allowing no vulgar admixture of triumph or cynicism, even in these crowning moments. Or, the disturbing suspicion came to me as I watched his face, could he be serious?. Did he in some way believe what he was saying?

'No, my dear chap,' he said. 'I must have seven hundred liras, at least.'

I was reassured, though not completely, by the exorbitance of his demand. As for Izzet, his eyelids fluttered with agitation. He stood up, as if to go. 'How can I return with such an offer?' he said. 'It is out of the question.'

'Well,' Mister Bowles told him, 'that is my figure. And by the way,' he added, as Izzet still hesitated, 'I have been up there this morning and I see you have stationed two soldiers on the site.'

Izzet at once denied that he knew anything about this.

'Be that as it may,' Mister Bowles said. 'It is hardly a mark of trust, is it? There was nothing in our agreement about a military presence.'

Izzet sat down again. He is highly strung and was quite distinctly trembling by this time. He looked like a vulture under powerful stress. 'Tell him,' he said to me, 'that the Vali has authorised me to offer six hundred liras, but fifty liras must be deducted, because that is the proportion of the lease. That is the final offer.'

'Five hundred and fifty?' Mister Bowles reflected for a moment or two. Izzet saved what dignity he could by refraining from looking at the Englishman's face, or at mine. 'Very well,' Mister Bowles said. 'I will accept that. It isn't enough, really, but I don't want to haggle.'

'He agrees,' I said. I did not translate the final remarks out of pity for Izzet.

'The money will be ready this evening,' Izzet said.

'Shall we say seven o'clock, then? Good.'

'The effendi will have the documents?'

'Oh yes,' Mister Bowles said. 'I'll have the documents all right.'

'Until this evening then.' Izzet departed, beneath the lofty gaze of the Prussian whoremaster.

'This calls for a drink,' Mister Bowles said. He gave his slow smile, and his eyes widened, in that attractive combination of effects that was becoming familiar to me.

It was not a smile of triumph. There was nothing gloating about it. It seemed rather to express a kind of calm vindication, as if Mister Bowles had made a bold stand for truth and right, and been justified.

'One would almost say,' I said, 'that you had been through this kind of thing before.'

He did not stop smiling, but he looked at me with a more particular attention. 'Good heavens, no,' he said. 'Hardly the kind of thing… Why do you say that?'

'Oh, I don't know,' I said. 'The way you handled it. What about the soldiers?'

'Albanians, by the look of them. They are bivouacked up there, overlooking the site. They didn't lose much time, did they?' He paused. His face had suddenly assumed a look of indignation and contempt. 'They're terrified in case I'm going to cart the stuff off,' he said.

'You wouldn't do that,' I said.

'No, of course not. But you know what these people are like. How about a drink?'

I chose aniseed brandy again, again because of the mezedes. Mister Bowles asked for white wine.

'I am grateful to you for your help,' he said. His eyes looked into mine directly, candidly. 'When things are finally settled,' he said, 'I will see that you are not the loser by it.'

The moment had come. We were sitting opposite each other, with only the narrow table between us. There were other people in the room now, but no one within earshot. Still I hesitated. I was afraid of him, physically afraid. Besides that, in a curious way I was in awe of him, because of his monumental hypocrisy. When people transgress violently against one's conception of them, Excellency, they assert themselves with peculiar vividness, they oblige us to look at them with washed eyes, so to speak. He was so far not what I had thought him that he awed me. Other pictures, former impressions, still clung to him, confusing my mind: the tall stranger momentarily bareheaded among the haggling Greeks; the amphibious lover; the conjuror with the Gladstone bag. His manner was the same as on the evening we met. He showed the same capacity for moral indignation, the same awkward bursts of speech. But it had all to be interpreted somehow differently now. I felt constrained, shy almost, as one would with a stranger.

I am aware that I am about to incriminate myself in your eyes. I should have reported Mister Bowles already. He has changed me. Today, Kourban Bayram, in the year of the Prophet 1286, sitting opposite Mister Bowles the trickster, aware of the commerce of the town proceeding outside, noting with approval that Biron has brought bread with the squid, I knew that this was a turning point in my life. My poor stratagems of the past paled before this one. And it was this knowledge that kept me still silent. I remarked on the heat. I mopped with monogrammed handkerchief the sides of my neck. I drank some of the water that had been brought with my aniseed brandy.

'These people,' Mister Bowles said, and the contempt was back on his face and in his voice. 'They are so absolutely, totally mercenary. There is no spark of… Well, I know it's an old-fashioned word these days, but there doesn't seem to be any concept of honour, among them. It's no wonder the Ottoman Empire is breaking up, if what I've just seen is an example?

It was this piece of insolence that emboldened me, Excellency, drove me to speech. He was taking me for as great a fool as the others.

'That head,' I said. 'You brought it with you.'

'I beg your pardon?'

I speared another pink crisp sliver of squid on my fork. My hands were unsteady. I am the most pacific of mortals, and Mister Bowles is a man acquainted with violence. 'You brought it with you,' I said. 'You didn't find it here.'

Our eyes met now, really I think for the first time fully, my solipsistic brown ones, his enterprising blue. Across the narrow table, across chasms of difference, I saw my image. Then with sudden shyness I glanced away. 'You needn't keep up this pretence with me,' I said.

'Pretence?' he said. 'What are you talking about?' He had paled, or so I thought, under the tan, and I saw his chest move with the deep intake of his breath.

'That head,' I said, 'the head you produced from your bag, with the air of a conjuror if I may say so, that self-same head was in your possession when you set foot on this island, and so by inference were all the other objects which you laid on Mahmoud Pasha's desk.'

I put down the fork and clasped my hands together under the table, in an effort to control their trembling. I kept my eyes away from Mister Bowles, I think out of some kind of tact – I was allowing him time to find a suitable face. When I did look his way again I found him regarding me closely.

'You must have a reason for saying this,' he said.

I told him how I had found the head in his room that evening. Naturally I did not mention the revolver or notebook.

'What were you looking for?' he asked. 'Are you a police agent?'

'I am nothing to do with the police.'

'Some kind of informer, anyway,' he said, with the same contempt.

I felt the blood rush to my face. It was not shame, Excellency – I am proud of my calling. It was partly that even now, perhaps particularly now, I wanted him to like me, to think well of me, and so I was wounded by his disparaging tone. But it was more than this. In those moments, as I paused before replying, all my frustration, all the pain of unjust neglect, rose up in me, led me to betray myself. In a voice I could barely control, I said, 'No, not some kind – the best kind, I am the best kind.'

'An informer,' he said again.

'And you are a swindler,' I said, trying to master my agitation, 'and the laws against that kind of thing are severe in the domains of the Sultan, not to say savage. As in all societies where malpractices are rife. Not to mention the fact that a word from me would certainly be sufficient to spoil your game here, and lose you the money.'

'Swindler?' he said. 'You understand nothing about it. They have impeded my research.'

It was astonishing, even in the rush of my feelings I was checked – he was the same, Excellency: the angry candour of those blue eyes, as if at some impatience with the world for failing to be adequate to his conception; honesty like a sort of suppressed rage in him; the halting yet curiously eloquent manner of his speech, with its awkward pauses and sudden blurts of assertion. It was difficult not to believe all this was genuine, even now.

'You understand nothing,' he repeated. 'I am simply an instrument.'

I did not pay much attention to this remark at the time, being too eager to drive home my advantage. But I remembered it afterwards, and his face saying it.

'At the moment,' I went on, 'time is working in your favour. Time and their greed and what they think of as your stupidity. They are obliged to gamble on your honesty – which I have helped you to establish. Any doubt of this and your scheme falls flat. And so do you. I want two hundred liras.'

He was silent for a full minute. He looked briefly round the room, then his eyes returned to my face, steadied there, as if he was aiming. I did riot like this look of his.

'Have you told anyone else?' he said. 'About finding the head, I mean.'

Fortunately I had anticipated this question. I had, in fact, learned from him. 'No,' I said, 'but I have left a written account of everything, from start to finish, in a sealed envelope, with forwarding instructions in the event of my disappearance or death.'

'I very much doubt it,' Mister Bowles said. 'Still… I'll give you a hundred. You are entitled to something, anyway.'

'A hundred and eighty,' I said, with relief – while bargaining one is safe. 'I won't take a piastre less.'

We argued for some time with that spurious intimacy, a kind of imitation friendship, which such negotiations induce. In the end I exacted a promise of one hundred and fifty liras, contingent of course on the deal with Mahmoud Pasha going through. I promised in my turn to act as intermediary with Izzet this evening, when he comes with the money. And so we parted, he to retire to his room, I to make my way back here.

One hundred and fifty liras! I can hardly believe it. I shall get some new clothes in Constantinople. A couple of silk shirts, a new suit. Then, suitably dressed, I can make my approaches to your officials. A new pair of spectacles too. My present ones do not suit my eyes, as I have explained, and besides the frame has been broken and repaired with wire, so they are unsightly in every sense. Once I have the money I can be on the next boat.

This report will be finished then, of course – my departure will bring it to a natural close. Mister Bowles too will be leaving, and the report has centred on him. This brings us to a very delicate juncture, Excellency. My whole situation has changed in the course of the last few hours, and our relationship, yours and mine, has changed with it. I have realised from the beginning that when you receive this report you will see that my usefulness is over. As an informer, on this island, I am finished. Moreover, in my rage for completeness, in my passion for your acknowledgement, I have revealed to you that on one level-though not the deepest – I have been falsifying my reports for many years. And now, by failing to report Mister Bowles, by turning the situation to my own advantage, I am compounding a felony. If these things became known to you, you would be displeased, you would have me arrested, all access to the archives would then be denied me.

I thought it didn't matter, you see. I thought my life was at an end. One final shape, as perfect as I could make it, wrought at the edge of the abyss, then my body toppling over. But everything is changed now, my life is opening up before me. Some small clerical post perhaps. My needs are few. The remaining years devoted to the collating and editing of my papers… You see how things are, Excellency, I cannot send you this report yet, if ever. For the moment I must simply shelve the question. Out of habit and piety I shall continue to address my words to you. And for the sake of unity of form, of course.

The smell of blood hangs over the island. On my way back I could smell it, thick and heavy in the midday heat. It seems to me that I can smell it still. Here and there blood-sodden patches on the roads. Below the market place a small group had gathered, among them children with round eyes. In their midst a sheep, mute, combed and dressed for death, horns gilded, fleece dyed red with henna. Twisted into the wool were amulets, ribbons, little coloured streamers of paper. She stood for the last time on her four legs, head down, exhausted with terror. I hurried past, to avoid the sight of the killing. But I was helpless to avoid the picturing of it, saw them force the beast over, kneel on her to keep her down, turn her dyed head to the east; saw the cut, and life-blood welling thickly out. Once the cut is made they die without a sound and without a struggle, eyes gently closing.

I was waiting for death like that sheep, until today. Red morocco and gilt lettering. Dedicated of course to you, Excellency.

He did not come. He was not in his room, either. Izzet and I were there punctually at seven, but no Mister Bowles. Izzet had the money in a cloth bag, all ready to hand over. We sat there for ten minutes, making uneasy conversation. Then Mardosian approached us and handed me a sealed envelope. Nothing on the cover. Inside a note for me, very brief, without salutation. 'Unavoidably detained,' he said. 'The troops are still on the site. Tell them I refuse to negotiate until these troops are removed. Tell them it is a matter of principle.' Small neat writing. His signature at the end. I looked up dazed from this to meet Izzet's peering gaze. 'He can't come,' I said.

'Why not?'

'He doesn't say. He refuses to go on with the agreement until the soldiers are removed from the site.'

'Allah, Allah,' Izzet said, raising his hands. 'What difference can that make now? He has nothing more to do on the site.'

'He says it is a matter of principle.'

'Principle?' Izzet rose abruptly. His face was bitter with rage. 'Shaitan take his principles,' he said. 'And him, and you. He is playing games with us.'

'I will see him,' I said. 'I will arrange another meeting.'

'I advise you to be quick, arkadeshim. The Vali is not a patient man. It is on your head now.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I will see to it.' With anguish I watched him walk away, carrying my freedom in his bag. What can have happened? What bee has entered Mister Bowles's head? He did not seem to mind so much about the soldiers this morning. He made no conditions then.

All my hopes, Excellency. I can write no more tonight, my misery is too great. I must see Mister Bowles.

He did not return to his hotel last night, or if so, it was very late. I waited, but he did not return. This morning, however, I have seen him. And I still cannot properly absorb what he said to me, the simple enormity of it. I sit here and look at the walls, my familiar possessions, with incredulity. I repeat his words to an imagined third party, trying to make them more accessible to the understanding. 'I'd like to leave it for a day or two, old chap,' was what he said. Nonchalantly. Leaning back in his chair. Right ankle laid over left knee, polished black shoe idly jigging. A day or two! This was in the little café-bar in Saliras Street, near the market.

It was by the merest chance that I was led to him. I knew he had not been back to the hotel. I was walking through the market when I saw three men at a fruit stall, men I had not seen before. I always pause to observe strangers, it is ingrained habit with me.

I took them at first for Greeks, but there was something different about the way they carried themselves, and about their gestures. Besides this, one of them, while deeply tanned, had a lighter colouring than is customary in this region. He was a man of about forty, short but very powerfully built, wearing a blue calico jacket. There were gaps in his teeth when he smiled. The other two were indubitably men of the south, one elderly with a deeply seamed face and a gold ring in one ear, the other much younger, smooth-skinned and serious. I watched them buy aubergines and tomatoes, which the young man put into a cloth bag. Then after a brief conversation they separated, the thickset man walking off along Saliras Street, the other two moving slowly towards the steps that lead down to the lower part of the town.

After hesitating a moment I followed the man in the blue jacket, not too close; but keeping him well in sight. He walked down Saliras Street, almost to the end of it, then turned quickly into the little bar there, called the Agoraki. I had some idea of walking in after him, but fortunately stopped outside and looked through the window, standing against the wall at an angle that made it difficult for me to be seen. I did not see anything of the man I had followed except one of his blue sleeves and a brown hand on the table. But opposite him, full in my view, was Mister Bowles. He was talking, and I could imagine the pauses, the eloquent blurts. Excellency, he was not at the hotel last night, but he was fresh and clean-shaven. He looked like a man that had slept, and breakfasted. I saw him raise his head and laugh.

I crossed the street and waited. After something like half an hour they emerged, shook hands briefly in the doorway, under the blue awning then went different ways, Mister Bowles towards the corner of the street, the other back towards the market. I watched him as he passed opposite to me. There was still some laughter in his face from "the meeting. I noticed his belt, very broad with a heavy brass buckle in the shape of a snake.

