Under the same sun Nita would be moving now about their little yard, growing heavy with what Waldetar hoped would be a boy. A boy could even it up, two and two. Women outnumber us now, he thought: why should I contribute further to the imbalance?
'Though I'm not against it,' he'd once told her during their courtship (part way here - in Barcelona, when he was stevedoring at the docks); 'God's will, is it not? Look at Solomon, at many great kings. One man, several wives.'
'Great king,' she yelled: 'who?' They both started to laugh like children. 'One peasant girl you can't even support.' Which is no way to impress a young man you are bent on marrying. It was one of the reasons he fell in love with her shortly afterward and why they'd stayed in love for nearly seven years of monogamy.
Nita, Nita . . The mind's picture was always of her seated behind their house at dusk, where the cries of children were drowned in the whistle of a night train for Suez; where cinders came to lodge in pores beginning to widen under the stresses of some heart's geology ('Your complexion is going from bad to worse,' he'd say: 'I'll have to start paying more attention to the lovely young French girls who are always making eyes at me.' 'Fine,' she'd retort, 'I'll tell that to the baker when he comes to sleep with me tomorrow, it'll make him feel better'); where all the nostalgias of an Iberian littoral lost to them - the squid hung to dry, nets stretched across any skyglow morning or evening, singing or drunken cries of sailors and fishermen from behind only the next looming warehouse (find them, find them! voices whose misery is all the world's night) - came unreal, in a symbolic way, as a racketing over points, a chuff-chuff of inanimate breath, and had only pretended to gather among the pumpkins, purslane and cucumbers, date palm, roses and poinsettias of their garden.
Halfway to Damanhur he heard a child crying from a compartment nearby. Curious, Waldetar looked inside. She was English, eleven or so, nearsighted: her watering eyes swam distorted behind thick eyeglasses. Across from her a man, thirty or so, harangued. Another looked on, perhaps angry, his burning face at least giving the illusion. The girl held a rock to her flat bosom.
'But have you never played with a clockwork doll?' the man insisted, the voice muffled through the door. 'A doll which does everything perfectly, because of the machinery inside. Walks, sings, jumps rope. Real little boys and girls, you know, cry: act sullen, won't behave.' His hands lay perfectly still, long and starved-nervous, one on each knee.
'Bongo-Shaftsbury,' the other began. Bongo-Shaftsbury waved him off, irritated.
'Come. May I show you a mechanical doll. An electro-mechanical doll.'
'Have you one' - she was frightened, Waldetar thought with an onrush of sympathy, seeing his own girls. Damn some of these English - 'have you one with you?'
'I am one,' Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. And pushed back the sleeve of his coat to remove a cufflink. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, was a miniature electric switch. Single-pole, double-throw. Waldetar recoiled and stood blinking. Thin silver wires ran from its terminals up the arm, disappearing under the sleeve.
'You see, Mildred. These wires run into my brain. When the switch is thrown the other -'
'Papa!' the girl cried.
'Everything works by electricity. Simple and clean.'
'Stop it,' said the other Englishman.
'Why, Porpentine.' Vicious. 'Why. For her? Touched by her fright, are you. Or is it for yourself.'
Porpentine seemed to retreat bashfully. 'One doesn't frighten a child, sir.'
'Hurrah. General principles again.' Corpse fingers jabbed in the air. 'But someday, Porpentine, I, or another, will catch you off guard. Loving, hating, even showing some absent-minded sympathy. I'll watch you. The moment you forget yourself enough to admit another's humanity, see him as a person and not a symbol - then perhaps-'
'What is humanity.'
'You ask the obvious, ha, ha. Humanity is something to destroy.'
There was noise from the rear car, behind Waldetar. Porpentine came dashing out and they collided. Mildred had fled, clutching her rock, to the adjoining compartment.
The door to the rear platform was open: in front of it a fat florid Englishman wrestled with the Arab Waldetar had seen earlier talking to the German. The Arab had a pistol. Porpentine moved toward them, closing cautiously, choosing his point. Waldetar, recovering at last, hurried in to break up the fight. Before he could reach them Porpentine had let loose a kick at the Arab's throat, catching him across the windpipe. The Arab collapsed rattling.
'Now,' Porpentine pondered. The fat Englishman had taken the pistol.
'What is the trouble,' Waldetar demanded, in his best public-servant's voice.
'Nothing.' Porpentine held out a sovereign. 'Nothing that cannot be healed by this sovereign cure.'
Waldetar shrugged. Between them they got the Arab to a third-class compartment, instructed the attendant there to look after him - he was sick - and to put him off at Damanhur. A blue mark was appearing on the Arab's throat. He tried to talk several times. He looked sick enough.
When the Englishmen had at last returned to their compartments Waldetar fell into a reverie which continued on past Damanhur (where he saw the Arab and blue-lensed German again conversing), through a narrowing Delta, the sun rose toward noon and the train crawled toward Cairo's Principal Station; as dozens of small children ran alongside the train calling for baksheesh; as girls in blue cotton skirts and veils, with breasts made sleek brown by the sun, traipsed down to the Nile to fill their water jars; as water wheels spun and irrigation canals glittered and interlaced away to the horizon; as fellahin lounged under the palms; as buffalo paced their every day's tracks round and round the sakiehs. The point of the green triangle is Cairo. It means that relatively speaking, assuming your train stands still and the land moves past, that the twin wastes of the Libyan and Arabian deserts to right and left creep in inexorably to narrow the fertile and quick part of your world until you are left with hardly more than a right-of-way, and before you a great city. So there crept
