I PROMISED to tell you how one falls in love.
A young man named Geoffrey Clifton had met a friend at Oxford who had mentioned what we were doing. He tacted me, got married the day, and two weeks later flew with his wife to Cairo. They were on the last days of their honeymoon. That was the beginning of our story.
When I met Katharine she was married. A married woman. Clifton climbed out of the plane and then, ued, for lahe expedition with just him in mind, she emerged. Khaki shorts, bony knees. In those days she was too ardent for the desert. I liked his youth more than the eagerness of his new young wife. He was our pilot, messenger, reaissance. He was the New Age, flying over and dropping codes of long coloured ribbon to advise us where we should be. He shared his adoration of her stantly. Here were four men and one woman and her husband in his verbal joy of honeymoon. They went back to Cairo aurned a month later, and it was almost the same. She was quieter this time but he was still the youth. She would squat on some petrol s, her jaw cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees, staring at some stantly flapping tarpaulin, and Clifton would be singing her praises. We tried to joke him out of it, but to wish him more modest would have been against him and none of us wahat.
After that month in Cairo she was muted, read stantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it ge. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was disc herself. It ainful to watch, because Clifton could not see it, her self-education. She read everything about the desert. She could talk about Uweinat and the lost oasis, had even hunted down marginal articles.
I was a man fifteen years older than she, you uand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with ical villains in a book. I don』t believe in permanence, iionships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter.
She was huo ge than I expected.
What altered her during their postponed honeymoon on the uary outside Cairo? We had seen them for a few days —they had arrived two weeks after their Cheshire wedding. He had brought his bride along, as he couldn』t leave her and he couldn』t break the itment to us. To Madox and me. We would have devoured him. So her bony knees emerged from the plahat day. That was the burden of our story. Our situation.
Clifton celebrated the beauty of her arms, the thin lines of her ankles. He described witnessing her swim. He spoke about the new bidets iel suite. Her ravenous hu breakfast.
To all that, I didn』t say a word. I would look up sometimes as he spoke and catch her glance, witnessing my unspokenexasperation, and then her demure smile. There was some irony. I was the older man. I was the man of the world, who had walked ten years earlier from Dakhla Oasis to the Gilf Kebir, who charted the Farafra, who knew aid had been lost more than twi the Sand Sea. She met me when I had all those labels. Or she could twist a few degrees ahe labels on Madox. Yet apart from the Geographical Society we were unknoere the thin edge of a cult she had stumbled onto because of this marriage.
The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of