Mister Bowles hesitated for a moment or two at the corner, as if making up his mind which way to go. I moved quickly along the street towards him, and called his name. He turned, saw me, and stood there waiting. He did not smile.

'What happened to you last night?' I said. I was panting slightly with the haste of my movements.

'I was held up,' he said. 'You got my note, I suppose?'

'Listen,' I said, 'I must talk to you.'

He looked at me for a moment, then said, indifferently, 'All right, if you like. I've got to go and meet Lydia and Mrs Marchant in about an hour's time. Let's go over to the bar there.' It was the one he had just come out of, but he didn't mention that.

It was cool inside, with the blinds down against the sun. We asked for a bottle of beer and two glasses. 'Who was that man?' I said.

'Which man?'

'The one you were with just now. I saw you talking together.'

'Did you? Oh, he was just someone I bumped into. Mrs Marchant was telling us about that business in the church the other evening.' He looked curiously at me. 'Extraordinary,' he said.

'You mean Saint Alexei biting the dust?' I said. 'Yes, it was gruesome, his head went rolling down the steps. What nationality was he, by the way? The man you were talking to just now.'

'Oh, American, I think. She says you ran off and left her.'

'She was in no danger,' I said. 'None whatever.'

'And you were?'

'Didn't she tell you how they all turned on me and started making the curse sign at me? They blamed me for it, you know, the accident.'

He looked at me with a sort of faintly smiling curiosity. 'She says they were simply crossing themselves,' he said.

'Nonsense,' I said. 'They were about to attack me.'

Mister Bowles hitched his chair back, placed his right ankle over his left knee, and commenced a jigging motion with his shoe. This struck me as uncharacteristic of him, and made me more sharply aware of something I had sensed only half consciously since the beginning of our conversation, some difference in him, some quality of impatience or perhaps excitement that underlay the good-humoured casualness of his manner.

'Listen,' I said, 'you realise, don't you, that they will be absolutely furious with us about last night? They are dangerous people. We must get the thing finished today, this morning.'

Mister Bowles looked towards me without replying. His eyes were vague, remote, not really regarding me at all.

'We'll lose the money at this rate,' I said, annoyed at being thus relegated to the margin of his attention. Annoyed too at my helpless sense of some change in him since our last meeting. 'We'll lose the money and get our throats cut into the bargain,' I said. 'Don't make the mistake of assuming too much rationality in these people. If they suspect us of double-dealing – and they will, if we delay – they are quite capable of having us killed, whatever the consequences. Mahmoud would hope to cover it up, somehow. I know these people.'

He went on jigging his shoe for a moment or two, then he said, quite casually, 'I'd like to leave it for a day or two, old chap.'

'Leave it?' I said. I was bewildered. 'But why?'

'Well, you see, I haven't finished my research yet.'

'Your research? But, please listen to me, time is everything in the matter. They are certain to suspect something.'

'Suspect what?' he said, with assumed hauteur. 'Didn't I make it clear to them that I am writing a book?'

'I don't know,' I said. I was in despair, Excellency, close to tears. 'I don't remember. What if you did? What is your book to them?'

'You thought the whole thing was a fabrication, I suppose?'

Once again, in spite of everything between us, and everything I know, he had me in the thrall of his outraged honesty. 'Do you think,' he said, 'that I am going to let those people come between me and my research?'

My eyes were smarting with the effort to repress tears. My life, the money, everything falling away from me. 'Why did you not make this clear before?' I said.

Mister Bowles saw my distress, I think, for his manner became gentler. 'Listen,' he said, leaning forward with one of his blurts of candour, 'if it will set your mind at rest, you can give them my word.'

'What?' I said.

'You can give them my word of honour that I will not remove any of the treasures on the site.'

His word of honour. He looked at me, leaning forward still, with that engaging eagerness, which was his great charm. The sense he conveyed that we were partners in a great enterprise, something exciting and challenging and thoroughly worthwhile.

'But there are no treasures on the site,' I said.

'True, of course that's true.' He seemed momentarily disabled. 'But they don't know that,' he said, recovering. 'They don't know that, do they? It'll only take a couple of days, you know.'

'A couple of days,' I repeated dully.

'That's all.' He stood up. 'Must be getting along,' he said.

'The soldiers,' I said, 'have they been moved?'

'Oh yes,' he said. 'They're nowhere to be seen. Are you coming?'

'No, I don't think so.' I was not eager to meet Mrs Marchant again, and he knew it. He was smiling as he went out. My God, what am I to do? What am I to do, Excellency?

I went to see Doctor Hogan, the only person I could think of. Izzet caught me on the way back. It was only a question of time, I suppose. He was with another man.

Doctor Hogan's house is up above the town, on the hillside. It is a beautiful house, high-walled and shallow-roofed in the old island style, with an interior courtyard and a fountain. The poet Valaoritou is said to have lived for some years in this house. I do not go there too often and I never stay too long, because I value these visits, and the talks I have with Doctor Hogan. He is kindly and humorous and knows much about the island.

We sat in the courtyard for an hour or two, in the shade of the lemon trees, talking of general things. I asked for news of his children – he has a son at the English School at Bebek, and a married daughter in England.

It was pleasant there in the courtyard with the wisteria, and the dark lemon leaves, and the water playing. Maria, the doctor's wife, brought some sweet red Samos wine and fresh figs-the figs are ripening now, Excellency. Pleasant, yes, but I could not relax, my fears refused to leave me. The doctor's presence, the kindly irony of his glance, the amiable dishevelment he always exhibits, the order and tranquillity of his whole establishment; all this failed to have its usual calming effect.

However, I learned from the doctor the identity of the man Mister Bowles was with today. I described him – the thick body, the gaps in the teeth. 'That's Smith,' the doctor said at once. 'The American. He was here only a few days ago.'

'What, here in the house?'

'Yes, he brought one of his crew, an Italian. Fellow had cut his hand very badly.'

'That's the man with the caique, isn't it? The one who is fishing for sponges.'

'Yes, that's right.'

Here was a piece of news. Had their meeting been planned or accidental? They shook hands at parting…

'He's leaving soon, apparently,' the doctor said. 'Or so Lydia says. I looked in on her today and we gossiped a bit.'

How does Lydia know that, Excellency? Obviously she is in touch with the American. Or did Mister Smith tell Mister Bowles today that he was leaving, when they met in the bar? In that case Mister Bowles must have passed on the information to Lydia in the course of the afternoon.

'When was that?' I said. 'When did you see Lydia?'

'Round about noon. Why do you ask?'

'I wondered if Mister Bowles was there. At the studio I mean.'

'Bowles? No, he wasn't there.'

It must be Lydia, then, who knows the American's movements. Perhaps it was she who introduced him to Mister Bowles. If my theory of the gun-running is correct, and if Lydia knows about it, knows who the contracts are, she may have used this knowledge to put pressure on the American. For Mister Bowles's sake, of course. What story can he have told her? Is he trying to arrange a passage on the American's boat? Is he planning to leave in a hurry and to cheat me out of my share…? The thought brought me out in a cold sweat.

'We don't see much of you these days, Basil,' Doctor Hogan said.

'I have been spending a lot of time at home lately,' I said. ' Reading, that kind of thing.'

I felt his eyes on me, but he asked me no questions. 'The news from Constantinople is very bad, so Lydia tells me,' he said. 'I don't know how she knows these things. I've had no letters for a month. The postal service now seems to have broken down completely.'

'Why?' I said. 'The news has been bad for years, but things go on much as before. What's wrong now?'

'Just about everything, as far as I can make out. They are proclaiming a republic in the north. The Sultanate, the Caliphate, the whole structure – it is all toppling over, Basil. Abdul Hamid never leaves the palace now. He lives behind locked doors with no one to rely on but the women of his harem and his Albanian guard – and how far he can rely on them is doubtful. No, it's all up with him this time. I'm going myself, the day after tomorrow, to bring my boy back here.'

I am merely reporting what he said about you, Excellency. I am not saying that I believe it. You have ruled for more than thirty years, and in that time there have been many crises.

All the same, I was depressed. When I stood up to go, I was attacked by a slight fit of dizziness. I did not speak of this to the doctor, but his eyes were on me, and he must have seen something change in my face, for he said, 'You must take things easy, Basil. I don't like your colour much.'

'Oh, I'm all right,' I said. I was touched by his concern, but any intention I had had of confiding in him had quite gone by now. He is kind, he is even good, but his life is too different from mine, too settled and secure. I need an outcast to confide in – a powerful outcast. Perhaps that is what you are, Excellency. The atmosphere of peace in the house, the sense of an ordered life, of family affection, reciprocal duties and ties, all the things that I have never had, can never have now, all this puts distance between us.

'By the way,' I said, as I was leaving, 'does the name Mannfeldt mean anything to you? It's a firm of some kind.'

'Mannfeldt? Yes, they are the armaments people. Aircraft too I think, not the engines, the bodywork. They've got all sorts of interests. Very big people. Gesing would know more about them, I should think.'

'Yes, I'll ask him,' I said. 'I heard the name, you know, and I wondered. What about terra rossa? It came up in the same conversation.'

'Terra rossa? Red earth. No, you've got me there. Sounds like a name on some primitive kind of map. You know, like terra incognita or terra pericolosa. One of those maps the old explorers made.'

'Yes,' I said, 'it does sound like that, doesn't it? Oh well, it doesn't matter.'

I shook hands with them and thanked them. Maria gave me ajar of home-made tomato paste. She put it into my hands as I was leaving. 'Come again when you feel like it,' the doctor said. I have the feeling that I will never see them again.

I went down a little way along the earth road that descends from the house towards the town. But this road is winding and offers no shade, so I decided to take a more direct way, down the hillside, through the olive terraces. It was late afternoon now, hot and still. I caught glimpses of dark blue sea through rifts in the olive trees. Smell of marjoram, cistus, mint from the uncultivated slopes among the terraces. At first my own body was all the movement, all the noise there was. Then, within my own pauses, the interstices of movement, I became aware of the life around me, sudden soft impactive sounds among the dry grass edging the terraces, wings of small birds in the trees. Suddenly I looked down to a clearing, a good way below me, and saw a little group, two men and a boy standing together. The fleece of a sheep lay beside them. The sheep itself I saw last of all. It was skinned and strung up on a post or perhaps suspended from a branch. Forelegs tugged high by the rope, livid pink shape in the broken sunlight among the trees. In the last few moments before my line of vision was obscured, I saw one of the men cut downwards from the join of the animal's forelegs. I did not see the knife, only the long cut down, from forelegs to belly. A thick, dark red line followed the knife. I saw this one gesture in just this one moment, then passed on. It was as if it had been performed just for me. Blood, that darker line? No, the animal was dead, blooded already. Probably the darker inner flesh opening to the knife…

Down to the lower terraces, out on to the road again, and it was here that Izzet, accompanied by a big, silent, ragged man, were waiting for me, at the turn of the road, just before the first houses. They were waiting at the side of the road, in the shade of the large mulberry tree there. They stepped out into the road before me, forcing me to a stop. Neither of them said anything at first; and this silence, and the fact that they had waited so patiently for me there, frightened me badly. I tried to explain to Izzet, but he did not listen. They were not there to listen. We moved to the edge of the road and they stood close to me.

'We know you have seen him,' Izzet said. 'You were watched.'

'He wants two more days,' I said. 'In order to complete his researches.'

'He said nothing about his researches yesterday. It was he who fixed the time. He was in a great hurry then. Now he wants more time.'

'Please have patience,' I said. 'You know the Englishman is honest.'

'Honest?' Izzet smiled, very disagreeably. The ragged man smiled too, I think because he saw Izzet smiling. 'He has been seeing the American,' Izzet said. 'The American has a boat. Do you think we are fools?'

'No,' I said. 'Of course not. But you should not attach any importance to these meetings with the American. It is natural for foreigners, who speak the same language, to be on friendly terms.'

'Why only now?' Izzet said. 'Tell me that. You cannot. Basil Effendi, you are in great trouble.'

They were standing very near. The ragged man reeked unpleasantly. Their shadows were over me and over the reddish dust of the road: Izzet's quick and small, moving with his gestures; the ragged man's motionless. Beyond them the road was stained and sticky with fallen mulberries and flies were murmuring among them.

I said, 'I will speak to him. As for the boat, I am sure there is no connexion.' I attempted to move further down the road, but they moved to prevent me.

'You know Mahmoud Pasha,' Izzet said. 'He is not a patient man.' There was something more than threat in his voice, something almost confiding. It occurred to me then that Izzet too might be in some fear. He and I are similarly placed – acting for unpredictable principles, seeing our respective dreams fading. 'He has no chance,' he said. 'Tell him that. The soldiers are no longer on the site itself, but the approaches are watched, from above, from below. He has no chance at all.'

'I will tell him,' I said.

They moved aside at last, and I went on down the road, still clutching my jar of tomato paste. I was shaken by the encounter, Excellency. I feel a kind of half-incredulous horror now, when I recall it. Here in my room, among the accustomed things, it is difficult to believe that anyone, anything, could have such power over me. The table before me, the words on the page, the life they assume: is it possible that the expression on another man's face can prefigure the eclipse of all this? Even while my flesh shrinks with fear of the knife, my mind swells with arrogance. I am the spinner, the creator. I am at the centre of my inviolable world…

But why do they delay? Why do they deal so delicately with us? It is not the Vali's usual method. Are they so afraid of repercussions from the British Consul on Mytilene? Mytilene is far, Constantinople is even farther. By the time an investigation was ordered, they could have plundered the site, without witnesses. Then who is to say what was found and what wasn't? (There is nothing there, of course, but they do not know that.) Perhaps they are hoping to catch Mister Bowles in flagrante delicto, so they can proceed with an appearance of legality. No, this too could be easily fabricated. They must have some other reason for their unwillingness to risk an enquiry, something that Mister Bowles himself knows nothing about. My mind returns to that red quadrilateral on the map in Mahmoud's office. Odd that the doctor should mention maps. A primitive kind of map, he suggested, of the sort made by the old explorers. Or navigators, of course. What other people make maps like that? People who want to indicate where treasure is buried. We are back to Mister Bowles again. What possible connexion could there be with Mannfeldt? Besides, the phrase was not on the map at all, it was in the letter. Gesing would know, the doctor said. Yes, Gesing must be involved in it somewhere. The frequency of his visits, the deference with which he is treated. They are armament manufacturers. Perhaps Herr Gesing is acting for them, trying to get a contract to supply items of equipment to the Turkish army. But why here? That sort of contract is only to be obtained in Constantinople, through government channels. The letter came from Constantinople, of course…

The news from Constantinople worries me the more I think about it. It is not only the doctor who says that your throne is toppling; one hears the same thing on every hand. They say that you keep yourself locked away in your palace at Yildiz, for fear of assassins; that you never emerge, not even for the Friday visit to the mosque; that your troops in Macedonia and the northern provinces are openly in revolt and preparing to march on the capital; that you are without support except for your women and eunuchs, and the palace guard, who are themselves in arrears with their pay, and probably disaffected; in short, Excellency, that the whole edifice of your administration is about to collapse. Even there are rumours that you are already deposed, already dead.

