Today, in the coffee salon of the Hotel Turista, he is joined by three functionari from the Ministry of Interior Development. They are all of them men with short necks and copious hair-is there no end to this hair?-and dressed alike in suits so dark that the folds of cloth are without shadows. Against Malcolm’s vast beige wall of tweed they seem to merge one into the other. An interpreter is necessarily present. A very young woman, still a student, she has made an attempt at fashion by pinning a crocheted collar to a plain brown sweater. This collar she touches now and then as she transforms Malcolm’s preliminary recommendations into the furze and petals and throaty moss of the national language. Her biographical density is powerful, since very little as yet has been expended, and it hurts Malcolm’s heart to look at her, the way she fingers her collar and twists an earring as she exchanges the sprawled flowers of her native tongue for the thudding bricks of his own English.

It puzzles him, but only a little, that official business in this part of the world should be conducted in the homey, lace-curtained public rooms of hotels rather than in offices or boardrooms. He is not at all sure that such offices and boardrooms exist. But what does it matter, he asks himself, as long as progress is made.

And in the next two hours, between three-thirty and five-thirty, two small international agreements are reached, one in each end of the coffee salon. The room darkens subtly as though in acknowledgment. Raki is ordered and cakes are brought around.

To her Austrian visitors Martä Gjatä delivers nothing, promises nothing, but through a burly boy of an interpreter persuades them that their opportunities will be diminished if they return home without her explanatory brochures and a copy of her film which has been given the engaging title Jepnï Nje Lutëm (A Gift of Brightness).

Malcolm Brownstone has determinedly sold his vision to his hosts, assuring them that Pleasure with a capital P is the springboard not only of profit but of progress, that healthy relaxed bodies roasted by the sun and bathed in a benign sea are all the more ready to stand on guard for the State. Though he won’t actually visit the site until the following morning, he has already studied the pertinent maps, charts, graphs, blueprints and photographs. He mentions matching funds, contract requirements, climate variables, the components of tide, wind, and hours of annual sunshine.