"But why?" he said. "What's it for?"

I tried to tell him but he didn't seem convinced.

"The trouble with you in the West is..." He thought about it. "You don't really value human life, human beings."

"That's not true."

"You value a monkey more than a human. And look at you: I hear you talk about a tree, about some kind of hedge." He pointed at me. "You value a tree more than a human being."

"That's ridiculous. I-"

"No, Hope, you have to learn"-he kept jabbing his finger at me-"you have to learn that a human life, any human life is worth more than a car, or a plant, or a tree...or a monkey."

THE WEIGHT OF THE SENSE WORLD.

I went out walking on the beach today. It was fresh and breezy and my hair kept being blown annoyingly across my face. For some reason, my thoughts were full of Amilcar and his mad moral certainties. I was distracted from them, fairly ruthlessly, when I trod on a fat blob of tar the size of a plum. It squashed between three toes of my left foot, clotted and viscous like treacle.

The next hour was spent in a frustrating search for some petrol or alcohol to clean it off. There was none in the house so I had to bobble through the palm grove to the village. I bought a beer bottle full of pink kerosene from one of the old trading women and eventually, with some effort and enough cotton wool to stuff a cushion, I managed to remove all traces of tar from my foot.

Now I sit on my deck, feeling stupid and exhausted, looking dully out at the ocean, a strong smell of kerosene emanating from my left foot, my toes raw red and stinging from the crude and astringent fuel.

The weight of the sense world overpowers me some days, today clearly being one of them. I seem unable to escape the phenomenal, the randomly human. It's at times like these that the appeal of mathematics, and its cool abstractions, is at its most potent and beguiling. Suddenly I can understand the satisfaction of that escape, savor something of the acute pleasure it gave to someone like John. All the itch and clutter of the world, its bother and fuss, its nagging pettiness, can wear you down so easily. And this is why I like the beach-blobs of tar notwithstanding. Living on the extremity of a continent, facing the two great simple spaces of the sea and sky, cultivates the sense that somehow you are less encumbered than those who live away from the shoreline. You feel less put upon by the fritter and mess of the quotidian. It is fifty yards from where I sit now to the foam and spume of the last breaker. There is not very much between here and there, you think, to distract you.

I remember something Amilcar said to me that night as we talked. I asked him what would happen if UNAMO were defeated. He refused to admit it was possible.

"But what if?" I said. "Hypothetically."

"Well...I would be dead, for one thing."

"Are you frightened?"

He pushed out his bottom lip as he thought about it. "No," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because what cannot be avoided must be welcomed."

I was never sure, in our discussions that night, if he was simply trying to provoke me. We talked on and the subject changed. He started to tell me about a girl, a French girl, he had met in Montpellier, whom he had asked to marry. She had said yes, and then three weeks later had said no. He never saw her again. He asked me if I was married. I said no. He smiled and screwed up his eyes.

"So. What about Ian?" he said.

"What about him?"

"I think he would like to marry you. Why don't you marry him?"

"You must be joking."

He found this very funny. Still laughing, he went outside to check on the boys in the gun pit. Alone in the hut I thought about what Amilcar had said, and realized that we had blithely assumed Ian was still alive. If he was, I doubted that marriage to me would be on his mind.

When Amilcar returned I could see his mood had changed again. He was depressed.

"Those boys," he said, sucking in air through his teeth to express his exasperation, "they are too frightened. I told them there was no danger. They would hear the federals from two miles away. Then they should call me. One shot. One shot and they would retreat." He went on bemoaning their lack of spirit.

"Maybe we should withdraw a bit," I suggested. "Maybe the UNAMO troops are farther down the road?"

"No. We will make our stand here."

He did not want to talk further, I could sense. He picked up the lantern and went to check on the abandoned materiel. I pulled some ponchos over me and settled down to sleep.

I woke very early. There was a faint light outside, a pale misty gray. Amilcar was nowhere to be seen. I sat up, stiff and sore. I had been badly bitten in the night on my neck and forearm.

Outside it was very still. For the first time I could see the full extent of the disarray of the village: everywhere there were piles of abandoned cardboard boxes and packing cases. I wondered where Amilcar was, and wandered through the village toward the causeway looking for him. Slowly a pale citron began to infuse the monochrome light around me; there was a low cover of thick cloud and it was cool.

As I drew near the gun pit I saw at once that it was empty. The boys had gone. Propped against the sandbag wall were their new guns, their bandoliers coiled beside them. More tellingly, three track-suit tops were hung over the antitank gun's barrel. Team Atomique Boum had finally disbanded.

I folded the track-suit tops and laid them on top of the sandbags. I sat down on one of the gun's tires and wondered what to do. The gun itself, I thought, my mind wandering, was rather a beautiful object. The long tapered barrel, blistered with dew, looked out of proportion, too long for the compact breech and the neat carriage. There was a booklet encased in a plastic bag hanging from one of the handles on the sight. I tore it open. It was a set of instructions on how to operate the gun-written in French.

I looked down the barrel and the long perspective of the causeway. Banks of mist lay over the marsh. It was all very placid, eerily beautiful. A few birds were beginning to sing. I heard the plangent fluting of a hoopoe.

"They've gone," Amilcar said.

I turned round. He stood there, slumped yet tense, his jaw muscles working.

