away as an experiment that he and I were attempting. It was a difficult evening for me. I was overwrought by the day’s excitement, and now that I had shaken off my mood of apathy I was over-reacting to the normal stimuli of living. I found myself laughing too loudly, drinking too much, and the agony of my jealousy returned more intensely than ever.
When Louren and Sally looked at each other like that, I wanted to shout at them, ‘I know. I know about it, and damn you, I hate you for it.’
But then I knew it was not true. I did not hate them. I loved them both and this made it all the harder to bear.
There was no chance of sleep for me that night. When I get myself into a certain state of nervous tension, then I can go for two or three nights without being able to still the racing of my overheated brain. I did not mean to spy on her. It was a mere coincidence that I was standing at the window of my hut staring cut from my darkened room at the moonlit night when Sally left her own hut.
She wore a long pale-coloured dressing-gown and her hair was let down in a dark cloud around her shoulders. She paused in the doorway of her own hut and looked around carefully, making sure that the camp was asleep. Then guiltily, quickly, she hurried across the open moonlit yard to the hut in which Louren was living. She opened the door and went in without hesitating and for me a long harrowing vigil had begun.
I stood by my window for two hours, watching the moon shadows change shape, watching the patterns of the stars swing and turn across the heavens, stars as fat and bright as they are only in the sweet clean air of the wilderness. The beauty of it was wasted on me this night. I was watching Louren’s hut, imagining each whispered word, each touch, each movement, and hating myself and them. I thought of Hilary and the children, wondering what madness it is that makes a man gamble his all on a few hours of transient pleasure. In that darkened hut how many confidences were those two betraying, how many people’s happiness were they risking.
Then suddenly I realized that I was assuming that this affair was merely play on Louren’s part, and I faced the possibility that he was serious. That he would desert Hilary and go to Sally. I found this thought intolerable. I could no longer watch and wait, I must have some distraction and I dressed quickly and hurried across to the repository.
The night-watchman greeted me sleepily, and I unlocked the door and went to the vault in which the golden books were kept, I took out the fourth book of Huy. I carried it across to my own office, and before I settled down to read I went to fetch a bottle of Glen Grant. My two opiates, words and whisky.
I opened the scroll at random and re-read Huy’s ode to his battle-axe, the gleaming wing of the bird of the sun. When I had finished I was taken by an impulse and I lifted the great axe down from its place of honour. I caressed the shimmering length of it, studying it with new attention. I was convinced that this was the weapon of the poem. Could there be another answering the description so accurately? I held it in my lap, wishing that I could draw from it the story of the last days of Opet. I was sure it was involved intimately in the final tragedy. Why had it been left abandoned, a thing so well beloved and yet thrown carelessly aside to lie uncared for and discarded for nearly 2,000 years? What had happened to the Axeman Huy, and his king and his city?
I read and dreamed, disturbed less frequently by thoughts of Sally and Louren. However, at every pause in my readings they came to me with a sick little slide of jealousy and despair in my guts. I was torn between the present and the distant past.
I read on, sampling those portions of the scroll which were still unknown territory while the level in the whisky bottle sank slowly and the long night passed.
Then when midnight had flown and the new day was being born, I came upon a small piece of writing which touched a new depth of response in me. Huy makes a sudden heart-felt cry from the depths of his being. It is as though some long-suppressed emotion will no longer be contained and must come out in this appeal to have his physical form discounted when his value is assessed. From base earth flowers the purest gold, Huy cries, in his own poor distorted clay there were treasures concealed.
I re-read the passage half a dozen times, making sure of my translation before I could accept that Huy Ben- Amon was like me.
Dawn’s first promise was tracing the silhouette of the cliff tops with a pale rose colour when I laid the golden book away in its vault and walked slowly back towards my hut.
Sally stepped out of Louren’s doorway and came towards me in the darkness. Her gown was ghostly pale and she seemed to float above the ground. I stood still, hoping she would not see me. There was a chance, for I stood in the deeper shadow of her hut and I turned my face away, standing quietly.
I heard the rustle of her skirts, the whisper of her feet in the dust very close in the dark, then her startled gasp as she saw me. I looked at her then. She had seen but not recognized me. Her face was a pale moon of fear and her hands were at her mouth.
‘All right, Sally,’ I said. ‘It’s only me.’
I could smell her now. On the clean night air of the desert it was a perfumed smell like crushed rose petals, and mingled with it the warm smell of perspiration and lovet. My heart slid in my chest.
‘Ben?’ she said, and we were both silent, staring at each other.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Long enough,’ I answered, and again the silence.
‘You know, then?’ It was said in a small voice, shy and sad.
‘I didn’t mean to spy,’ I said, and another silence.
‘I believe you.’ She began to move away. Then she turned back. ‘Ben, I want to explain.’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said.
‘Yes, I do. I want to.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Sal.’
‘It does matter.’ And we faced each other. ‘It does matter,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t want you to think that I, well, that I am so terrible.’
‘Forget it, Sally.’ I said.