I must not, will not, believe this, Excellency. I need so desperately the continued splendour of your existence. To whom, other than you, can I address my reports and my prayers, surrounded as I am by enemies, with no word of acknowledgement from your officials? You are my only hope. It makes no difference whether I send this report or not. It is your existence that matters. If you cease to exist now, Excellency, I am extinguished with you.

How well I remember your accession, though I was no more than a boy then. All day the streets were crowded with people waiting. They came from many parts to see you. The rich came in coaches, black eunuchs riding with drawn swords alongside. All day the people squatted in the street, waiting, smoking. When the sun rose and it grew hot the sellers of sherbet and melon did a great trade. My mother bought me lukumi wrapped in painted paper. I remember still the blue and red designs, the sweetness dissolving in my mouth, the thirst following. Everyone was happy. Then the soldiers marching through the streets, to take up their positions in the courtyard of the mosque, the Albanians in their plumed hats, the Spahis in silver and blue, the Bostangis most resplendent of all in scarlet and gold. You came to Eyub on a white horse, the green banner flying over your head, music playing, the people cheering. We could not get very near to the mosque, because of the crowd. But we waited there, as near as we could get. Then the voice of the imam, proclaiming your reign. Commander of the Faithful. God's Vice-Regent on earth. What expectations we had of you, Excellency.

I have decided to go up there, tomorrow morning. Up into the hills. I must find out what is happening. I made up my mind this evening in the café – I went to the café on the square, after my meeting with Izzet. The one that is opposite the hotel. I sat there an hour, watching the entrance, but he did not come. I knew he would not. I sat there, looking sometimes across at the entrance, sometimes down at my inert thighs in their crumpled white, my plump but delicate hands. As if looking for evidence of something – of my existence, perhaps. Nobody joined me at my table, but old Panos the waiter talked to me from time to time, and he smiled. He did not stay near me, but he spoke, on three occasions we exchanged words, and these interchanges made me more aware, not less, of the hush always around me these days. At the centre of this hush, there is my mind, noting things, framing words. Flowers on the stall, people passing, Yanni standing morosely in the evening sun at the hotel entrance – I can only make these things exist by naming them, interiorly mouthing the words. But why did Panos speak to me? We were never friends. Has he not heard the stories? Perhaps he is unswayed by them. Could it be that I am mistaken, deluded, that there is no feeling against me? Impossible, have I not seen it on their faces, do I not see it a hundred times a day? When I try to decide whether it is really so, try to recall precise events, expressions, my mind refuses, the hush in which I live takes on a quality of sibilance, a faint hiss, my head aches and I feel nausea. I cannot bear these uncertainties any longer, uncertainties about your existence and my own. I must go up to the site tomorrow.

It is afternoon, about the third hour. Light outside still, but my shutters closed, lamplight on the paper before me. The white sheets and my words on them clear in the soft light. I have a sensation of lightness, almost of floating – I am not heavy enough in my chair. Perhaps due to hunger. I have eaten very little today. Strange this lightness, this insufficiently anchored feeling, because my body should be tired, should be exhausted, after the exertions of the day. What could better illustrate the dualism of soul and body?

Excellency, I know now why he delays.

I left early, at sunrise, dressed as I had been on that earlier occasion when I watched them among the rocks. I am not used to walking, and progress was slow, once I had gone up from the shore into the foothills. The sun was high over the sea when I reached the side of the gorge, and fiercely hot on my back as I climbed. This gorge, narrow and very deep, lies at a right angle to the line of the shore. It rises higher on the far side, then tilts down in a long gradual line to form the promontory. The ruins that Mister Bowles is so interested in lie beyond this, on the reverse slope. To reach them from here it was necessary to work round the neck of the gorge through tangles of rock and scrub. I had calculated that this route would bring me out more or less directly above the ruins. If I proceeded cautiously I should be able to approach without attracting the attention of anyone already there.

It was intensely hot. The pulsing of the cicadas was almost intolerably loud, drowning all other sounds. Wavering clouds of tortoiseshell butterflies rose around me, disturbed from their feeding on the origen flowers. Already I was feeling exhausted. I was paying the penalty for years of sedentary living. My legs ached, I was perspiring freely. Thoughts of serpents and scorpions came unbidden to my mind. Once I stumbled and fell, bruising my shin. Nevertheless I persisted. I took off my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. I pushed back the headcloth from my sweating brow. The desire to have my uncertainties removed increased with every step. In fact, so totally was I prey to this ardour that my physical discomforts ceased to trouble me, rather they began to be welcomed as a sort of earnest of success. Suffering, too, is a kind of portent. (Let me take this opportunity of saying that I have always wished to suffer, all my life – though it is only recently that I have fully realised this. That is why Mehmet Bey found such a willing instrument in me: not because I wanted to betray, but because I wanted to suffer. That is why I became a writer of reports, Excellency. Otherwise why would I wrestle with words, go on wrestling, when every bout ends with me thudding to the canvas? Easier to stay down, make the submission sign. I see I have used the same word as Mister Bowles. Instrument. An odd word for him to use.)

With undimmed ardour, then, I worked my way round the side of the gorge to the long spur of the headland. Now I was in sight of the sea again, glimpsed its far blue through tangles of broom and holly oak. Below me I could see the beginnings of the ruins, traces of walls here and there, discernible as lines and angles rather than structures, signs of a human intention among the otherwise haphazard accumulations of nature. I paused at this point, and it was fortunate I did so, because in this pause I heard voices, higher up, to my right. Moving very slowly, and keeping well below the line of the spur, I made my way towards this sound, and after no more than a hundred metres I saw them, saw the drab olive of their uniforms, two soldiers sitting on a narrow level backed by rock, in the shade of a low pine tree. One sat against the rock, the other was further forward, looking out towards the sea. I could not see their faces clearly, but their heads were young-looking, close-cropped – they were not wearing their kepis. There is room there, as far as I could judge, for bedding and a fire. A good place for surveillance, because although they cannot overlook the actual site itself, they can watch all approaches to it from above, from the interior. I suspect that Mahmoud Pasha has posted at least two more men below the site, on the shoreward side.

They showed no sign of being aware of my existence. With utmost circumspection, using declivities, thin folds in the hills, rocks, bushes, anything that afforded cover, I made my way down towards the ruins. Further down, concealment was easier as the vegetation grew more thickly, there were trees among the scrub, wild almonds, gnarled abandoned olives, umbrella pines, even some chestnut trees, all this due to the presence of water here, just below ground.

I paused again here, grateful for the shade. Far below I could see the long irregular swathe of green where vegetation clothed the shallow ravine of the water-course running down to the shore. Beyond this, and appearing like a continuation of it, the ancient jetty pushed into the sea, the water greening over the massive blocks below the surface. The shapes of marble, untarnished by centuries of immersion, glimmered in this light, at this distance, like limbs of some gigantic marine deity sprawling there. Somewhere below me, though I heard no sound, somewhere amidst this denser foliage, if I was right, was Mister Bowles.

I descended, following the green tracery of the spring, scrambling over rock and scrub, clumsy, fearful-yes, I was beginning to feel afraid, Excellency, as if Mister Bowles might suddenly manifest himself, confront me, rise up from among the rocks. I experienced that ancient fear of the watcher or tracker when he suddenly feels that he himself may be the quarry. Vigilance in pursuer or pursued breeds terror.

Nevertheless I persevered, hearing the sounds of my own exertion, hearing too the faint but all-pervasive sound of running water. The going was easier now, I was following a cracked, uneven pavement, partly grassed over. On one side of me circular bases of pillars formed the rough pattern of a colonnade; on the other the ground had slipped and fallen away, there were hummocks of rubble softened by grass and ground ivy. The pavement led to a tholos, perhaps marking the inner sanctuary of the temple. Beyond this the ground was again heaped and broken.

I took a path between thickets of arbutus, or what at first seemed a path – in fact it was merely a level cleft between outcrops of rock, and led me into another, but much narrower and steeper ravine.

As I moved slowly forward through this defile, my sense of desolation grew, the constriction in my heart tightened. No longer the ardour of discovery. Now I felt only doubt of surviving in this fearful undergrowth. Perhaps Mister Bowles was not there at all. Why should I have thought that he was? Why was I there myself, what chimera had lured me? Reason dimmed in me, all purpose left me. I was reduced to my own solitary inexplicable existence, an unwieldy, sweating person, uttering intermittent grunts, his life wasted behind him, his prospects minimal. In search of what? I stopped, stood still, and fear at my existence settled round me, closely, intimately. In full summer, in the middle hours of the day, we should avoid lonely, enclosed places, Excellency. Existence is intensified in us, to the point of dread. There was dread in the beating of my heart, in the shrilling of cicadas, the wavering flight of butterflies, the leaps of grasshoppers sustained beyond expectation. Pan's time, when every creature realises itself, the weak in fear, the strong in power.

I had some moments of swoon there, Excellency. Then, with an effort, I went on, clambered out of this 'well of eternity', literally clambered, as the gully had become impassable. I scrambled up one side, clinging to the roots of cistus and sage, on to a more gradual upward slope facing away from the sea. Before me, on the left, were further ruins, low walls, the ground plan of a house. A fig tree grew against the arch of a doorway. To my right, the slope continued, bare, ochreous, scattered with small rocks. Along the crest of the slope a few straggling thorn bushes. As I stood there, looking up, I heard, or thought I heard, a voice, a human voice, male, in trailing snatches of song. I at once began to climb the rise, setting my feet sideways, caution and the effort of climbing keeping my body low. The singing carried to me again. I lay flat, with my breast against the last few feet of the slope. Very carefully I worked my way upwards until by raising my head I was able to see what lay on the other side of the slope. What I saw was so extraordinary that I almost despair of making it credible to Your Excellency.

The ground fell steeply into a hollow, roughly circular in shape, tangled with bushes immediately below me, then open for a few yards until the land tilted up again, reddish in colour and bare, like the slope I had just climbed. Alone there, full in the sun, was Mister Bowles. He was working, slowly scraping with a short-bladed knife at the face of the farther slope. Except for his hat and a pair of white drawers, he was naked. Naked and dark red in colour, gleaming with perspiration. Red too, lustreless dull red, was the earth face he was working at. He was singing to himself in a droning baritone; not words, but odd random notes, such as a man makes when he is busily occupied.

At first, in those first few seconds, it seemed to me that Mister Bowles had taken leave of his senses in this hot secret place, and was attacking the very earth itself, in slow maniacal protest against the human lot. But the motions of his knife were too fostering, too delicate and loving. There was no adversary there. Besides, it seemed to me now that I could discern a shape, a form, lurking in the clay: Mister Bowles was engaged in an act of creation, he was carving a form out of the hillside. Stilling my agitated heart, and clearing my eyes, I made out lines of a human figure, largely embedded still, turned a little from me, the contour of a shoulder, a face, the shadow of a face, curiously obscured and indistinct. Man's or woman's? It dwelt there, while Mister Bowles, like some devotee in his hat and drawers, made worshipful motions with his knife, and droned his song. – It dwelt there, yes. He was not carving it. Not sculptor but midwife, freeing the form from its impedimenta, its gross obscuring matter, delivering it. This is the task that has been absorbing him, this the reason for all his prevarication and delay.

I watched him for some time longer, in fascination. Then I began to think about getting away. It struck me as distinctly unwise to announce myself there and then, even dangerous. I thought it best to steal away and deliberate on how best to use the knowledge thus unexpectedly gained. However, dis aliter visum. Along the crest of the slope where I was lying the earth was loose and friable. In shifting my position preparatory to retreat, I dislodged several small stones and one or two larger ones, which slid a few yards down the slope behind me until caught in the scrub. Unfortunately for me, Mister Bowles was not singing just at this moment, and he heard it. He turned at once and very quickly. I ducked down below the crest. There was silence for some moments and I was beginning to breathe again when I heard his voice, in quite distinct and passable Turkish – ah, le perfide! – saying, 'Come down here at once.' I heard sounds which indicated that he had changed position. I thought of flight, but Mister Bowles is fitter and faster. Besides, there was the revolver.

I raised my head and looked down. I was filled with apprehension. He was at the foot of the slope, on my side, just beyond the bushes. He was holding the revolver. 'It is I,' I said. 'Pascali.' Grammatical, in spite of my fear, Excellency.

'Come down here,' he said again, this time in English.

I did so, with what alacrity you can imagine. He stood there waiting. Naked, glistening red, that instrument of death steady in his hand. When we were face to face, I saw a look in his eyes that I recognised – I had seen it the day before in Izzet's: not fury, not dislike, a steady look of murder.

When he spoke, however, his tone was almost equable. 'What the devil are you doing here?' he said. He had a heavy, sweetish smell about him, mingled sweat and oil – he had oiled himself against the sun.

In fear I told him. I had been curious, I said, and being curious had made my way up here. Curiosity, I said, was a primal instinct in homo sapiens, and I had my fair share of it. Besides, there had been particularly strong cause for curiosity in this case, because I had wanted to see what a man would risk losing so much money for, not only his own share, but mine. And more than money was at risk, perhaps he did not realise that our lives were in danger. I told him of the meeting with Izzet, how they had waited for me. Talking thus volubly, I saw the look of death leave his face.

All the same he had not really listened. 'Professional curiosity,' he said, when I had rather breathlessly come to a stop. 'Once an informer, always an informer, I suppose.' There was something of a sneer on his face.

'Indeed yes,' I said, in haste to agree. I was beginning to feel a certain elation, now that he looked saner. I knew the existence of something he had wanted to keep secret. That he could have hoped to keep it secret for long was a sign of his less than total grasp of reality, his belief in the shaping force of his own desire. With troops on the ground, Mahmoud and Izzet intent on recovering the lease, and half the town no doubt aware by now of his interest in this place among the hills, it can only be a matter of time before his trouvaille is common knowledge. Perhaps even now there are others who know, others who have watched…

He went over to where his clothes were lying, bent down. When he returned his hands were empty. He turned to indicate the form in the hillside. 'Isn't it marvellous?' he said, and in those blurted syllables there was a kind of confiding enthusiasm. I think he was glad, now that the murderous desire to preserve his secret had passed, to have found someone with whom he could share the experience. 'Too early yet, of course, to identify the period,' he said, with an attempt at scholarly dispassion. I was reminded of his manner on producing the articles from the Gladstone bag, the way he had lectured us. His pale eyes in the sun-darkened face looked hallucinated almost.

