There was no jungle in this universe. Above the sand was flinty wilderness, and higher still the meadows began. Then out of the forest spread the land of eternal snow, up to the final great peaks, the land of the abominable Wendigo, the primal layers from his underground Alhambra to the mountains of the sky and snow where the soul could sometimes go now that the galleries had reverberated to this deep-set mysterious explosion that spoke to him from all the sounding places of the walls. He stood, waiting for the sand to burst through the small white bricks, stayed calm and terrified as if he were in a dream, while the grey blades of outside sunlight moved like a windmill round and round over his eyes. The only sound was the hiss of the sea, the metallic surf lazily striking the brilliant sand. Between him and the beach a tree was burning, and while he stood in the same position he saw white flames rolling over it, shaking out smells of bay-leaf and juniper, lemon and rosemary. White phosphorous was burning on its foliage, and he was pleased because the spectacle seemed to wear off his fear and awe of the explosion far underground. The tree burned but did not die, glowed and lit up the sea-beach when the sun fell.
He stayed buried, paralysed, unable to look up at the burning sun. There was no urine left in him, and he pulled roots from the earth to stop the flesh of his two jaws meeting. I’m going to die, he thought. I can’t go on. He was alone, forgot when he had parted from or lost the others, stood at the entrance to his brick-lined burrow, and no one came in nor even near it. The sea was an ugly steel-flat torment edging the yellow sand and reflecting the sun’s heat at him with bleak ferocity.
When he sensed that the world beyond his closed lids had turned black, and felt the night air chafing him, he stood up again. To save rummaging into his haversack for a compass he selected the Pointers of Ursa Minor and kept the dim North Star to his left. Eyes opened and accustomed to the dark, he was at the head of a wide valley, low hills on either side. Smokeless, and without lights or fire. In the clarity of his mind he speculated on how many sins one had to commit before reaching the kingdom of heaven, how many good people abandon who had come to lean on you more heavily for support than you realised in your malformed desire to be free of them. Your life depended on people who needed you. Nancy and the children, Myra and their child, Shelley and the girl he had left in Barcelona prison — he had abandoned them to help people whom he wanted to need him, but who, in reality, had learned well enough how to help themselves, a break with settled fate in order to control the circumstances of his own life.
He walked, feeling only the rub at his feet of grit and dust. Even the ubiquitous dog-jackal no longer broke its heart in the interstellar spaces of the night. He plodded through an unlit silence, in no hurry any more to do fifteen or twenty miles before rest. No one was on the road, no stragglers from the attack. He seemed too far north, according to Mokhtar, but remembering many glimpses of Shelley’s map (more clear and familiar now than the cycling map he had used as a youth around Nottingham), he kept his track parallel to the mountains, and in a few days he would go up and over them till sooner or later he reached the Kabylie mountains which backed on to the Algerian coast. He was on his own, in no man’s land and no man’s army, felt clear-brained and energetic, and as he walked he did not think of fighting again except to decide that he was armed against friend or foe, which thought gave him not only freedom (to say it aloud) but also an affirmation of life that he was determined to hold on to. Without Mokhtar’s group, he was exposed to friend and enemy alike, though if he weren’t knifed or shot by unsuspecting friends he could always show the FLN identity card given him in the Monts des Ksours. Three weeks east-north-east would get him into Tunisia, and he was tempted to go there, but he wasn’t in that sort of mood yet, still wanted to try his arm in the area of main fighting to the north. The purpose that had led him here raged more clearly under his vacillations of selfish desire. The tree had burned off its foliage, but the tree was even hardier, and ready to grow again. By Tunis he could reach London in a month, but he was not yet drawn to that other section of his heart. As much as to see Myra and the child, he craved in the bursting heat of the day to go back to Nottingham and visit his children. The catastrophic act of leaving them struck full force, and he wept in the night, saying not yet to himself, not yet.
The bottle was full, warm and slightly salt, and he sat down to uncork it. He smoked a cigarette, carefully lit and hooded in the middle of the night, took off his sandals and rubbed his feet free of grit. They were tough, and he wasn’t bothered by soreness, saw himself walking barefoot, for when these sandals were gone he might not find more. He had no fear of the wilderness. There was food in his pack, and he could last a few days even without. He had Algerian money, mostly coin, which might help if he met nomads, or got into an oasis one night. But there was no need to set himself spiralling on the course of desperation. He wanted no plans, especially those that might lead him astray or to disaster. He would respect patience and instinct and so be helped by them.
During the walk he enumerated the contents of his knapsack. There were biscuits and chickpeas, chocolate and sardines, dried figs and a mush of lentils. There was a map which Shelley had taken from the back pocket of a guidebook, and annotated against other maps, as well as a compass, binoculars, pencils and notebook. The watch was in his pocket because the strap had rotted some weeks ago. He had fifty cigarettes, matches, and an unworn shirt for use when the one on his back fell off in shreds. There was a three-pronged clasp-knife, an oil-soaked rag and pull-through, and a small screwdriver. This traveller’s bric-a-brac took little enough space, but to it was added a water-bottle, a light machine-gun, and one thirty-round clip of ammunition. Of the three passports, he had kept only the British one, in order to back up his story if he were captured.
Walking alone at midnight hammered schemes into the head, inebriation of hope that softened the brain and bled even the blood-poison out of you, that acid protection of borderline health that kept you alert and visionary under the stars, and cool under the sun. There’s two of us, he muttered. There’s Frank and there’s Dawley, and we’ll look after each other, so that neither of us will come to harm. The left hand must look to what the right hand does, and both can lash out for the benefit of each other, all for one and one for all. You’re a one-man circus, but whatever you do you can’t retrace your steps or go back into the imperative-negative blackout of the past for reasons of ease and sentimentality. Walking backwards is as evil as writing your name backwards, an exercise in weak-minded satanic self-destruction. He felt the black web of the blackest spider shaking before him, its fabric beckoning when he turned towards it, as if death were really and readily stalking and had taken the place of his own backward glance. He had never felt the weight of evil so close, and this at a time when he considered himself on a great mission of good.