He would explain to her about the path. Constantin knew all kinds of things, every thing. “It was an early governor who laid it out. Just as you wanted to walk, he wanted to ride. The roads of the island, such as they then were, palled. In any case, roads take the shortest route. By winding round and round these hills you get an illusion of distance, as if you were not on an island. Thus Sir Cecil rode.”

The girl saw the track winding round and round. “All this for his recreation.” In the tone of her parents. “Hundreds of coolies laboring for months.”

“Or a handful of overworked ones, mostly women. He would have told himself it served some larger purpose. That is generally the way.”

“Now it is,” she said. “In those times they didn’t bother.”

But she did not know Sir Cecil’s dates.

“You think hypocrisy is new?”

“Only with regard to empires.”

How could she talk of the past, who had no past to speak of?

The bay appeared on the left—or, it would be, west. Warships idled—a dove-gray carrier, a cruiser, sloops. All movement there came from merchantmen, ferries, junks, and from a Sunday line of little yachts racing out past Ly-ee-mun. Between island and mainland a concrete sea shone like an aerodrome on which the craft sped or stayed. For the yachtsmen it would be green water, ruffling the hull and cool-rushing through the fingers you trailed over the side. At Ly-ee-mun, where the girl once sailed with Freddy from the Secret Service, the water was deepest, and deeply blue. Freddy flung overboard the crusts of their sandwiches, saying, “Bong appitee, fish.” She had watched the receding bread briefly inflate, almost expecting the snapper or garrupa to rise to it, like carp. Freddy was lovable. It was Constantin she loved.

The underbrush became an occasional roasting bush, became strewn rubbish, fell away entirely. They had come now to the start of silence, where none of the road noises could follow and no sound lay ahead, not even an aromatic rustle in shrubbery. The scene enlarged to receive them, as they matched to it their pace, their solitude, their expectations.

It was less like land than a monstrous topography involving the emotional language of maps—faults, depressions, relief; it might have been a chart layered in colors of intensifying aridity. The hills were empty everywhere, scarcely prickled with growth: naked, like flesh—no, like hide, or like some unsociable material, canvas, calico. It was the cadaver of a landscape, making you realize how upholstered, how nourished and overfed were hills elsewhere.