'By God, yes,' I said, taking some steps nearer to it. In fact, the figure gave me feelings of dread, Excellency; or rather, it renewed that dread I had felt some time before, trapped in the gully. It was life-size as far as I could tell, reddish clay-coloured, the colour of the earth that still largely contained it and into which it was half-facing. The contours of left shoulder and upper arm were all that had been so far uncovered completely, the features and head still partially obscured by encrustations of earth; and it was this masking accretion that disturbed me, as I went closer. With the beauty of the shoulder and arm revealed and evident, and head and face bemonstered still by those gouts of clay, there was a sense of affliction and stillness in the form, as of some creature arrested by the gods, punished with partial metamorphosis, flesh into earth.

'Bronze,' Mister Bowles said. 'It is bronze, you know, not stone.'

'Male or female?'

'Oh, male,' he said at once. 'Look at that arm.'

It was extremely hot in this hollow. My feeling of oppression increased. It was due, I think, not merely to the heat, or the ambivalence of the figure in the hillside, but to what I felt as the intensities of feeling expended and retained in this enclosed place. Secrecy, aspiration, fanaticism-I know not what to call it. It was in the red earth and pale rock and the bushes and the liturgies of the bees among the thyme. It was in Mister Bowles's face. Savage was the word that came to my mind. I am sensitive to atmosphere, as I have told you before, Excellency. All good informers are.

I could feel sweat trickling slowly down my left side. 'Beautiful,' I said, vaguely.

'Isn't he?' he eagerly and instantly agreed.

'I think I must leave now,' I said. 'I find it very hot down here. A regular suntrap,' I added, attempting a laughing tone.

He paused, looking at me as if considering. 'Yes,' he said. 'It does get hot down here. I'll stay a little while longer. The work is just getting to an exciting stage, you know.'

'Quite so,' I said.

'Then I've got to clean up a bit before I leave. Fortunately there is water here.'

'Yes,' I said.

Mister Bowles hesitated again, then he said; 'I've got a proposition you might be interested in. Will you come over to my room at the hotel for a drink this evening? I'd like to talk to you. I'd like to explain all this.'

'Very well,' I said.

'About nine? In the meantime, keep this to yourself.'

'Of course,' I said.

'You'll be the loser if you don't.' Mister Bowles nodded significantly and looked intently at me from under the brim of his hat. 'You'll lose everything.' he said.

It was with these words echoing in my mind that I turned away from him, started scrambling up out of the hollow. They are in my mind now. How long I have been sitting here, writing to your Excellency, I don't know. I lose count of time here at my table. Time, in any case, is running out for me, as it is for Mister Bowles, and you too, Excellency, I think. I will never get the money now, never get off this island. I must write everything down before it is too late. Already I know with sadness that things have been missed and lost, impressions, complexities of meaning, significant facts even, that will never now find their way into this report. Inevitable, I suppose. Now all my waking thoughts are devoted to this work of mine. Even when I am with others I am formulating phrases, looking for the significant detail with which to enlighten Your Excellency.

I have forgotten to eat today and now I am hungry, but there is no food here. Mister Bowles mentioned a drink, perhaps food will be included. Nine, he said. I should think it must be six now, perhaps a little later: the sea has assumed its evening softness and depth, the sky is paling. I must rest a little, Excellency.

The sun had set when I awoke. I made coffee – it is here before me now. I rate the coffee bean above the olive among God's gifts to man. My legs and shoulders ache from the exertions of earlier. I look from my window at the luminous after-glow on the sea. The sky a gauze-rose suffusion. I look along the shore to the darkening hills where I stalked Mister Bowles today. As the sky loses light the trees along the sky line lose distinctness, they soften like charred wood. Minutes after this charring of the trees darkness will fall, abruptly, like some dark stuff with scents in its folds, smells of dust and pine and the faint brackish odour of the night-time sea.

Again, as on that first evening, the evening of our meeting, I picture Mister Bowles in his room. He will stand at his window, looking out at the nightfall. How, I wonder, did he become what he is? Natural delinquency or some process of disillusionment? Perhaps he discovered his gift by accident, as I discovered mine. I feel we are kindred spirits. Passionate and fraudulent Mister Bowles. Mon semblable, mon frère. How will he keep his bearings in this sudden descent of night? Here in the Levant, darkness comes too soon for the stranger, comes before he has time to create his night-time being. Will Mister Bowles be caught unawares before there is time for the stiff upper lip? It is not like the gradual English nightfall, Excellency, that I have read of in their poets but never seen, resignation coming with the waning light, the waverings of gnats, the last songs of birds. There the heart is given time to attune itself, to find some form of pensiveness or melancholy, not unpleasing. In England they are schooled in this gentle stoicism, but how does he feel here, with darkness imposed like a gesture almost, gesture of extinction? I see him for these few minutes at the window, overtaken by darkness, with the crooked line of his past behind him and the short straight line in front. He stands there, aware of aspirations disappointed, ambitions unfulfilled. And now just one ambition, simple and immense.

Excellency, I know what terra rossa is. And with that knowledge other things have fallen into place. But I must deal first with Mister Bowles.

I went straight to his room. He was there before me, as I expected, but it could not have been much before, because when he opened his door I saw signs of chaos and confusion behind him, saw it even before entering, clothes on the floor, a chest of drawers with gaping apertures where the drawers should have been. He had not had time to put this in order. Where had he been then, while I had been writing, sleeping, writing? He must have left the site well before dark.

'Yes,' he said, no doubt seeing my eyes widen. 'Someone has been having a jolly good look at my possessions. Come in, anyway. It will not take long to put things to rights.'

I sat on the bed, watched him bundle clothes back into drawers, into the wardrobe. 'Is anything missing?' I said.

'Not as far as I can see. There's nothing much here except for a few clothes. I always travel light, you know.'

'Except for marble heads,' I said.

Mister Bowles paused in his tidying, and looked at me. 'H'm, yes,' he said. 'But that was necessary.' No slightest sign of a smile on his face. He seems almost totally lacking in humour. Perhaps it is just this deficiency that makes him so successful as a trickster. But it is not enough to explain his unnerving air of being always justified. 'They must think I'm an absolute idiot,' he said.

'Why?' At this moment, by a fortunate chance, I leaned forward on the bed and as I did so I glanced down and saw the little notebook with shiny black covers lying just underneath.

'To think I would leave anything valuable lying about in my room,' he said.

He could not yet have realised it was there. Otherwise, I reasoned, he would immediately have retrieved it. Casually I moved a-little along the bed. The diary was now within reach of my foot. 'Probably Izzet, or some of his minions,' I said. 'They will be trying to find out if you have taken anything of value from the site.'

'I suppose so,' he said. 'They stopped me and searched me as I was coming back today. The two soldiers stationed above the site. I don't think they knew what they were looking for. In any case, it is quite absurd. They can't see the site itself, nor a good part of the ground below it. There are a thousand hiding places there.'

'It is more serious than you seem to think,' I said. 'They won't wait much longer. Your life is in danger. Mine too.'

Mister Bowles was crouching at the chest of drawers with his back to me. I extended my foot, kicked the diary towards me, bent down, picked it up. I had no time to do more than slip it behind my back, before Mister Bowles looked round at me. 'I'm a British subject,' he said.

'You are as liable as any other subject to die of a knife between the ribs,' I said. 'Take my advice before it is too late. Let them have the papers back on the terms they have offered.'

He straightened and turned to face me. 'And the statue?' he said. 'You don't understand. I have a responsibility now.'

Excellency, I cannot describe the earnestness, the conviction, with which he said these words. I heard in them the final death-knell of all my hopes. It was at this point, I think, that the idea of betraying Mister Bowles began to germinate in my mind, though it is difficult to be precise about beginnings – the seed had no doubt been dormant there a long time, waiting for the right weather, the right blend of fear and disappointment. 'But our deal,' I said. 'The agreement… what about that? It is all over, then?'

'Not at all,' Mister Bowles said. 'All I need is a day or two longer, that's all. That's where you come in, actually. Look, let me tell you how I came to find the statue, then maybe you'll see…'

'All right,' I said.

'I'm going to have a glass of beer and a sandwich up here in my room,' he said. 'Would you like to join me?'

In accents I took care not to make too delighted, I assented to this. He rang the bell and Biron appeared almost at once. The sandwiches were ordered, salami for me, cheese for Mister Bowles. While this was going on I managed to transfer the diary from the bed behind me to my side pocket. Biron was polite and attentive, but he did not look at me, he did not look into my face, either then or when he returned with the food and drink.

'I have been wanting to talk to someone about it,' Mister Bowles said, as soon as Biron had gone.

Over the beer and the sandwiches, he told me about it, told me in that halting, curiously compelling way of his, with blurts of eloquence and self-revelation. I shall give his own words where they seem particularly vivid or revealing. But for the most part I shall use oratio oblique. In short, Excellency, what follows is Mister Bowles's story transmuted into art. It will help towards the effect, however, if you will try to picture Mister Bowles himself, sitting opposite to me, face dark red from the sun, pale eyes glinting, hair smooth and neat in the lamplight.

He had decided, he said, to pay one last visit to the site, before selling back the lease. To have a last look round, he explained, and complete his notes: 'For the book I am writing, you know.'

That he should persist with this story of a book surprised me at the time. But then, of course, it is more than a story, much more. I am coming to understand him. I am sure that his interest in the putative abodes of the putative Virgin is quite genuine. His claim to be writing a book, though I feel sure no words of it have yet been written, is no mere falsehood; the book has that degree of existence fantasy can lay claim to, which is considerable – I speak as one who knows, veteran of many solitary triumphs. No he is not a liar, he is an accomplished fantasist, and like all such – like myself, Excellency – both victim and exploiter. All the same, an uneasy doubt remains. Did he really go back there, in the hot afternoon, to write non-existent notes for a non-existent book? With Izzet and the Pasha in the net, and payment only a few hours off? Certain it is that something took him back there – if not I should have had my money, should have been in Constantinople now.

Nothing much of the villa was left standing, only a single arch and a broken wall. (It was in a cavity below this arch, if you remember, Excellency, that he claimed to have found the objects he showed to Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet.) However, the ground plan was still there to be seen, and he had begun a methodical examination of the site, noting the details. 'I could hear the lizards,' he said, 'slithering about among the stones while I was working.'

Straightening up from his measurements he had seen, in the face of the rock behind the villa, small rectangular niches, obviously cut by hand, blackened inside, presumably by the flames of devotional lamps. 'I have seen the same sort of thing in wayside shrines,' he said. Generations of people had come here to light lamps or candles. Prayers and promises uttered in that remote place, from lips long dead. 'I noted it,' he said. 'It was evidence, of a kind. Popular beliefs have to be taken into account, you know.' Also, he had thought it the kind of personal detail that goes down well in a book.

Behind the villa the terrain was very irregular, strewn with masonry half-overgrown, mounded with heaps of reddish earth. It was clear, he said, that there had been considerable subsidence of the land here, though not very recently. He had made his way over this, seeking to trace signs of outbuildings, and he had come eventually to the edge of a roughly circular declivity, steep-sided, scattered with rocks and scrub. 'I don't really know why I went down there,' he said. It wasn't as if there were any visible signs of habitation. 'There was nothing there,' he said. 'It was impulse, pure impulse.'

There was in his manner now a new, and disturbing, quality of intensity. It was clear that he was in the grip of his own story. His eyes no longer regarded me closely, but looked at some point midway between us, with a great effort of concentration. It was as if he was in fear of being swamped, rendered incoherent, by the sheer marvellousness of what he was relating.

The cicadas shrilled with what seemed increasing volume all round him, but not, somehow, he said, in the hollow itself, once he began the descent – they seemed to stop on the edge of the slope, so that the afternoon was both loud and silent. He looked around a bit down there, saw nothing of interest, and was about to leave when, again on impulse, pure impulse – he stressed this, Excellency – he had walked over and forced a way through the tangle of scrub that grew against the foot of the slope. Nothing there but the same reddish earth and grey limestone -or such at least was his first impression-and he was in the act of turning away, when something glimpsed there, some intimation only half-conscious, registered as it were on the retinue of the mind, caused him to look again, more closely.

Then he saw what he had seen before, but now with full awareness.

It was at first like a curiously curved spur of rock embedded in the hillside, outer edge of some much greater mass. He might have assumed it to be no more that this. He said, 'I might have left it, even then,' and his eyes were stark at the thought of that appalling possibility. However, something more than accidental about that curving line had come home to him – it was, after all, what had made him look again: the impossibility of the shape being a merely random formation. 'There was something necessary about it,' he said. He looked at me anxiously, for understanding, for the charity of understanding. 'In the last analysis,' he said, 'there is no resemblance between the forms in nature and the human form, none at all.' I mentioned the gnarled shapes olive trees sometimes assume, the way the sea will sculpt human-seeming reclinations in the rocks of the shore. 'No, no,' he said impatiently. 'There is no necessity about any of these things. That is my whole point. That is what I saw. Those other things you mention, rocks and trees and so forth, they are… obedient. What I saw in that line was something urgent. It is quite different, you see.' He was excited at the force of the distinction he was making. He did not want me to discuss it with him, only to understand his feelings, see the wonder.

So he had stepped closer, taking care not to damage the screening bushes – you see, he was already thinking of concealment, Excellency. He looked closely at it, touched it: it was rounded, smooth beneath the flaking clay. It came to him then that this was a human arm.

He shivered, he told me, in spite of the heat in that enclosure. There was something deeply disturbing, unnerving almost, in the discovery that something in the human image might be trapped there. This passed, and a feeling of excitement rose in him. He moved his fingers slowly along the curve. More clay flaked away, allowing him to feel the rounded solidity beneath. There was not enough of the arm exposed yet to establish the dimensions, so he tried removing some of the earth at the sides, but it was packed hard, too hard for his fingers. He climbed out of the enclosure and returned to the area of the ruins, where he found a sharp fragment of marble. Armed with this he returned, and there, in that screened and secret hollow, he set to work, scraping slowly at the earth, carefully prising it away from the form beneath.

After a while he stood back. He was looking at the shape of a naked human forearm, life-size, fashioned in metal-bronze it could only be. From the angle of this, he judged that the body to which it was attached was half-turned inward, into the hillside.

'Amazing,' Mister Bowles said. 'You have no idea how strange it was, seeing it there like that. It was as if it was struggling, itself, to get out.'

He had been obliged to leave it at this point, though he did not say why. He could not stay any longer, he said – there was no time. He had made no attempt to conceal things. In any case, he said, it was not visible, so far at least, from the floor of the hollow. Only someone who did as he had done, forced through the scrub, would have been able to see it. 'That's the whole point, you see,' he said. 'No one would normally… I myself… I was led to it.' So he had left it and clambered up again, out of that charmed place.

