sheets as it so often did before dawn in Alexandr ia, chilling the air, washing down the stiffly clicking leaves of the palms in the Municipal Gardens, washing the iron grilles of the banks and the pavements. In the Arab town the earthen streets would be smelling like a freshly dug graveyard. The flower-sellers would be putting out their stocks to catch the freshness. I remembered their cry of ‘Carnations, sweet as the breath of a girl!’ From the harbour the smells of tar, fish and briny nets flowing up along the deserted streets to meet the scentless pools of desert air which would later, with the first sunlight, enter the town from the east and dry its damp façades. Somewhere, briefly, the hushing of the rain was pricked by the sleepy pang of a mandoline, inscribing on it a thoughtful and melancholy little air. I feared the intrusion of a single thought or idea which, inserting itself between these moments of smiling peace, might inhibit them, turn them to instruments of sadness. I thought too of the long journey we made from this very bed, since last we lay here together, through so many climates and countries, only to return once more to our starting-po int, again captured once more by the gravitationa l field of the city. A ne w cycle which was opening upon the promise of such kisses and dazed endearments as we could now exchange — where would it carry us? I thought of some words of Arnauti, written about another woman, in another context: ‘You tell yourself that it is a woman you hold in your arms, but watching the sleeper you see all her growth in time, the unerring unfolding of cells which group and dispose themselves into the beloved face which remains always and for ever mysterious — repeating to infinity the soft boss of the human nose, an ear borrowed from a sea-shell’s helix, an eyebrow thought-patterned from ferns, or lips invented by bivalves in their dreaming union. All this process is human, bears a name which pierces your heart, and offers the mad dream of an eternity which time disproves in every drawn breath. And if human personality is an illusion? And if, as biology tells us, every single cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years by another? At the most I hold in my arms something like a fountain of flesh, continuously playing, and in my mind a rainbow of dust.’ And like an echo from another point of the compass I heard the sharp voice of Purse-
warden saying: ‘There is no Other; there is only oneself facing forever the problem of one’s self-discovery!’
I had drifted into sleep again; and when I woke with a start the bed was empty and the candle had guttered away and gone out. She was standing at the drawn curtains to watch the dawn break over the tumbled roofs of the Arab town, naked and slender as an Easter lily. In the spring sunrise, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed — a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing; the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme; the Perfection of God, the One, the Sole’ … The great prayer wound itself in shining coils across the city as I watched the grave and passionate intensity of her turned head where she stood to observe the climbing sun touch the minarets and palms with light: rapt and awake. And listening I smelt the warm odour of her hair upon the pillow beside me. The buoyancy of a new freedom possessed me like a draught from what the Cabal once called ‘The Fountain of All Existing Things’. I called ‘Clea’ softly, but she did not heed me; and so once more I slept. I knew that Clea would share everything with me, with-holding nothing — not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors.
* * * * *
II
o the city claimed me once more — the same city made now somehow less poignant and less terrifying than it had been S in the past by new displacements in time. If