Another day he came and was sick in her arms, vomited all night, and only at dawn, weak, and feverish did he confess: they had had to arrest a traitor. He had been a friend of Rango's. The group had been obliged to judge him. Rango had been forced to question him. The man was not really a traitor. He was weak. He had needed money for his family. He was tired of working for the party without pay. The party never worried about a man's family, what they needed while he was away on duty. He had given his whole life, and now, at forty, he had weakened. He had been tempted by a good position in the embassy. At first he had intended to exploit his position for the benefit of the party. But after awhile he got tired of danger. He had ceased to be of help... Rango had had to force himself to turn him over to the party. It had made him sick. It was his first cruel, difficult, disciplined act. But he didn't sleep for a week, and each time he remembered the man's face as he told his story, and repeated: just tired, very tired, worn out, at forty, too many times in prison, too many hardships, couldn't take any more. Had been in the party from the age of seventeen, had been useful, courageous, but now he was tired.

Every day he brought a story like this one. When the conflict grew too great he drank. Djuna did not have this escape. When the stories burnt into her and hurt her, she turned away and into the dream again, as she had done in childhood. There was another world visible to practiced eyes, easy to enter and inhabit, another chamber to which only the initiate could follow.

(Moods flowing like the river finding its way to the sea and vastness and depth. In this world the river was the flow; tap the secret of its flow, in the lulling rhythm of its waves, in the continuity of its current. Love is a madness shared by two, love is the crystal in which people find their unity. In this world Rango was capable of giving himself to a dream of love, which is a city of only two inhabitants. In this world, when Rango buys shoes so heavy and so strong, they seem like the hooves of the centaur, hooves of iron, whose head was in the heavens but whose hooves must pound the battlefields.)

There are drugs to escape reality, a Rango vomiting from the spectacle of cruelty, Rango's harshness toward her feelings. He should, by laws of accuracy, be angry at his own emotionalism and human fallibility. But because of his blindness, he gets angry at Djuna's face turned away and attacks her swift departures from horror. He drinks but does not consider that a trap door opening on the infinite, an inferior drug to dispel pain... But Djuna's excursions into astronomy, her sheltering of the artists in the barge... He is merciless toward their kind of drug to transform reality into something bearable...