He had been surprised, he said, momentarily, when he got out into the open and could see the sea again, to find that everything looked unchanged. 'I tell you,' he said, 'I expected the sea or the hills or something in the landscape to be different, changed, after that. You probably think that's funny…'

'No,' I said, 'I understand it very well.'

'It was such a wonderful experience, you see. The way I was directed to it, you know. I haven't been able to describe it properly. I went back again today – you saw me there. But it is slow work. I am afraid of damaging him.'

'So you knew,' I said, 'that same evening – when you sent the note?'

'Oh, yes. That's why I mentioned the soldiers. They were there, you know, two of them, actually on the site, just a bit higher up from the villa.'

'Well, they are still not very far away,' I said. 'You didn't think they would remove them altogether, did you?'

'There are two more, lower down,' he said, 'but it doesn't really matter. All I need is a bit more time. And that's where you come in.'

'How is that?' I said. I got up, for no particular reason, and walked a few paces across the floor. The movement brought me a view of the sky through Mister Bowles's window, and I saw the full moon hanging there, improbably large, dilated-looking as if resting on liquid.

'If you would go back to them,' he said, 'ask them for just a day or two more. Until the day after tomorrow. That's all the time I need. That would give me a chance to clean it up, have a good look at it. Have some sketches made, you know.'

' Lydia would be able to do that,' I said. 'Have you told her about the statue?'

'No, not yet. I'd rather you didn't say anything to her about it just yet.'

Excellency, I do not believe him. I think Lydia is in love with him, or at least that he has succeeded in making his life and purpose vitally important to her – which amounts to the same thing. I think she has been acting as intermediary for him with Mister Smith. Inconceivable that she should have remained in ignorance about the existence of the statue, when it was taking up so much of his time and attention. Why does he lie to me? Is it because he and Lydia are planning something together?

'So that is your proposition,' I said. 'I am to go to Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet and ask them to wait until the day after tomorrow. Then presumably you will hand back the lease agreement?'

'Exactly,' he said. 'And then we shall get our money.'

'What makes you think they'll wait?' I said. Actually, I was myself puzzled, as I had been puzzled for some time, by the most uncharacteristic patience being displayed by Mahmoud.

The Pasha is afraid of something, Excellency. Something is holding him back – something more than respect for a lease or the rights of a British subject.

'Oh, they'll wait,' Mister Bowles said now, with full confidence – it is obvious that he at least believes in these. 'When we have got our money,' he said, 'I shall report my discovery to the authorities in Constantinople. The statue will be recovered, it will be taken to Gulhane, where it will be exhibited to the public as one of the new museum's most prized possessions. I will request that a small plaque be placed beside it, giving my name and the circumstances of the finding.'

'And that would be enough for you?' I asked.

'It would be there, you see,' he said. 'My name, I mean. There for all to read.'

'What about me?' I said. 'Mahmoud Pasha will be furious. He will have no time to explore the site. Officials from the mainland will be here as soon as you report the matter.'

'True,' he said. 'That is quite true, old chap, but you will have the money, won't you? I mean to say, if Mahmoud had paid up and then found nothing, your position would have been just as difficult.'

His selfishness was monstrous, the single, absolute nature of his vision. 'You should have thought of that,' I said, 'before you asked me to act as interpreter.' It was true that I had intended to leave anyway, once I got the money, make for Constantinople and the archives. But Mister Bowles did not know that. He had been quite prepared to leave me to the wolves.

'Never mind that now,' he said. 'What do you say? Shall we be allies?' He was smiling. Suddenly he held out his hand. 'We two against the whole damn lot of them,' he said.

I smiled back at Mister Bowles and took his hand. 'Allies,' I said. 'We will see this thing through together.' I was drawing, Excellency, on the vocabulary of adventure story heroes, dimly remembered. And so, I think, was Mister Bowles.

In that brief interval, between the touch of his hand and the words of response that I uttered, no more than a few seconds, there was born in me the absolute conviction that Mister Bowles is trying to trick me again; and at the same time I felt my own readiness to betray him burgeoning within me.

We toasted our alliance in the remains of the beer. 'You will go and see them, then?' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'I will.'

'There is another thing,' he said. 'If you really want to help, you can come up to the site tomorrow and lend a hand. There's a lot to do and it is slow work for just one.'

'What time?' I said.

'Oh, any time. I'll be there all day.'

I left shortly after this. He did not see me down, which was fortunate, as it turned out, because then I should probably not have stayed talking to Chaudan in the lounge. And in that case I should probably never have found out what terra rossa is. It is a type of bauxite, Excellency.

He volunteered the information, I did not ask for it – it did not occur to me to ask. By a happy chance he had met Doctor Hogan earlier this evening and the doctor mentioned it to him. Lucky too was the fact that Chaudan was staying at the hotel that night. He spends most of his time in the north of the island, on what I suspect is a very uncomfortable construction site, supervising the road they are building along the coast. He is glad to escape when he can, and this evening he had managed it. Yes, Excellency, it is bauxite. Nothing to do with old maps, or explorers. Bauxite – and I am quoting Monsieur Chaudan now – is a non-plastic, claylike material. It can take many forms, depending on origin, being sometimes soft and friable, sometimes dense, sometimes porous. It varies widely in colour being found in cream, pink, brown, red, yellow, grey. Terra rossa is of a granular, earthy type, and as the name implies, red in colour.

But the truly interesting thing, Excellency, is that all bauxites, however they may vary in texture and appearance, contain a very high percentage of alumena, the principle ingredient of aluminium alloys. Aluminium: a metal white, sonorous, ductile, malleable, very light, not readily oxidised or tarnished.

I slept well, Excellency – three or four hours of unbroken sleep. Early morning now, just after sunrise. A great calm over everything, first touch of sun on the sleeping face of the sea. I feel this calm in myself, a spent feeling, peaceful, rather desolate. This report is drawing to a close. Things are falling into place. It is always the same: the potential of the beginning, the tremendous scope for action that one's characters have, the excitements of observation and inference their very freedom allows one; then the gradual, self-limiting process, alternatives scrapped, anomalies eliminated, until we are left with this form, this sequence, fixed, consistent, achieved.

I feel these threads coming together, adhesive, ready to set in their final shape. Mannfeldt, manufacturers of armaments; the diamond shape on the map; Herr Gesing's influence with Mahmoud, his interest in Mister Bowles's activities; terra rossa. There are bauxite deposits up there in the hills, Excellency. That is why Mahmoud Pasha has been buying up the land. Not to negotiate directly with the company – the government will handle the concession – but to be in a position to claim compensation. He could hope to recover at least treble his outlay. No doubt there has been some private arrangement between him and Herr Gesing, who will be working on commission. Something they would not wish the authorities in Constantinople to know – perhaps Herr Gesing has been promised a share in the profits from the resale, in exchange for advance information. I suspect that the compensation offer has already been made, already been accepted. Quite possibly the land is no longer Mahmoud's, but yours, Excellency – acquired as a preliminary to negotiating with the mining company. That would account for Mahmoud's otherwise unaccountable delay in acting against Mister Bowles, his fear that the documents would get into the wrong hands. No punishments so savage as those handed out by a corrupt administration defending its own privilege, Excellency. Mahmoud's extortions and murders here would have been overlooked, since they only affected a subject people. But irregularities in respect of imperial property would have ruined him, if they had come to light. He must have known this from the start, but his cupidity got the better of him. He must have supposed, too, that the lease would run out long before any mining operations were begun…

As for Mister Bowles, I have been looking at his notebook again. Those meticulous entries mean more to me now. There, accurately dated, with the place names in red ink, are the records of his transactions. Over the last six months or so he has been performing all over Asia Minor. Imagine it, Excellency, The same air of rectitude, the same impression of stupidity, the same objects, the same Gladstone bag! And now, after so much endured, so much fantasy sustained, so much self-contempt warded off, now life has outstripped his art, reality has transcended the dream. Can you wonder that he has become so passionate, so possessive?

There are still questions, of course. Why did Mister Bowles go back to the site that afternoon, when the deal had already been concluded? What had he been discussing with Mister Smith that day, when I saw them outside the bar, laughing together? Above all, knowing what I know of him, can I believe that he will surrender the statue to the authorities? The day after tomorrow. Why was he so definite about the day? It is the first time that he has committed himself in this way.

I do not believe him. That flower of betrayal, which grows with its own urgency "now, outside my control – I feel its petals expand. It luxuriates in my distrust of him, and its scent is sickening, desolating. A swamp plant, Excellency, growing in the corruption of my hopes, just as fantasies have flowered in his, in Mister Bowles's.

I will go up there again soon, to fix the few threads remaining.

It is done. I have been to Izzet-but not to ask for more time. I have betrayed Mister Bowles, the flower is in the light of day now. I did not do it for money, though money was the pretext I carefully fashioned for myself. Even that was unnecessary, because there was money here, waiting for me when I returned from seeing Izzet. An envelope under the door, containing exactly my share of the money, one hundred and fifty liras, as a note, written hastily in pencil, unsigned: Here is the sum we agreed on. I advise you to get clear of the island without delay. It cannot be Mister Bowles who delivered this: he is still up there, on the site, cherishing his bronze boy. If not he, then who? Lydia, it could only be Lydia. He would never have confided in anyone else. Not Mister Smith surely, he will be keeping out of the way for the next few hours. Besides, Mister Bowles would not trust him. No, it must be Lydia, she is the only one he could count on, whose money he could count on. That is why he brought her in, not for the sketches as he pretended to me, but for the money – Mister Smith will have to be paid, and his price for such an undertaking would be high, the Englishman could not meet the bill, presumably.

All the same, it was sent at his behest. He honoured his promise. He recognised the contribution I had made. There is even, in the note, care for my welfare and safety. And I have betrayed him. Perhaps at the very moment I was putting the knife into his back that envelope was being slipped under my door. The money has not made my act superfluous, because it was not the motive; but it gives me a feeling of love for Mister Bowles. Not gratitude, love. Also it renders the flower more repellent. In a few hours from now he will be in the hands of the authorities, who are also denizens of the swamp. It will be perhaps the last arrest your accredited representatives on this island will make, because your power too is at an end, Excellency. You too, the king alligator, you are finished too.

Excuse me for the bitterness of my tone. Let me try to preserve coherence in my narrative, even at this late stage, due distance, a semblance of order. I will begin with my visit to the site today, my second visit and I fervently hope my last. (But Izzet told me to remain here, await instructions, and I fear they have plans for me still.)

I set off early. I kept well down below where the soldiers were stationed. They were probably still sleeping, but I took no chances. Mister Bowles himself had not been there long when I arrived. He had brought wine and bread and tomatoes, and he shared this food with me, we ate it together sitting against the bankside in the shade – the sun had not yet risen high enough to reach the lower part of the hollow, which still had the cool of night in it.

After we had finished eating we set to work, each armed with a long-bladed knife. Mister Bowles brought these. He had got them, he told me, from a stall in the market. Presumably they are left-overs from the Sacrifice Bay ram. Mister Bowles worked on the line of the body turned outward, I on the other side, cutting deeper into the hillside, hollowing out the earth behind the head and right shoulder. We had to be careful not to cut too much away behind, especially in the lower part, as there was a danger of disturbing the balance of the figure, which, as I have said, stood upright.

We worked like this for perhaps two hours. At regular intervals one or other of us would step back and survey him. Little by little the naked body was assuming shape under our hands. There were no longer those disfiguring gouts of clay which had produced dread in me by bemonstering the features. The metal was still clay-coloured, and clay was crusted in the ears, the corners of the eyes, the folds of the lips, the short curling hair; but the proportions were clear now, the level brows, the line of the chin, the strong column of the neck.

As we worked Mister Bowles talked to me. His hesitations and plunges seemed less strange here, the rhythm of our work providing a sort of accompaniment. He had always, it seemed, been interested in the ancient world. 'Ever since I was so high,' he said, holding out his knife. At school it had always been the ancient history lessons that he liked best, looked forward to most. 'The very names,' he said. 'Sumerians, Babylonians…

And then the idea that you could dig, find out things about them… When people asked me what I wanted to be, you know, I always said, Archeologist.' But his father had died when he was fourteen, there had been difficulties with money, he had had to go and work in an insurance office, marine insurance, in the City of London. 'How I hated it,' he said. 'Totting up figures all day long, you know. I was there for ten years. Until my mother died.' I thought of his little notebook, the neat columns there. It was probably in the insurance office that he had acquired this orderly habit. Was it there too, I wondered, during that ten years' slow rage, that he had seen his mission in life?

I was silent for some minutes, prising away the earth from behind the neck and below the right shoulder. The face was raised slightly, as if in faintly smiling response to some greeting, or perhaps summons. 'What happened then?' I asked him. 'Oh,' he said. 'I gave it up, you know. I mean, there was no longer any reason… I started off on my travels. Rather like that doctor, Doctor Hogan. That's why I was so interested. There was a sort of parallel.'

I forbore to point out the differences. Mister Bowles too, then, is a believer in portents and parallels. Like myself, Excellency – again there was this slight shock of recognition. The difficulties I have had in seeing Mister Bowles clearly, have derived from the fact that he is too close.

By now we were full in the sun. Mister Bowles had stripped to his shorts again, and applied more of that sweetish-smelling oil. I retained shirt and trousers, for fear of being burnt by the sun. 'I read everything I could,' he said. 'I kept up with the latest discoveries. When I was a boy, Schliemann was my great hero, you know.' He paused, glancing across to me. 'Those things I told them,' he said, 'they were historically accurate. The facts, I mean. I never… In all the time I have been travelling around, I never gave false information. Everything I have said could be supported by evidence.' It was amazing to listen to him, Excellency. He had claimed to have found a marble head and a gold bracelet where no head or bracelet had been. And here he was, glancing across at me with his hallucinated eyes, talking about false information. There was, a kind of logic in what he said – so long as you could believe that the first lie was justified, and Mister Bowles clearly did believe this. 'That head and bracelet,' he said, as though reading my thoughts, 'I am sure now, in the light of this find, that what I said was quite correct. This villa is undoubtedly the site of a considerably earlier house. You only have to look at the foundations to see that. I am convinced that this statue was part of a collection formed during the Attalid period. Perhaps someone from the mainland who had a country house here. That is the only time that would correspond to the date when there would have been anyone in this part of the world rich enough or cultivated enough to form such a collection.'

'How do you think it got here?' I said.

'Anybody's guess,' he said. 'It certainly wasn't made here. Shipped from Greece to Asia Minor, I should say. Then, some time later, here. You can see how the land has subsided very considerably all over this part of the hills. Quite possibly the earlier house was destroyed in that way. Who can say? We're talking about two thousand years. He has been here, in the hillside, for two thousand years.'

