“Shall you be here?” he asked.

“Yes. I’ll spread my wings and wait for you.”

But he stayed standing beside me, and we watched a ridge of traveler’s trees.

“Don’t puff up with too much pride,” he said, “because in a world of blind women, a one-eyed woman only appears to see.”

“What about you fellows puffing up? I’m not here to humiliate you, you know, but when we’re in camp it seems like all you do are little things to humiliate me in front of the others. You won’t even ask us women whether we approve of the plan?”

“Do you approve of the plan?”

“Yes, but you always do as you see fit. Do as you please and take your amusement at us women’s expense.”

“War is no amusement, and it’s always a man’s expense. Don’t badger me with a molehill when we’ve got a mountain to fight. If they capture us, it’s our lives. What becomes of you women? You’re treated like flowers compared to us!”

“Flowers crushed at the heel. They’ll humiliate us too. We’ll move from one humiliation to another.”

“What humiliation?”

“Oh, why don’t you just pack me in straw and ship me off?”

“I love you.”

“Well, we protected ourselves the last expedition. But what I say is don’t rejoice once you’ve got over the devil’s back, because you might just find yourself under his belly.”

“Let’s don’t argue. Let’s just watch out for them . . . Don’t you know how well I think of you? I probably think better of you than you think of yourself.”

I feel like I’m being lifted up. Someone is lifting me up in the air.

I wake up before I find out whether I’m being lifted up to be made love to or to be packed in straw.

“Where do you go next?” he is asking.

We sit with our backs against rocks. It is morning, and we are drinking rice tea and eating beef sandwiches. He is eating beef sandwiches. I began eating one until I discovered it was made out of the hump of the bull.

We sit at right angles from each other.

“Is there any plan to your travels? Any scheme to them?”

“No. I keep things open. But first I’ll probably return to the States. It’ll take me three or four months to write this travel book up from my notes and pictures.”

“But you’re the kind of woman who likes to steer her own ship, like Miandra.”

I want to say that I am hardly Miandra, hardly as vicious or self-centered; maybe as self-willed but willing what I hope are better things. And I wouldn’t keep a fellow on a string for twenty years hoping for some dangerous pleasure that I couldn’t even myself imagine.

I do not say any of this, of course, of the princess.

“But you are disillusioned,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s what I read in your eyes, some brand of disillusionment.”

It is not disillusionment he sees but what Richard Wright would call “the defense of indifference.” Perhaps I am as vicious and self-centered as Miandra. I am out in the world, merely, yes. But I still speak at what Paz would call “the other” from behind shields. And I’m always doing my book.