The girl had always held disappointment to be the cruelest sensation, mocking you back into childhood. And now this landscape reeled with disappointment, was disappointment brutally incarnate. She tried—on her tongue that had become, quite simply, thirst—she tried the syllables “I cannot.” But did not speak them—and in this place tears evaporated before they could be shed. Reasonable comparisons were long since gone, nothing whatever being relative to the present case. There was no holding this fire in the hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus.

She thought on Sir Cecil, who rode while others walked and was cruel to animals.

They had ceased to sweat. Her arm where it emerged from the sleeve was aged and crumpled, like the shredding worst of the paper money you reserved for the Kowloon Ferry. When the path was plain before them she would shut her eyes now on rings of purple that remained as rainbows beneath the lids. Her steps, no longer regular, no longer an even two to his one, blundered into him. “Sorry.” She had a pebble in her shoe, and shook it out in walking rather than ask for quarter. Constantin walked straight and strong, driving out the devil, and paused only when she had fallen far behind. She would come stumbling up, asleep; they would resume. He had seen a lot of this in the army, the sergeants shouting “You, there!” He said without rancor, “Pull yourself together.”

She flashed awake. “Shut up.”

He laughed. “When I was a sergeant, I was obeyed. More so than when I became an officer.” Constantin had been commissioned in the field during the Italian campaign. A signal had been delivered; he had been told to join the officers. “Which meant, one left the shade of the tree where one was, and crawled on one’s belly to another tree to join the brass. This was in the Alban Hills.”

She dreamed a classical landscape, wooded; an ellipse of lake in an emerald valley; the cool shade of the Italian campaign. Anger withered like everything else, and she kept pace.

You had to remember that the rains fell here, the unimaginable rains. There were months when the rains fell every day, rain or shine; they could fall in bright sunlight, and this scene of dehydrated clarity could not be exempt. The rain collapsed on you, there was always more where it came from. Thus it fell without any sense of release on either side. One must believe in rain here too, sluicing out primeval sediment from crannies, rinsing stones down streaming canyons in a wash of mud.