Upon this, I stood back again to look at him. He was free now to the waist. Below this he was exposed in low relief, still backed against the clay. He was a very young man – shapely and strong, but slender – not quite yet at the full growth of manhood. Though discoloured with tarnish and engrained with clay, nothing of him that we could see was broken or incomplete. The features, fingers, genitals, all were perfect. One arm, the one turned to us, was held somewhat away from the side, bent at the elbow, the forearm extended forward of the body at an angle slightly below the horizontal. The hand was open, fingers spaced a little. The other arm was at his side. He appeared to be taking a short step forward, the right leg being a matter of nine or ten inches in advance of the left, though both feet rested flat on the same level, thus throwing the weight of the body slightly back, contradicting the apparent intention of forward motion. This tension in the form gave an appearance of hesitation to the pose, reinforced by the blind face, the smiling curve of the caked lips.

'He's marvellous, isn't he?' Mister Bowles said. There was a shy ardour in his tone. He might have been showing me a photograph of some loved person.

'He is, yes,' I said, and my assent was unforced, Excellency. It was now very hot in the hollow. 'I think I'll go and find a bit of shade,' I said. 'Rest for a while, if you don't mind.'

Mister Bowles pursed his lips, as if dubious. Then he said, indifferently, 'All right, if you like.' He did not really want me wandering around. 'Time is short, you know,' he said. 'I was hoping you would help me clean him up a bit later on.'

'Of course,' I said. His reluctance was encouraging, in a way. I had other reasons – other than tiredness, I mean – for wanting to break off for a while. I wanted to have another look at the terrain. A certain idea had been burgeoning in my mind all morning. Of course, I had been suspicious of him ever since I had seen him with Mister Smith that day, in the bar – is it two days ago or three? I lose count of time, Excellency. I had thought it possible he might want to buy a passage off the island on Mister Smith's caique. Perhaps he wanted to forestall the consequences of Mahmoud's fury when it was found that the site contained nothing valuable. Perhaps he was arranging to decamp in a hurry, so as to cheat me of my share of the money. However, finding him with the statue had made me think again. It had explained why he delayed, why he jeopardised everything: he was the prey of his obsession, I had thought, this terrible truth he had found through lies. In all this I had forgotten the more calculating aspects of Mister Bowles's nature, forgotten, too, his sense of being specially appointed. He has been 'led to' the statue, as he believes. Does he really intend to give it up for the sake of his name on a plaque? Now I remembered – what I should not have forgotten – that it is not a question only of Mister Bowles and Mister Smith. There are three others on that boat – five men altogether. Five men can do much, Excellency, if paid enough or frightened enough.

I climbed out of the hollow on the same side as I had first approached it, the side from which I had approached it today. From this side it would clearly be out of the question. I knew that in advance. The mounded, hummocky ground beyond, with its tangles of masonry and vegetation, its ruined walls, its steep clefts and gullies – clearly impossible from this side. The statue must weigh three hundred and fifty pounds at least, I had calculated. Quite possibly more. But from the other side of the hollow, the side I had not seen…?

I went back towards the ruins until I reckoned I was at a safe distance from him, then began to make my way round in a fairly wide semi-circle, with the intention of coming out at a roughly similar level at the other side. This I found extremely difficult, at times even hazardous – particularly for one so unathletic as myself, Excellency. But I persevered. Sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes slithering feet first, torn by scrub and bruised by stone, I made my way round. I was uneasily conscious that parts of my route might have been visible from above, from where the two soldiers were stationed, but though I may have been seen I was not challenged. When I did reach the other side of the hollow, what I saw soothed my pains to a large extent. It was possible, Excellency. For a group of determined men it was feasible, though difficult. There would be five of them, if all the crew were employed on it. Excellency, supposing I am right about Mister Smith. Supposing he is here on some illegal enterprise-let us say landing guns for the rebels. And supposing something has gone wrong. Perhaps being searched has scared him. Perhaps there has been some breakdown in the arrangements. In this situation he will be wanting to get away, he will be interested in the idea of some quick money. Not threats, as I once thought – men like that would be too dangerous to threaten. But money, yes. And Lydia has money…

I had come round from the side, through rock and thick scrub into a more open area, not precisely behind the hollow where Mister Bowles was working, but giving me a view of the slope down from this, and then the longer, more gradual slope of the hillside itself. It was true that there were sizeable rocks amid the pine trees, especially on the first and steeper part of the slope, and there were folds in the ground that might be awkward. But no more than a hundred yards beyond, quite clearly visible, was the line of the stream bed – dry now and wide enough for two men abreast. Admittedly, the footing would be difficult, because of the irregular stones forming the bed, but these would not be large, and the slope was fairly gradual. I could not see its course for very far, but I remembered, as I crouched there, the view I had had from the path higher up, on my way here that first day when I had come to spy on him: the long green swathe of the stream bed with its edging vegetation, the sea, the continuing line of the jetty, the greening of the water over the marble blocks. It was possible, Excellency, it was the only possibility, and therefore it must be the answer. They could never get him out of the hollow unaided, of course -a dozen men could not have done it, the slope was too steep, the clay too crumbling. But with lifting gear from the caique… They might have a spare block and tackle. Or they could use the tackle from the boom. It was level enough along the top for three men at least to stand together…

There were the soldiers, of course, to reckon with. The two above would see nothing of it, their view was cut off by the fall of the land. But the two below, nearer the shore, they were on the same side of the headland as the stream bed. Besides, there was the noise… Mister Bowles had not seemed particularly worried about the presence of the soldiers, once they had been removed from the site itself.

I judged I had been away no more than half an hour. But I do not think, after that scramble, that I could have looked like a man who had been resting in the shade, and I thought that his manner was suspicious when he greeted me on my return. I say that I thought so, Excellency – it was impossible now with him to be certain of such things. His wild and gleaming appearance made normal identifications impossible. His whole manner, since the finding of the statue and the subsequent secretive labours, had become so charged with feeling, so almost melodramatic, that there was no register for milder feelings.

'I don't think we'd better dig round him any more,' Mister Bowles said. 'I don't want him to start keeling over. What I'd like to do now is clean him up a bit. I've been bringing olive oil up here. That was the only thing I could think of that wouldn't damage the surface, you know.'

He had also brought several cloths, squares of black velvet -thick, heavy velvet such as is not to be had on this island, Excellency. They had been cut roughly from some single piece, perhaps curtaining or a woman's dress. I wondered where, at such short notice (since he could not have known he would need it), he had been able to obtain such material.

We worked together, Mister Bowles on the head and face, I lower down on the pectoral slopes and rib cage, applying the oil gently but firmly, softening by repeated application the encrustations of clay. From time to time I glanced up at their two faces, the faint impervious smile of the metal, the almost painful care and devotion of the flesh – he was worshipping, Excellency. In me too, as I worked on, there grew up a feeling of reverence. We were bathing him, not washing. There was a lustral, expiatory quality in what we were doing. Mister Bowles and I were at one, for the first and only time, ministering together; and all I had felt about our closeness, our identity, was evidenced and made tangible here by our hands as we went through the same cherishing motions, repeatedly applied the oil, wiped away the dissolving clay, informer and trickster, divided by our schemes but at one in this ritual.

The clay was tenacious. It clung to him, to the nostrils, the short curling hair, the slight ridges of muscle at the loins, as if reluctant to give up its claim. First applications turned it a glistening darker red, a dark blood colour so that at first we seemed to be washing the body free from the blood of wounds. But below this the metal came up lustrous.

'If I were you,' Mister Bowles said suddenly, 'I'd get clear of this island as soon as I possibly could. As soon as you get the money, I mean.' He did not look at me as he said this, being intent on the eye sockets. There were no eyes, Excellency -below the lids narrow vacancies.

'Yes,' I said, 'I was intending to go to Constantinople.'

'Why there?' he said. 'That's the last place I would want to go just now. You won't be able to stay here, you know. There's nothing for you to do here. Not unless you change your profession, or arrange for a new paymaster.'

'Why do you say that?'

'The heyday of spies is over,' he said. 'Abdul Hamid is finished. The Macedonian regiments are in the capital. They are welcomed everywhere. Enver Bey and Talat are in charge now.'

I looked up from my work, at his serious face – he had spoken without mockery – and then up at the blinding purity of the sky. The shrilling of cicadas from the slopes all round us seemed at this moment to rise to a crescendo that was then impossibly sustained.

'Rumours,' I said. Even at this moment of shock, my mind continued to assemble evidence against him. It must have been from Lydia that he had got this. He had seen her then, and recently. The velvet material, I was suddenly convinced, had been hers. Quite unexpected and unbidden there came into my mind a recollection from the evening of his arrival, when I had introduced him to Lydia, and seen her hand engulfed in his…

'More than a rumour, old boy,' Mister Bowles said, stepping back from the statue a little. 'It is absolute fact. Why do you want to go to Constantinople anyway? I say, come and stand over here, and have a look at him now.'

I did as he said. Although I was still shaken by this curt announcement of your downfall, the appearance of the statue drove everything else from my mind. He stood there, a young man of possibly twenty or so, taking a slight step towards something. His head, chest and arms gleamed in the sun, dark olive colour, with glints of gold. The tarnish of ages still lay on the bronze, but the oil had glossed and darkened it. There was no visible flaw in any of the surface we had cleaned. The gleaming torso contrasted with the dull earth colour below, giving him the look of someone struggling out into sunlight – an accidental effect, but deeply impressive. Above all it was the tension within the movement of the body itself, something unresolved, disturbingly ambivalent, that gave the work its life and distinction. The form expressed a subtle conflict between advance and recoil. It was there in the raised, slightly smiling face, in the squared shoulders, the tentative gesture of the arm; in the slight forward step and the withheld trunk, which could now be seen to be slightly turned from the direction of the walk, a further torsion of reluctance. With some marvellous instinct the remote creator of this youth had found a form for awkwardness and grace together.

'That is no copy,' Mister Bowles said. He turned to me an excited face. 'He was already old when the Romans were here,' he said.

'I don't know,' I said. 'He is certainly very beautiful.' I was moved, Excellency. Not only by the statue itself but by the way in which Mister Bowles included me in his emotion. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because I intended to inform on him, a great urge to confide in him rose up in me. 'You asked me why I wanted to go to Constantinople,' I said. 'I'll tell you.'

And I did tell him, told him everything, as we resumed the work – lower down now, along the flanks and the groin. Told him of the long silence in which I had lived, the neglect of your officials, and now the hostility of the Greeks. 'I kept no copies, you see,' I said. I told him how the money had come through every month, never varying; and of my wish to visit the archives, bribe my way to repossession of the papers. He listened seriously, though without looking at me. His hat was pulled low against the glare.

'You mean to say nothing has ever happened?' he said. 'Good God. As for the money, I have heard of other cases. You know how inefficient the bureaucracy is. They would just go on paying you.'

'But twenty years,' I said.

'They've been going downhill for ten times as long as that, Pascali. No, there is no machinery for countermanding anything. Some clerk made an order on the bank, and the money keeps on coming. Nobody knows why, so nobody stops it. The chap who arranged it is probably dead. It's not likely he kept any records anyway. Or if he did they would be in such a state of confusion that no one…'

He paused, his saturated velvet on the slope of a thigh, and looked across at me. 'Just imagine the paper-work involved,' he said. His pale eyes looked seriously and directly into mine. I thought I detected in them a look of pity. 'Just imagine the weight of it,' he said. 'The whole system is clogged with paper. Have you any idea how many informers there must be in the Ottoman possessions? The Sultan has been paranoid for years, you know. It is common knowledge that there are more spies than police in Constantinople. Do you really suppose those fellows in the Ministry have a filing system? No one reads anything, Pascali.'

Because I was frightened by the implication of his words, I took refuge in sneering. 'Your own métier is at an end, if all you say is true,' I said. 'Have you considered that? I mean, you depended on this system didn't you? The swamp has been your habitat.'

'Swamp?' he said.

'Yes.' I was thinking of the flower that was now spreading its petals against the roof of my poor demoralised brain. 'The Empire is a swamp,' I said, 'and if you don't mind my saying so, we both belong in it, together with the orchids and snakes.'

'I don't know about that,' he said. He was embarrassed by my metaphorical language. Rather over-doing things, he probably thought. He himself never used figures of speech. 'In any case, I shall be moving on, you see.' He raised his eyes to the statue's face. 'This is a turning point in my life,' he said. 'Do you realise how few original Greek bronzes there are in existence?'

'I thought you were intending to turn it over to the authorities tomorrow.'

'Oh, yes,' he said. 'I am, of course. But just the association of the discovery with my name will be enough.'

He was lying to me, Excellency. I knew it then, beyond doubt. Knew it in bitterness and desolation. He would never give the statue up. Had he not been 'directed' to it? He would go on, as I had always dreaded, follow his dream, while I would be left behind in this place, penniless, among enemies, without an occupation even. I could not endure it. I knew then, finally, what I must do. My eyes were close to the boy's flank. They filled with tears, through which the bronze glinted, became iridescent.

'It is surprising,' Mister Bowles said, in a different, more measured voice, 'well, at least it always surprises me, how Greek sculpture provides us with a sort of universal paradigm, a model for all human affairs.'

I looked up at him from my crouching position. He was standing with his back against the hillside, head turned to look upwards along the slope. My eyes were still slightly blurred, and as I looked up at his face in profile, his features had a strange outer edge of light, as if the area immediately adjoining his face derived a radiance emitted from the surface.

'How do you mean?' I said.

'Well, in the very early period, the seventh and sixth centuries, the figures were not really individualised at all. It didn't matter who they were. They were images of man as such. They were marvellously human, but they were not distinguished one from another. Just a celebration of collective humanity, you know. Then you got the breakdown of that sort of mythical unity in the classical period, when there was an awakening to personality, to individual responsibility. It was still monumental – to begin with at least. I mean there was harmony and balance in it. The weight was in the centre. But the unity was achieved in the individual work, not so much in the expression of a collective attitude. As in the sculptures of Phidias, for instance. Perfect unity of form and spirit. But it didn't last long you know. Just that perfect balance, for a generation only, not much more anyway. While it was actually happening, the conditions that made it possible were being undermined. In the Greek state itself things were beginning to break up. There was a lot of conflict – between the individual and the state, secular and religious claims, and so on, and as you come down into the fourth century this shows itself in the sculptures. The centre of gravity is displaced from the middle. The figures are not so secure, not so self-contained. There is more differentiation, more insistence on naturalistic detail. Then in the Hellenistic period, you know, after about three hundred, the whole process degenerates into drama and decoration. Instead of that clear arrangement of axes, you get tricks of opposing rhythms. The forms no longer reach out, they turn around their own centre. That is the finish of it. The whole art becomes decadent, and so does the society, of course.'

