The clearing was bathed in a brilliant whiteness. Perhaps that blaze could have been dismissed as some phenomenon of nature—the amber eye of the sun slanting off the lacquered vines, thousands of leafy mirrors gleaming like the facets of an emerald. Or perhaps my vision was intensified by the light that filtered through the prism of sweat beading my eyelashes. I brushed the sweat away. The glow persisted.

And there was something else, an aberration perhaps, a fraudulent offshoot of the light-headed exhaustion I felt from lack of sleep: an air of tremulous expectancy seemed to hang over the white clearing, as if it were under a spell and lay waiting for some long-delayed magician to unlock it.

Ish-Chayl’s pick rang out in the riverbed, glancing off a rock. He exchanged it, first for the entrenching tool, then for the fork. Finally, with the utmost caution, he flicked the paintbrush over a bulge in the riverbed. So intent was he on the bulge, so close was his nose to it, that I was only a few feet from him before he noticed me.

“What the hell,” he said nastily, “are you doing here?”

“I wanted to ask you a question.”

“Couldn’t it wait?”

I shrugged.

“Well? What is it?”

“What are you doing here?”

He glowered at me, then shifted his wary eyes to the bed of the dry river as if he possessed some colossal secret he was reluctant to share. Finally he crossed to the far bank and rummaged through the musette. He scooped up a few lusterless pellets, a gummy globule that smelled faintly of myrrh, and a half dozen shards of black and whitish-blue agate.

“Know what these are?” he asked.

I didn’t.

“The nuggets are gold. The ball of resin—it’s still fragrant—that’s bdellium. The marbleized stone is onyx, right?”

“If you say so. How’d you happen to find them?”

“I came back here the day after the grenade debacle to check out the damage.” His skin was flushed—it could have been the heat—even his foxy eyes were inflamed. “No,” he went on, “I don’t know why I came back, unless it was…” The sentence hung in the white silence.

“Unless it was what?”

“Well… preordained.”

“What’s preordained about your finding the gold and the rest of it?”

“Perhaps God pointed the way. I was His instrument.”

The presumption of divine intervention in human affairs violates my sense of an orderly and comprehensible universe. I gazed at him in bewilderment—the kind of confusion that borders on panic.

He went to his knees and with meticulous little strokes flicked his paintbrush over a bulge in the wadi.

“Why,” I asked, “would God be so concerned with your find?”