He walked slowly, gun levelled, not wanting to waste a bullet, or send the noise of its death far enough to bring worse depredators on him. It was a pity; plucked and roasted it would make good food, tough but filling, though the smoke of cooking might also give him away. It was well-protected, he thought, by the hard laws of the world — passing out of its gaze and continuing his journey.
From a range of higher ground he saw the buzzards squatting where he had slept, as if still waiting for the last crack of life to leave him before coming on to where he was now. Their numbers had increased, holding a meeting perhaps on why they had permitted him to escape, discussing bad tactics and better measures for next time. Two people were walking through them, and a cloud went into the air like large flakes of burnt paper. He was disturbed at being followed, when all he wanted was to climb away from the track and rest, instead of walking on through the wide open day. The sharp beak had torn skin from his arm, and gave an intense ache. He poured water on, which burned as if it were acid. Then he drained the bottle, which did not filter through to his thirst.
When the first breeze of dusk wakened against him he saw a well in the distance surrounded by tents and camels. He hoped he had left his pursuers far enough behind to stop and get water for his bottle. The heat of his shirt, which did not normally bother him, now began to torment as if it were actually on fire, afflicting his whole body with an intolerable fever.
A thin drum-rhythm sounded. There were trees by the well, the shadows of their branches marked on tent roofs. Faint ropes of smoke curled towards clear sky, and the crazy fluting notes of a raita chipped the air and mixed with the pattering voice of the drum. The enchanted sound of alert and graceful music in the middle of war and wilderness emphasised how isolated and alone he was, and that he no longer felt any emotion or loss when he speculated on people who formed a great part of his life. The rope that held him to them was burned free. He could not remember how many weeks and months he’d been away. All disturbing memories had withdrawn beyond some horizon he’d left far behind or passed unnoticed in the night. Each broad day was an island that he crossed, and so was each night, and he felt that without injury from war or nature, the desert was a healthy place for one to live in, with a little food and water now and again. Optimism was arrowed into his veins, a love of life in the continuous beauty of light and air, and emptiness that was quiet enough for thought and sufficiently wide to suck out all weariness.
Children came to watch him: a boy in a ragged robe, and a mèche of hair sprouting from a shaved head that made the skull seem too big. He stared, while the girl smiled. The men and women from the crumbling wall of the well were looking at three ragged performers between the tents. He unclipped his bottle, and stood to watch, all of them now silently waiting. The music came faster. An old man played the raita, scarred and bitten legs coming below his rags, feet slightly moving to the sound of his own music. A clout had been twisted around his skull, and he was staring into the sky but away from the sun, with a smile of tenderness that hoped for some sort of reward. Frank thought he was blind.
Camels tied to the trees were searching the length of their tethers for roots. A boy threw stones to drive them back into the shade. They nuzzled and pawed the ground. The music caught his blood and he forgot his thirst and fever. The second performer wore a long, patched robe, had a white face and reddish or hennaed hair. He did nothing except move his head from side to side and look scornfully at those gathered to watch, presenting a demonic aspect of thin wide lips and a long chin covered with a grey beard, and a scanty moustache with a gap under his nose where it would not grow. At his feet lay a damp sackbag, something moving inside as if striving to shift with the music.
No one spoke. They watched glumly. The third member was a lugubrious young man who played the drum. Black curly hair came from under his embroidered skull-cap, and his dress was a long dark robe with odd buttons down the front. He played his single stick as if disliking the inspired rhythm it produced, his intelligent face made sensitive because of his distaste for the job he was doing, as if between sessions or on the move he escaped such a life by dreaming over some tattered but unimportant book.
Drum and raita dominated the silence and finally deepened it, each tap-note soaring sharply. Frank gained strength from their fluency, forgot his fever till the whole world he saw pressed close and gentle against his eyes. The white-faced, red-haired man softened his scornful look for a moment, then reinforced it and stared towards the mountains as if his eyes would cut a way through while the music, in spite of its faster beat, never lost the fluid racing lines of its rhythm. Yet it remained graceful and weak, pipe and drum trying their uttermost to become powerful rather than merely hypnotic. The old man’s body curved, but the youth with the drum stood with hunched shoulders and tapped out quicker rhythms with just as much ease as at the slower beats of the beginning, his look of impotence growing, as if his performance had gone on long enough and the time had come to end it. Yet the speed increased, when Frank thought it impossible. The audience seemed to be waiting for a revelation. To Frank all those in the desert looked haggard and exhausted, worn-out and noble, as if about to wake from sleep. Whether working or resting, this common quality linked every face and lost itself deep beneath the skin, shaping the bones, steeping their eyes in it and giving them the pathetic dignity of people struggling to visualise their place in a world of food and water which was continually denied them.
Palm branches flipped and rustled in the wind, grit whirling around their feet and faces. Drum and pipe notes jumped on every grain and dragged it to earth, because no one was disturbed by it. The white-faced man of the three resumed his look of disgust, his lips curling, as if ready to: give them up as lost and vanish forever into the orange-tinted hills. As if on second thoughts he bent down to the filthy sack at his feet and moved his hand around inside, a look of green, glistening fear on his face. The old man with the flute weaved more violently, veins humped on his tobacco-coloured temples, as if about to faint or fall to the ground and still go on with his thin, wild music. The man bending down at the sack suddenly sprang up, holding a live snake.
The crowd drew back in fear from this man possessed of power and talents beyond the limits of their lives, holding, a weapon that could strike them but not him. Perhaps they hoped he’d lose sight of them, so they stood still, and from his expression of phosphorous rage he certainly saw no one, the pupils of his small eyes shifting in bile, mouth open and moving to insensate music. The snake held them, spade-head and fangs fixed by the neck as it coiled round his arm to fight the demonic grip. But it was impotent against such strength and he smiled in a way that set the audience laughing — which he took as a signal for the real battle to begin.
He roared from his wide-open mouth, long and grating, as if he would destroy his own throat. A shade of fear passed over him. The strong snake lashed around the sinews of his bare arm, a loathsome scene that Frank stayed and stared at and felt the deep blackness opening below all sense and thought, his whole world collapsing as if he were about to drop into the cold black water, back into primeval slime that lay beyond the coast of horror. The real island was the truthful inner night that only truth could show you, and only truth lead you safely away from. His bowels turned to water, his brain to ice.