Fronded trees showed themselves, thinly inclined, congregated in search of shelter rather than to furnish it. It was the place where a watercourse had been channeled down. As they came up they could see the stream falling on a cement conduit and disappearing under a causeway. The causeway was formed by a kind of concrete coffin graven with the imperial imprint: with medieval crest, the motto in French.

“You’re mad!” Constantin shouted as the girl knelt to drink—striking up her cupped hands, splashing water over her dress and tears into her eyes. She plunged her forearms into the slide of water, defiant, as if they too might contract typhoid there, or dysentery, or blackwater fever. She sat to take off her sandals that unclamped themselves painfully, the buckles branded grittily onto the instep. Each foot, when washed, instantly dried. He sat down under the trees, trees in name only, the trunks slender as bamboos, and watched her doing this. At her age there was beauty even when looking a sight. Beauty all-powerful, and as vulnerable as her blistered neck.

She sat near him in the shade of strange afternoon. He had taken off his shirt. Touch was unthinkable, she could scarcely bear the pressure of clothes, she had spread her hands wide on the grass of the oasis. There was the mottling light, the shine of water, and the sound. There was the life—of beetles, butterflies—renewed in these leaves and grasses. There was the glow of reflected, unremitting day; and the spell. One would have thought it necessary to conjure up such fullness, to coax or dramatize it into expansive being. Its having sought them out here, taken them unawares, a million to one, imposed a decent silence, a tribute already shaped with remembrance.

Ludicrous, if you thought about it, this squatting on the ledge of a great rock in the China Sea. Yet he looked on in silence at her outspread arms, her sunburned leg and checkered dress, her shoes capsized on the coat of arms, her tender neck.

Soon it would be as before; he would get up and put on his shirt—and at length did so. He washed in lethal waters; he brought her shoes. He took her hands and pulled her to her feet, and put dry lips to her salty hair. He said that they could not stay there forever. There was untruth in this: something would stay, and he could not, putting on his shirt, make it all as before.

They were out of this in a hundred paces, and stood again on a long spine of the rock. Where there should have been a prospect of the sea, and the grand staircase of fields descending to it, there was the tin sky, the carcasses of hills. Far, far off, at many miles, there was the winding incision of a path—some other path, not conceivably theirs.

Constantin said, “We’ve come damn nearly halfway.”