In memory of Skip and Mary Dison For Quintin and Griffin And for Louise Dennys, with thanks 『Most of you, I am sure, remember the tragic circumstances of the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir, followed later by the disappearance of his wife, Katharine Clifton, which took place during the 1939 desert expedition in search of Zerzura.
「I ot begin this meeting tonight without referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences.
「The lecture this evening ...」 From the minutes of the Geographical Society meeting of November 194-, London
I
The Villa
SHE STANDS UP in the garden where she has been w and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather.
There is anust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly ehe house.
I she doesn』t pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then tinues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.
She turns into the room which is anarden—this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling.
The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, aurns his head slowly towards her as she enters.
Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.
She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips.
Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his bao pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its opy of branches, and above that, blue sky.
She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reag his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, aters.
What? she asks, ing out of her tration.
He turns his dark face with its grey eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.
He whispers again, dragging the listeni of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging int those months before he died.
There are stories the maes quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk. He wakes in the painted arbour that surrounds him with its spilling flowers, arms of great trees. He remembers piics, a woman who kissed parts of his body that now are burned into the colour of aubergine.
I have spent weeks in the desert, fetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of preoccupation.
His eyes loto the young woman』s face. If she moves her head, his stare will travel alongside her into the wall. She leans forward. How were you burned
It is late afternoon. His hands play with a piece of sheet, the back of his fingers caressing it.
I fell burning into the desert.
They found my body and made me a boat of sticks and dragg