She felt the mists of sleep rising from the ground, bearing the perfume of roses of Sharon; in the sky shone the eyes of the grounded aviator not yet accustomed to small scales, to shrunken spaces. There were other human beings attempting vast flights, with a kind policeman as tall as the crusaders watching over them with a glass of water and two aspirins; she could sleep now, she could sleep, she could find her bed with his flashlight shining on the keyhole, his car so smoothly so gently rolling away, his white hair saying sleep...

Sabina in the telephone booth. Alan had just said that he was unable to come that day. Sabina felt like sliding down on the floor and sobbing out the loneliness. She wanted to return to New York but he begged her to wait.

There were places which were like ancient tombs in which a day was a century of non-existence. He had said: "Surely you can wait another day. I'll be there tomorrow. Don't be unreasonable. "

She could not explain that perfect lawns, costly churches, new cement and fresh paint can make a vast tomb without stone gods to admire, without jewels, or urns full of food for the dead, without hieroglyphs to decipher.

Telephone wires only carried literal messages, never the subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and deaths, but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb, and one more day in it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish policemen, and roses of Sharon were too gentle a cure for suffocation.

Grounded. Just before she slid down to the floor, the bottom of the telephone cabin, the bottom of her loneliness, she saw the grounded aviator waiting to use the telephone. When she came out of the booth he looked distressed again as he seemed to be by everything that happened in time of peace. But he smiled when he recognized her, saying: "You told me the way to the beach."

"You found it? You liked it?"

"A little flat for my taste. I like rocks and palm trees. Got used to them in India, during the war."

War as an abstraction had not yet penetrated Sabina's consciousness. She was like the communion seekers who received religion only in the form of a wafer on the tongue. War as a wafer placed on her tongue directly by the young aviator came suddenly very close to her, and she saw that if he shared with her his contempt for the placidities of peace it was only to take her straight into the infernal core of war. That was his world. When he said: "Get your bicycle then, and I'll show you a better beach further on..." it was not only to escape from fashionable reclining figures on the beach, from golf players and human barnacles glued to damp bar flanks, it was to bicycle into his inferno. As soon as they started to walk along the beach, he began to talk: