“I fought badly,” said the Earthquake. The volume was turned up. “I fought badly,” he repeated. “So I give you a seventh bull. I give it as a present to Abyla.”

There was a buzzing of approval. People sat down again. The seats were hard. They had thrown away their cushions, but it didn’t matter.

A man yelled at Genia Ortiz, peering over the side of the enclosure. “Sit down!” he yelled. “Donkey meat is not transparent!”

Wavery retrieved his spectacles from his breast pocket. He said, “A seventh bull? Does this happen often?”

Marie Amaral admitted: “It doesn’t happen very often. He has to pay for the animal himself. But to give a bull is not a special thing,” she said bravely. “A special thing is to have a special afternoon.”

Down in the ring, a door opened. A roan-coloured beast trotted into the shade, the steam rising from his angry hump, his head. In the middle of the sand he paused. Unhurriedly, he turned. He waited for the picadors.

This was one of Geryon’s oxen, thought Zamora.

“Ah, this is a bull,” said Marie Amaral, watching him slam into the horse and withdraw his horns, webbed with the animal’s guts.

Soon it was the third act.

Periclito removed the hat returned to him by his mother. He placed it on the sand. He stood erect, inhaling the air perfumed with blood and his mother’s withheld flowers. He hobbled forward.

The whole ring went absolutely silent.

In the centre of the ring, an ear twitched.

5

In the silence the new bell stuck four. It was four o’clock.

Alone of the crowd, Wavery raised his eyes from the ring. He had been upset by the previous spectacle. The taut tongue of the bull as the animal swayed backwards in a diminishing sway found repeated in him an unpostponable agony. Instead of Periclito and the seventh bull, Wavery saw the miraculous crag of La Mujer Muerta, the goddess who had loved against her father’s wishes and been turned by him into stone.

Nothing could be drier than her slopes, nothing. Beyond her peak, Wavery felt the intense, saturated, throbbing of Africa as he had felt it on an afternoon two weeks before, sitting in the Daimler beside Catharine.

Chapter Fourteen

WHEN THEY WERE not at school, or lobbing oranges at one another from slings in El Hadu, Halima’s three children, all sons under the age of ten, stood on La Mujer Muerta a mile from the border spading parabolas of sand off the tarmac which the poniente had spread in small dunes like the hieroglyphic bumps on Captain Panteco’s face. Whenever a car drove by, they held out their hands and waved their spades. The spades were fashioned from flattened cans, forked into pine branches. To Norredine, the youngest, fell the task of shovelling back the sand each evening before they returned to El Hadu. On a busy day they might collect fifty or sixty dirhams from grateful tourists.

On this late afternoon, a splendid silver-grey saloon drew to a halt beside them. Its driver wound down his window and gave Norredine five dirhams.