V.

"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 in on the gentle Waldetar a suspicion cheerless as the desert.

If they are what I think; what sort of world is it when they must let children suffer?

Thinking, of course, of Manoel, Antonia and Maria: his own.

V

The desert creeps in on a man's land. Not a fellah, but he does own some land. Did own. From a boy, he has repaired the wall, mortared, carried stone heavy as he, lifted, set in place. Still the desert comes. Is the wall a traitor, letting it in? Is the boy possessed by a djinn who makes his hands do the work wrong? Is the desert's attack too powerful for any boy, or wall, or dead father and mother?

No. The desert moves in. It happens, nothing else. No djinn in the boy, no treachery in the wall, no hostility in the desert. Nothing.