'Well,' I said, 'of those periods you mention, I should have been most at home in the last one, the tricks of opposing rhythms, as you put it – and so would you, I think.' In fact, Excellency, although he had spoken in his lecturing voice, there had been a touch of the old moral disapproval in the way he had ended, and it had riled me slightly – hence the gibe, which I do not think he noticed. 'I don't see why decadence should be such a dreadful thing,' I added.

'Well, the whole thing was fragmented,' he said. 'You only have to look at the fluctuations of style. You only have to look at the faces, there is no serenity in them. They are questing and doubtful.'

'What about his face?' I said.

'Oh, him.' Mister Bowles's voice softened. My eyes were clear now, Excellency, but Mister Bowles's face still had that radiance about it. He was happy. 'He is just at the point of decline,' he said.' At the brink. That is why he is so marvellous.'

'Fragmented,' I said. 'That was the word you used, wasn't it? And this whole process took about five hundred years.'

'About that, yes.'

(That is roughly the duration of your Empire, Excellency. I point this out to you for the sake of the parallel.)

'So,' I said, 'it went from a collective idea of man, to a very brief period of perfect balance, then to increasing anguish and disunity, finally to breakdown and fragmentation.'

'Yes,' he said. 'That's about it. We've been living among the fragments ever since.'

'Fragments mean pickings,' I could not help saying, again provoked by his somewhat schoolmasterly air. 'If it could be speeded up,' I added, 'it would look like an explosion, wouldn't it?'

'How do you mean?'

I looked at him for a moment or two before replying. How strange it was, Excellency. Here we were together, he and I, talking easily, more than that, intimately – we had become friends at last, we had achieved our own, poignantly brief, balance. And I was about to betray him. I felt myself in danger of tears again. 'Well,' I said, looking away from him, 'think of a bomb – a perfect, unified shape, then fragments.'

'Yes,' he said, 'in a way, perhaps, but not really. The true perfection was the balance itself, and that is always an intermediate stage, you know. And brief, as I say.'

I nodded. 'Well,' I said, 'I can't do much more here. I'll be getting back now, if you don't mind.'

'Ah right,' he said. He stood silent while I retrieved my jacket and put it on. 'I'll stay on a bit longer,' he said. 'By tomorrow I shall have all the information I need, you know. Then we can go ahead.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Goodbye then, for the moment.' Mister Bowles hesitated, then suddenly held out his hand. 'Thanks for your help,' he said. 'I won't forget it. Listen, take my advice, don't go to Constantinople. Get out of it all, while the going's good. With your languages you could get work in Europe, as an interpreter, something of that kind.'

'It depends on money,' I said.

'You'll get your money,' he called after me. 'You have my word for that.'

At the foot of the slope I turned to look back at him. 'Tell me,' I said, 'what did you mean that day, when you said you were an instrument?'

'Oh, that,' he said. 'Well, someone has to show them.'

'Show them?'

'The error of their ways, you know.'

'A sort of mission?'

'You could put it like that.'

'I see,' I said. 'Yes, I see.'

And I did see, Excellency. I saw several things as I clambered up out of the hollow. Mister Bowles must have had Messianic leanings for a long time-perhaps even in those early days, in the insurance office. Now he has come to believe himself sent by a higher power. The delicate balance between zeal and financial gain which has preserved him hitherto, kept him apparently sane among the world of men, an accomplished trickster, has been broken. Whatever daimon led him down there in the first place was conducting him straight to mania, to the excess-in his own nature which was always there. He went mad in that hollow, Excellency.

At the top of the slope, I turned to look again. He was kneeling before the statue, at work on the belly and loins. I watched the two naked figures together there, the darker and paler red, both gleaming with oil. The youth looked over Mister Bowles's head with a sort of ecstatic aloofness, beyond, to where his step was taking him. That out-thrust hand had never held anything, no implement or insignia. It expressed desire. The step was made, irrevocable. The body was offered and withheld. Ecstasy may accompany many forms of beastliness and violence, Excellency, as well as communion with the gods; and whether that step forward was into life and joy, or into some degrading rite, could not have been told from the face or posture of the body.

You see I continue to draw parallels, make analogies, even now, as the night advances, and the moon rises over the sea. Full moon, Excellency – he must have taken this as a sign of favour, of blessing on his enterprise… The money is in the envelope, on the table before me, proving that he did not intend to cheat me after all. But I feel no compunction now, no regret, only a sick impatience for the night to be finished. I will break off for a little, with your permission, Excellency, make coffee, rest my eyes.

I left them together, as I have said, Mister Bowles and his bronze love. I knew, quite coldly and certainly what I must do. There was no inclination to tears now, only the feeling of desolation which attends acts of destruction felt to be necessary but not really desired.

I felt neither fatigue nor hunger as I made my way back to the town. Occasionally, however, I found myself staggering a little. I went straight to the Metropole, straight to Herr Gesing's room. Just as I was, stained with sweat and clay. If I passed anyone on the way I did not notice. He kept me waiting for some time and when he came to the door he was in crumpled pyjamas, puffy-eyed. I had disturbed his afternoon sleep.

'So,' he said. 'It is you, Pascali.'

'Can I see you for a few minutes?' I said.

He looked at me for a moment or two longer, then stood aside for me to enter. His room was bigger than Mister Bowles's. The bed was in an alcove with an arched entrance.

'Here,' he said, 'take a seat. You are not looking so good this afternoon, Pascali. You like a cold coffee?'

Gratefully I assented. While he busied himself I looked round the room. There were typewritten sheets on the table, but I lacked the energy to try to get a closer look. I needed no confirmation now. Whether Herr Gesing was acting for Mannfeldt or, as I suspected, some subsidiary interest, possibly a mining company, was of no real interest now.

'I keep always cold coffee, for the afternoons,' Herr Gesing said. 'In this verflucht hot weather.'

We sat opposite each other, at the table. Herr Gesing removed the papers, but without haste. 'Well,' he said. 'What can I do for you?'

Two minutes it took, no more, to commit myself to the betrayal of Mister Bowles. I did not give any information to Herr Gesing, and he did not ask for any. I did not by word or sign indicate that I knew of the bauxite deposits. I merely made him the offer.

'You said you wanted the Englishman off the land,' I said.

Herr Gesing offered me cigarettes from a japanned box. 'Yes, that is so,' he said. 'And that is the same now. Our attitude the same remains.'

'Well,' I said, 'I can get him off. For good. Within forty-eight hours. But I must be paid.'

I asked him for money, Excellency, in a forlorn attempt to preserve an appearance of reasonable motive, to conceal from Herr Gesing and from myself the gratuitous nature of my act. Mister Bowles is intending to be off the island anyway by tomorrow, if I am right, but Herr Gesing does not know this. I do not think he knows anything about the supposed finds on the site, nor the deal between Mister Bowles and Mahmoud Pasha. He may know of the existence of the statue, but that would be of no great concern to him, probably. Mister Bowles is simply an intruder to him, a potential threat to his interests.

He smoked reflectively for a minute or two, while I waited, my head swimming slightly, my vision not clear. 'My name,' he said, 'must not be…'

'Involved?'

'Involved, ja. There are interests here, big interests. You must conduct with care. Es ist eine lokale Sache, Pascali. You understand?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Fifty liras. I can give you fifty liras.'

'When?' I said. 'Now?'

He laughed a little. 'No, not now,' he said. 'When it is done. You come to me when it is done.'

'Very well,' I said. It did not matter to me, Excellency. The money, I mean. Except, as I have said, to provide a motive. All the same, I thought it probable that he would pay. 'Fifty liras is not much,' I said, out of a long habit of bargaining.

'Bah!' he said. 'Listen to me, the Englishman has no right there, the lease is not in order. In the courts it cannot stand up.'

'Yet they allow him to remain there,' I said.

'That it is that I do not understand,' He shrugged his thick shoulders. 'But who can understand these people?' he said.

I struggled to my feet. 'Don't worry,' I said, 'the site will be free by this time tomorrow.'

'Good, good,' Herr Gesing said. His pale fleshy face creased suddenly, revealing a shallow dimple in the left cheek. He held out his hand. 'Now we are allies,' he said. 'Allies, Pascali.'

'Yes,' I said. I shook his hand. 'Commerce and National State advancing hand in hand,' I said.

He chuckled. 'You remember, eh?' he said. 'The future is with us. Wir haben die Wille.'

I pictured us as Mister Punch might have depicted us: me as feminine Commerce in helmet and clinging gown, Herr Gesing as National State in a top hat, sausages cascading from below his frock coat. Like the strings of pink sheep guts the Turks carried away after the Sacrifice, for their evening chorba. Suddenly it seemed to me that I could smell it again, here in this close room, the stink of blood and sheep pelt that had hung over the whole island. I felt faint, my vision blurred. Then the world cleared again, and Herr Gesing was smiling the same smile.

'A noble ideal,' I said.

'Not ideal, no. Ideals is nostalgia. Like your Mister Bowles, he has ideals. Pah!' Herr Gesing tightened his small mouth in disgust. 'No, ideals we do not have – wir haben Ziele, Pascali. Ziele.'

'Goals,' I said.

'Goals, ja. The Baghdad Railway, which we Germans have built, that was not an ideal.'

'No,' I said, moving towards the door. 'I suppose not.'

I said goodbye to him quickly. Too much to expect that I would linger there with him, talking about Darwinism as applied to national states. Darwin never meant it to be. Besides, I preferred Mister Bowles's perverted idealism to this dirty future of Herr Gesing's, built on one crooked deal after another.

From there I went to Izzet. It did not take long to explain things to him. I did not, of course, tell the whole story. He would have thought me mad. They knew about the statue already – Mister Bowles had been watched. But Izzet was not worried about that. It had not occurred to him that the Englishman would be mad enough to try and remove it; and while he was engaged thus they had felt more secure, since he was neglecting the smaller, more obviously valuable things on the site.

This security I proceeded to destroy. It was not a question of the statue, I said, but of other things. 'Other things?' he said.

'Other things he has found there. Don't you see, Izzet, the statue is only a trick. He has used it to cover up his other activities.'

'Why are you telling me this?'

'When I discovered the truth, the kind of man he really is I had no choice. My loyalty to the Vali… And then, think of my position, I had helped him, you see. You would not have believed me…'

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I see.' He was already trembling, Excellency. Izzet, as I have said, is very emotional about money. He was far too disturbed to examine my motives thoroughly. 'The pig,' he said. 'What treachery.'

'Yes,' I said. 'He will have a full moon, tonight. They will use the American's boat. They are all in it together.'

Touch by touch I inflamed his rage and greed. 'I will report this at once to the Vali,' he said. 'You will return to your house, and remain there. You will not leave your house, Pascali.'

I obeyed him, Excellency, to the letter. Here I am. It must be somewhere between eleven and midnight. I have heard nothing. Supposing after all that I am wrong. I review the evidence in my mind: the involvement with Lydia; his meeting with Mister Smith; his talk of the day after tomorrow; full moon – he would not dare show lights; the finality of that handshake, and then the envelope under the door. No, I cannot be mistaken. Above all, there is my knowledge of him. He would never give the statue up…

Excellency, I hear sounds now, on the terrace outside, voices. They have come for me. What I have been dreading so much I could not speak of it… They will ask me to guide them… They are knocking now, calling my name.

Everything is finished, Excellency. I am outside the frame now. He is dead. Lydia too is dead. It is more than a week since I have been able to write. I go on living here in my house. No one has made a move against me; I am left alone. It is only with the greatest effort that I take up my pen again. All desire to write has left me, all that racing to keep abreast of things, that passion for recording, that has kept me writing so furiously ever since he arrived: all ended now, all stilled. The shots that killed them ended my report. What is left is epilogue; or perhaps, roughly speaking, coda.

They would not have died at all, or at least they could have been given a chance of life, if it had not been for the discovery of the murdered soldiers. I never intended his death, only his defeat, I wanted to make my failure his too, preserve the intimate connexion between us. Zusammen verbunden, as Herr Gesing said, that evening at dinner, linking his hands together. All the time, obscurely, I was worried about those soldiers. He did not seem to mind their presence there, once they were off the site itself, away from a direct view of his activities. Did he know what was going to happen to them?

They came for me, Mahmoud Pasha himself and Izzet at his heels. Appropriate of course that I should lead them to him, perform the kiss. Twelve troops. We went in two boats across the bay, keeping near to the shore to be in the moon's shadow as far as possible. They had muffled the oars. We made no noise as we crawled along the rim of the bright sea, the shadowed hills to our right. No one spoke. We beached beyond the headland in the little cove. Their ship's boat was already there, on rollers, near the water. The caique lay farther out, beyond the line of the jetty, no lights showing. If any of the crew had been left on board, they would certainly have seen us, but there was no sound, no challenge. The boat waiting there on the beach, the deserted caique, this was all the evidence that was needed. I had been right. They were up there already.

On the beach the soldiers tied cloth round their boots. I too was made to muffle my steps. I had decided to lead them by way of the stream bed, since this was the only way Mister Bowles could come down, and we would thus be able to intercept him if he finished the work earlier than expected.

We proceeded in double file, with myself and Mahmoud in the lead. Mahmoud wheezed with the exertion of the climb, but displayed a dreadful lightness of foot-I was hard put to keep up with him. The smooth stones of the stream bed led up before us white in the moonlight, glinting with mica. We made no noise, trudging steadily, eyes on the path before us, careful of the loose stones. In spite of my anguish, or perhaps because of it, because my mind clamoured for respite, a sense of unreality descended on me, I fell into a dream-like state as we went on, a condition almost of trance. There was the white defile before us, the slow climb, the need to set one foot after the other: all this precluded any sense of an issue, as if this ascent could have gone on for ever.

When we reached a level roughly similar to that at which the two lower troops had been stationed, Mahmoud despatched a man to alert them. They were some three hundred metres to the west of us, in the direction of the town, where they could overlook the approach by sea.

'It is odd', Izzet whispered to me, 'that they have seen nothing.' His face was pinched and white in the moonlight, looking narrower, more bird-like than ever below the dark turban he was wearing. 'The pigs must have been drinking,' he whispered.

We waited for perhaps ten minutes there. Then we saw the man returning, walking carefully across the slope, just above us. He was holding both hands extended before him a little, in what even at that distance seemed a stiff and unnatural manner. This was the beginning of the nightmare, Excellency, up till then merely the approaches, the moonlight reaches of the dream. As in nightmare the man was hampered, he could only approach slowly for fear of noise – he had to contain his news until he could whisper it. Slowly he clambered down towards us. He held out his hands towards Mahmoud. His broad Mongolian face was expressionless with shock. His hands were darker than his face, much darker – the blood was still moist. 'They are dead,' he said, in a harsh whisper. He raised one hand and made a sharp gesture inwards, towards his chest. 'I thought at first they were sleeping,' he said.

