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By Root 4520 0

for France but for invincible Man-the hero still girlish-looking even after two years of African sun and solitude, still frail and fragile in the same way that adolescent girls appear incredibly delicate yet at the same time durable, like wisps of mist or vapor drifting check-less and insensate among the thunderous concrete-bedded mas-todons inside a foundry; appearing now only the more durable because of the proven-no: reproven-fragility, at once frail yet at the same time intact and inviolable because of what in another had been not merely ruin but destruction too: like the saint in the old tale, the maiden who without hesitation or argument feed in advance with her maidenhood the ferryman who set her across the stream and into heaven (an Anglo-Saxon fable too, since only an Anglo-Saxon could seriously believe that anything buyable at no more cost than that could really be worth a sainthood)--the hero, the sheeplike acclaiming mass with not one among them all to ask or even wonder what he had done or when or where, nor even against what or whom the victory, as he passed immune even to the uproar, across the cheering city to the quai and the destroyer (a cruiser maybe, a destroyer certainly) which would carry him to his Paris triumph and then return him, chief of a corps and commander of a depar'I'ment, or perhaps even Governor General himself.

But that didn't happen either. He crossed the Mediterranean and disappeared. When they followed in the order of their postings, they learned that he had gone on from the port base too, after even less than one night, to assigned duty somewhere in the interior, exactly where and on exactly what service, nobody at the port base knew either. But they had expected that. They believed they even knew where he would be: no place remote merely because it was far away and impossible to reach, like Brazzaville, Wednesday Night say, where the three pale faces-Commandant-governor, new subaltern, and halfbreed interpreter-would slumber hierarchate and superposed, benignant and inscrutable, irascible and hieroglyph like an American Indian totem pole in ebon Eden innocence; but a place really remote, not even passively isolate but actively and even aggressively private, like an oasis in the desert's heart itself, more blind than cave and circumferenced than safari-a silken tent odorous with burning pastille and murmurous with the dreamy chock of the woodcutter's axe and the pad of watercarriers' feet, where on a lion-robed divan he would await untimed destiny's hasteless accouchement. But they were wrong. He had left the port base the same day he arrived, for a station as famous in its circles as the Black Hole of Calcutta-a small outpost not only five hundred kilometres from anything resembling a civilised strong-hold or even handhold, but sixty and more from its nearest support-a tiny lost compound manned by a sergeant's platoon out of a foreign legion battalion recruited from the gutter-sweepings of all Europe and South America and the Levant-a well, a flagstaff, a single building of loop-holed clay set in a seared irrecon-cilable waste of sun and sand which few living men had ever seen, to which troops were sent as punishment or, incorrigibles, for segregation until heat and monotony on top of their natural and acquired vices divorced them permanently from mankind. He had gone straight there from the port base three years ago and (the only officer present and, for all practical purposes, the only white man too) had not only served out his own one-year tour of command, but that of his successor too, and was now ten months forward in that of what would have been his successor's successor; in the shock of that first second of knowledge it seemed to them-except that one-that earth itself had faltered, rapacity itself had failed, when regardless of whatever had been the nephew's old defalcation from his family's hope or dream seven or eight or ten years ago, even that uncle and that godfather had been incapable of saving him; this, until that single classmate picked up the whole picture and reversed