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By Root 14083 0

that S last magnificent summer which followed the spring so swiftly. It came curving in, this summer, as if from some long-forgotten latitude first dreamed of in Eden, miraculously redis-covered among the slumbering thoughts of mankind. It rode down upon us like some famous snow-ship of the mind, to drop anchor before the city, its white sails folding like the wings of a seabird. Ah! I am hunting for metaphors which might convey something of the piercing happiness too seldom granted to those who love; but words, which were first invented against despair, are too crude to mirror the properties of something so profoundly at peace with itself, at one with itself. Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world’s sorrows. Unless perhaps it were simpler to repeat under one’s breath some lines torn from a Greek poem, written once in the shadow of a sail, on a thirsty promontory in Byzantium. Some-thing like …

Black bread, clear water, blue air.

Calm throat incomparably fair.

Mind folded upon mind

Eyes softly closed on eyes.

Lashes a-tremble, bodies bare.

But they English badly; and unless one hears them in Greek falling softly, word by word, from a mouth made private and familiar by the bruised endearments of spent kisses they must remain always simply charmless photographs of a reality which overreaches the realm of the poet’s scope. Sad that all the brilliant plumage of that summer remains beyond capture — for one’s old age will have little but such memories upon which to found its regretful happinesses. Will memory clutch it — that incomparable pattern of days, I wonder? In the dense violet shadow of white sails, under the dark noon-lantern of figs, on the renowned desert roads where the spice caravans march and the dunes soothe

themselves away to the sky, to catch in their dazed sleep the drumming of gulls’ wings turning in spray? Or in the cold whiplash of the waters crushing themselves against the fallen pediments of forgotten islands? In the night-mist falling upon deserted harbours with the old Arab seamarks pointing eroded fingers?

Somewhere, surely, the sum of these things will still exist. There were no hauntings yet. Day followed day upon the calendar of desire, each night turning softly over in its sleep to reverse the darkness and drench us once more in the royal sunlight. Every-thing conspired to make it what we needed. It is not hard, writing at this remove in time, to realize that it had all already happened, had been ordained in such a way and in no other. This was, so to speak, only its ‘coming to pass’ —

its stage of manifestation. But the scenario had already been devised somewhere, the actors chosen, the timing rehearsed down to the last detail in the mind of that invisible author — which perhaps would prove to be only the city itself: the Alexandria of the human estate. The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature. It is hard to believe, I know, when one thinks of the perfection of that summer and what followed it. Much had to do with the discovery of the island. The island!

How had it eluded us for so long? There was literally not a corner of this coast which we did not know, not a beach we had not tried, not an anchorage we had not used. Yet it had been there, staring us in the face. ‘If you wish to hide something’ says the Arabic proverb, ‘hide it in the sun’s eye.’ It lay, not hidden at all, somewhere to the west of the little shrine of Sidi El Agami —

the white scarp with the snowy butt of a tomb emerging from a straggle of palms and figlets. It was simply an upshouldered piece of granite pushed up from the seabed by an earthquake or some submarine convulsion in the distant past. Of course, when the sea ran high it would be covered; but it is curious that it remains to this day unmarked on the Admiralty charts, for it would constitute quite a hazard to craft of medium draught. It was Clea who first discovered the little island of Narouz.

‘Where