But there ahead of them were the Narrows, narrowing. The trip from DuMartheray was already almost over. Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day— each so full, and oh so lovely— and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them. Sailing through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind. . . . Now the sun was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting all their wild irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces dropping directly into the sea, red rock into blue water, all untouched by human hands (though the sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor, splintering inside her. But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea cliffs ahead marked the first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they would dock and the evening would come. They would eat in a harbor café next to the water in the long twilight, and that day’s glorious sail would never come again. This strange nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to come: “Ah, I’m alive again,” she said to herself, and marveled that it could have happened. Michel and his tricks— one would think that by now she would have become impervious to all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too much for the heart to bear. But— well— better this than the numbness, that was certain. And it had a certain painful splendor, this acute sensation— and she could endure it— she could even enjoy it, somehow, in snatches— a sublime intensity to these late-afternoon colors, everything suffused with them. And under such a flood of nostalgic light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous— the big lighthouse on the western cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green, port and star-board. Then in to the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down into rowboats, in the failing light, across black water through a crowd of exotic ships at anchor, no two the same as ship design was going through a period of rapid innovation, new materials making almost anything possible, and all the old designs being reinvented, drastically altered, then returned to again; there a clipper ship, there a schooner, there something that looked to be entirely outrig-ger . . . finally to bang into a busy wooden dock, in the dusk.