Mahmoud Pasha looked at the man's hands, then up towards the slope, towards the way we were going. He nodded once. 'Gelde, cochuklar,' he said. 'Come, my children, let us continue.'

There was death in the air now – I think from that moment Mister Bowles's death was inevitable. We went on in silence. From time to time we had to climb up along the sides, holding to the low branches of pines. But always we followed the line of the stream. We were now not far below the ruins, though these were not visible to us here. The cold radiance of the moon lay on the hills around and above us. The plunges of granite in the gorge beyond the headland were like streams immobilised by a thickening solution of alkali, divided into deltas by the darker scrub. Threading the slopes, the silver lines of goat tracks.

I led them up, sick at heart, thinking of nothing now but coming to the end. We quitted the track at a point well above the hollow, and very slowly, very cautiously now, came obliquely downwards across the slope. He had posted no lookout, Excellency. He would have had the confidence of his destiny upon him; but he must have known the soldiers were dead, otherwise he would surely have taken this precaution -we would have been visible as we took up our positions above them, there would have been time for them to get clear. Of course, he needed all the men for the work, perhaps even Lydia too…

Now the long claw of the headland was before us, beyond it we could see the great brimming expanse of the bay, the glimmering of the ancient jetty, the shadowed caique at rest on the calm surface. We worked our way round to a rocky terrace on the slope, some three or four yards deep. To our right the land plunged down again in a torrent of silvered rock and scrub. Slowly we worked along the terrace. Suddenly Mahmoud held up his hand, halted us. There they were, Excellency, working full in the moonlight. There were six of them, not five as I had been expecting: two below, in the hollow itself, four at the top of the slope. The statue dangled, still upright, just clear of the bank.

Mahmoud gestured us into position along the terrace, spaced at intervals, concealed among the rocks. Me he kept beside him. It was a perfect field of fire, Excellency: they had no chance, none whatever. And still they worked on, absorbed, totally heedless. Even when his men were settled in position, Mahmoud gave no order. He uttered a hiss of indrawn breath, and when I glanced at him, I saw that he was smiling. I will not forget that smile of his big white face. He waited there, withholding the order, savouring his triumph; waiting while we crouched and watched them at their work.

One of the men below was Mister Bowles, I recognised the angular figure, the smooth hair – he was bareheaded, curiously boyish looking. The other with him was much shorter and slighter. They were holding the statue steady as it hung there. Three of the men above were at the rope, some dozen feet to the right, along the crest of the hollow. The fourth, who was facing us, I knew at once for Mister Smith. They had rigged up a scaffold by means of three oars lashed together, and he was standing against this, using his weight as a wedge.

We could hear and see everything. The creak of the ropes, the winching sound of the pulley wheels below the scaffold, the scrape and setting of the men's feet and their grunts of exertion as they heaved together on the rope, the glinting fibres of the rope itself as it descended from the oar overhanging the slope to the slings at the statue's shoulders-they had fashioned a rope harness for him. Everything was as clear as if it had been daylight-I could even see the brass buckle on Mister Smith's belt. The statue gazed serenely across the moonwashed spaces between us, walking on air now.

So for the space of perhaps five or six minutes we crouched there and watched: watched as the statue rose foot by foot with the pulls on the rope, beyond the reaching hands of those below, slowly upwards until he was clear of the bankside, hanging free. I could see nothing of Mister Bowles except his back, but I could imagine the anxiety on his face as he watched his darling's progress upward. His helper below had stepped back from the bank and stood behind him a little.

There was a dreadful fascination in the spectacle, in this purposeful, doomed activity, in their absorption and helplessness, Mister Bowles and his helper trapped like flies in that bowl of light, the others outlined there, only the exposed slope below to escape by. Dramatic, Excellency. But it was the bronze youth himself, as they hauled him clear, that held my attention, and aroused my superstitious awe. He hung there, his head just below the top of the slope, swaying very slightly. And his ropes creaked. Excellency, I was looking at the crucified man of my childhood, but transformed it seemed, ecstatic – that raised face, that dreaming smile – triumphant in the hands of his persecutors. The moon threw his brows into prominence, shadowed the sockets of his eyes. He held out his hand towards us.

Then, abruptly, the tableau was broken by Mister Bowles. He bent down, took up a length of rope lying beside him, began to clamber up towards the statue's feet. I think he was going to rope the feet, Excellency, so that the others could draw him in horizontally the rest of the way, bring him flat on to the crest of the slope. But he was given no time. It was now, with the statue suspended there, the men above taking the strain, Mister Bowles climbing awkwardly, hampered by the rope, it was now that Mahmoud whispered the firing order, left of him to those above, right of him to those below. If the men before us heard the click of the bolts, they had no time to move, barely time to look up, even. Perhaps they saw the glimmer of a face, the glint of a gun barrel. But the shots crashed out, and continued without pause, for what seemed long enough to destroy the world. Mister Smith dropped at once, straight down into the hollow, diving past the statue, to end quite still at the foot of the slope. He was killed outright, I think. My eye went from him to Mister Bowles's assistant, who had turned to face the shots. It was Lydia. She ran three steps forward, then fell, but she was still moving. The statue, released, dropped with a rattle of wheels, like clockwork, feet first, straight on to Mister Bowles who made or seemed to make, at the last moment, some embracing or protective gesture towards it, before it struck him on head and chest and bore him beneath it down to the floor of the hollow, where the shots masked the crash of its fall. Lydia, on one knee, the other leg trailing, crawled a little way towards the statue and the inert form lying half under it. She was shot again, lowered herself on to her face, writhed briefly as if trying to turn over on to her side, to a more comfortable position. But she couldn't manage this, and after a moment lay still.

Mahmoud shouted and the firing stopped. A series of appalling groans came from somewhere at the top of the slope. We listened to these sounds in silence for some time, then Mahmoud sent the soldiers down to recover the bodies. I went with them, Excellency, a sort of dogged self-punishing urge to completeness impelling me. I saw Lydia and Mister Smith lifted, quite tenderly now, by the sober-faced soldiers, carried to the top. Lydia 's hair had come down and hung behind her as she was carried up. Her face was unmarked, a white oval in the moonlight, eyes staring. It took six men to raise the statue sufficiently for Mister Bowles to be extricated from it. I looked at him once and then no more. He had no eyes, no nose, no mouth: only a glistening mask of blood. Mercifully, at this point I was released from further attention by an attack of vomiting. Spasm after spasm kept me there, while they made litters for the bodies with the oars and spars Mister Smith's men had brought up. Still retching, I crawled into the bushes, out of sight. No one looked for me or called my name. I lay there motionless, until the steps and voices and groans had gone, until long after they had gone.

Gradually, with the restored calm of night around me, the warm air enfolding me, I began to feel comforted. My loneliness and sickness were compounded with that of the world, diffused to the furthest spaces I could imagine. I knew that my limbs would not carry me down again. After a while, I slept, Excellency. Slept through the crossing of the moon and waning of the stars, through the first light. When I awoke I was cold and hungry, but my mind was clear. I stepped out from the bushes, looked briefly across the floor of the hollow. The statue was still there, lying face down, his back leg raised a little from the ground. The fall had broken off his right arm at the elbow, so that he was prostrate against the earth, his face pressed into it. I could not see the arm anywhere, and I did not look for it.

I climbed out of the hollow, along behind the remains of the villa. I came to the one arch left standing and the angle of the ruined wall. There was the cavity below it just as Mister Bowles had described – he had taken great care, I remembered suddenly, to describe the precise location of his 'finds'. Acting on impulse, I made my way up there, knelt above the cavity, put in my hand. At about the extent of my arm, my fingers touched something. I strained further and my hand closed over an object cold, smooth, shaped. I was excited, Excellency. I drew it out: it was a doll, made of some hard, whitish, rubberised material, resembling congealed fat; a grotesquely, offensively, ugly doll, with protruberant eyes and thick blubbery lips; bald, but otherwise quite sexless and ageless. In the morning sunshine I stood there, turning the obscene thing over in my hands. On its nude left buttock, stamped in faint blue ink, Potsdam 1896. I knew now why Mister Bowles had returned to the site that afternoon, the afternoon he had been 'led' to the statue: not to complete his researches, as he had given out, but to plant this outrageous doll: he had intended Mahmoud and Izzet to find it after he had gone. It was his last trick, Excellency, quite gratuitous, designed to give aesthetic shape to his whole transaction. Did I not say he was an artist? Also, of course, it was part of his 'mission', part of what he had been sent to do. He had wanted to show them the error of their ways.

After a moment more, I knelt again, carefully replaced the monstrous thing. They will look there, if they retain any belief in his truthfulness. I hope they find it – perhaps they already have, they have been busy on the site these last few days.

All that is more than a week ago, eight, perhaps nine days – I do not keep count of the days, Excellency. There were nine deaths altogether: Mahmoud's four soldiers – the two above were also killed, and in the same way, stabbed as they lay there; and five of Mister Bowles's party – the wounded man died two days afterwards, he had been shot in the abdomen. The sixth, who was thought to be a Pole but turned out to be Lithuanian, was unhurt. He was found next day in the foothills near the shore. He is at present in the military prison and it is probable, with that leniency the Turks show after bloodshed, that he will be released.

It is not known for sure who killed the soldiers. Their rifles had been taken, and their bayonets, and cartridge belts, and boots. None of this was found either on the site itself or on the boat when they afterwards searched it. I myself see this as proof that the murders were done by Greek rebels from the mountains. And it confirms my suspicions about Mister Smith: if he was there to land arms he would have had the means of communicating with the rebels. I think he arranged it in advance, as soon as the date of the attempt had been fixed with Mister Bowles. I would like to think it was without Mister Bowles's contrivance, but he must have had some knowledge of it, knowledge that his obsession enabled him to disregard.

Now I have his notebook only, the rows of neat figures recording his trickeries. No words, no intrusion of feeling, not even a reference to the statue. The notebook was to record his transactions only-which were also his acts of retribution. He was keeping accounts straight with his daimon.

Other than that, nothing. Nothing of hers, of Lydia 's. They have locked up the studio until her parents in Lyons can be informed.

Nothing really but questions. Questions of fact, questions of interpretation. The head, the bracelet, the documents concerning the lease – I do not know where he hid them. Probably up there in the hills somewhere, but far away from the ruins. Someday, no doubt, they will be found again, to provide a new set of puzzles.

Mister Bowles, Lydia too, remain mysteries to me-opaque, ungraspable. As does this brief action in which we were all engaged…

At least I did not make characters of them. Now, after these few days, they have already lost unity in my mind, their wholeness was a physical impression only, not surviving the body. I am left with fragments – that word again: Mister Bowles as he was on the day of his arrival, as he stood bareheaded, momentarily bemused, with all my story contained in his luggage, the head, the bracelet, the obscure doll; his face as he laid the head on Mahmoud's desk, that quick licking of the lips his only sign of stress; his face again, gleaming and fanatical as he ministered to the bronze youth; then that final mask of blood. There is no way now of recombining these elements.

And Lydia, whom I neglected so after the statue was found: her awareness of him, right from the start, we all saw it, that first evening, every movement was for him – as if she had been waiting; her bare arm glimpsed among the rocks; her landscapes, which imprisoned things – we ourselves were arrested that day in her studio, in poses to her liking, among the other objects assembled there. Then I saw her as Circe. But there was the gown, that sacrificial smudge. I should have known then. She was the victim of all of us, because she had nothing material to gain. She was there for love, Excellency. It was as if she was waiting, as if her possession of freedom was only apparent, until Mister Bowles came. Perfect balance is insufferable, as I have said elsewhere in this report. Perhaps Lydia too, with her ostensible fear of the irrational, perhaps she too was waiting for the gesture that shatters the glass. And then, Mister Bowles had this gift for inspiring people with his own vision of things, involving them in his purposes. Like a skilful cast of the net… She was intending to go with him. Their suitcases were found on the boat…

You will understand, Excellency, that I am offering you simply one version among many. Even in that Mister Bowles and I are alike, the version chosen being that which lends itself to the shaping fantasy at the time. Everything is thus enveloped in its own thick aura of alternatives, including me, the observer. One chooses a convenient self, a suitable standpoint. I could have been a different kind of voice in this report.

I do not know, even, what he proposed to do with the statue. Other than getting away with it, I don't think he knew himself. Perhaps he was planning to sell it in Europe, where for an original Greek bronze of that period (if he was right) he might have got a large sum from the right buyer. I think not, but one cannot be sure. Maybe the statue itself is a fake – there would be a marvellous irony in that. It has gone by ship to Constantinople now. Izzet told me there were fragments of brain on the statue's foot, the forward one.

Mahmoud and Izzet have been obliged to leave the site -empty-handed, save possibly for the doll. There are workmen from the mainland up there. The preliminary surveys have been made. Yesterday several times, and again today, there were explosions of dynamite, resounding over the whole island. First fanfares of Herr Gesing's Commerce and National State.

I do not go up there. Since the shooting I have lived in a sort of vacuous calm. I spend most of my time along by the shore, walking, thinking. I feel some prescience here, some demand still unsatisfied by what has been done. I sense it, glimpse it faintly, as I move towards the end; an end not seen, but contained in the beginning. Standing on the beach, among the bric-a-brac of ages, it is strange to acknowledge how infinitely small have been the gradations of change, since he arrived on the island and my report began. Minute changes in the constitution of the sea, adjustments the wind might have made to grasses, fading of things brought about by the sun in that time. Frightening, this discrepancy, wastage of persons and hopes, blankness of endurance in things.

My hopes too, in this pang of time, have withered. 'Imagine the paper-work,' he said. I remember his face as he said that, the look of pity in his eyes. 'Abdul Hamid is finished,' he said. He was right, Excellency. I knew it then, as I know it now. My reports have not been read. Worse, they have not been kept. And now you are no longer there. It was because I knew he was right, and because of the pity in his eyes, that I betrayed him. I have Lydia 's money still in the envelope, but there is no use for it now. The blood money from Herr Gesing I will not collect. I will wait here. One day they will come for me. My death will not even serve as a sacrifice, such a belated and accidental event will not be regarded with favour by any god. More than that will be required for an acceptable aroma. The world is preparing for it, Excellency.

Now you too are gone. There is nobody there. I shall bring this to a close, go for a walk along the shore, study the indifference of things. We cannot retaliate on indifference by asserting truth, only by casting doubt. Maybe none of this actually happened. Like the fly, the fly on my wrist, remember?

Lord of the world. Shadow of God on earth. God bring you increase.