"Look." He pointed at the neatly stacked guns. I think it was only then that the impossibility of his situation-its farcical unreality-struck home. He put his hands on his hips and looked up helplessly at the sky.

"Those boys," he said, trying to chuckle. "A great volleyball player makes a bad soldier. Now I know." He looked back at the mess in the village. "Look at this. Terrible."

I felt cold and shivered. I picked up a track-suit top. "Can I have this?"

"Take anything. Help yourself. Have an antitank gun."

I pulled on the top. Amilcar was looking incredulously at the instruction booklet for the gun.

"In French...can you believe it? How do you think they knew that the one man left to fire it had been to Montpellier University?" He threw the book away. "How much would a gun like this cost?"

"How would I know?"

"Two hundred thousand dollars? Half a million?"

"What can I tell you? It's brand new. Who knows how much these things cost?"

"Somebody from UNAMO bought this for us in Europe. I wonder what his commission was?"

He levered off the top of one of the flat wooden boxes. Inside, on a polestyrene rack, like wine bottles, were three thin shells with lilac, onion-shaped tops, like domes on a Russian church. He removed one and held it out: it was a rather beautiful object, well designed, like the gun. The lilac shone with a luminescent glow in the Yellow light. Amilcar opened the breech of the gun and offered the onion nose to the opening. It slid in easily. It was far too small. He pulled the shell out.

"How much would one of these cost? Five thousand dollars? Ten?"

I didn't answer him this time. I zipped up my Atomique Boum top. He sat down on the sandbag wall. I felt so sorry for him, in his new uniform-it had acquired a few extra creases but he still looked dapper and neat-with all this redundant sophisticated weaponry. He looked down at the ground without speaking.

The cluster of bites on my neck itched. As I scratched them I realized they were in exactly the same position as Amilcar's curious scar. I thought if we had more time, and the occasion was right, that I would tell him about my port wine mark, splashed across my skull.

"Hope," he said suddenly, "would you help me a little? I need your help. It will save time. Then we'll go back to the airstrip, get you out on a plane tonight. But I just have to do one more thing and if you help me it'll save time."

"Of course," I said instantly. "Glad to."

I could only manage two land mines, and even that was an effort. They were heavy, painted black, the size of dinner plates and two inches thick. Amilcar was carrying four and he had a Kalashnikov slung across his back as well.

We walked slowly up the causeway, heading for the middle, stopping occasionally to let me rest. The sun was rising now and the mist was beginning to lift off the marsh. Patches of blue were showing through the thinning clouds.

After about four hundred yards we stopped above a culvert. Amilcar slid down the sides of the embankment and I passed him the mines one by one, which he then stacked beneath the roadway in the center of the culvert.

His last contribution to the defense of the heartland, he had told me, was to be the destruction of the causeway. The equipment had been abandoned, the soldiers had fled, but if he could blow a hole in the causeway then he would feel all his efforts had not been in vain. His plan was straightforward: he was going to detonate one of the land mines by a simple mechanism he had devised. The butt of a Kalashnikov would be balanced above the pressure plate of an activated land mine, held up by a prop-a two-foot stick. To this stick a long line of string would be attached. When he was far enough away, Amilcar would simply yank on this string, the stick-prop would be removed and the Kalashnikov butt would fall square on the pressure plate. The mine would explode, as would the other five stacked alongside it. The resulting explosion, he assured me, would demolish a considerable section of the causeway. I said it sounded a good plan-a neat bit of improvisation.

So I handed him the last of the land mines and clambered back up the embankment to the road. I sat down on the verge and waited for Amilcar, taking in the scene around me. It was a fine and clear morning. On the far bank of the marsh some palm trees were reflected perfectly in a reed-free sheet of water. I thought: what an extraordinary and lovely tree the palm is! And I thought how its ubiquity in the tropics often prevents us from appreciating its singular beauty and grace: its slim, curved, gray trunk, the delicate frondy splay of its foliage, the fact that no matter how old or how stunted the tree might be, its essential elegance remained....

My stomach rumbled and I felt a sudden nicotine craving seize me. From the culvert I heard the amplified scrape and clunk of heavy metal on rough concrete as Amilcar stacked his land mines.

I walked to the edge of the embankment and watched as he emerged, stooped, from the culvert, unwinding his ball of string. He backed cautiously up the slope to the road and then very delicately straightened the loose, looping curve the string made. He laid the string on the ground and placed a stone on top of it. He removed his spectacles and wiped his sweating face on his jacket sleeve.

"Let's hope the prop doesn't fall too soon," he said, with a nervous grin.

He stepped down the embankment again to check on a grass stem that was snagging his detonating string. I looked up the causeway road. Carried on the still morning air came the faint noise of an engine. I listened hard. A motor vehicle. I shaded my eyes and peered. Even this early in the morning there was a shimmer of heat haze coming off the road. I saw two vertical black dots ride the wobbling quicksilver of the mirage.

"Amilcar! A truck's coming."

He scrambled up the embankment.

"Oh no," he said, his voice full of petulant disappointment. "Wait a second."

"Shouldn't we go?" I said, anxiously. But he was already at the culvert's entrance. He went in and emerged moments later with the Kalashnikov.

"Jesus, Amilcar," I said. "What're you doing? Let's get out of here."

"No, I promise you. Just a few shots and they won't be back 'till tomorrow." He cocked the gun, awkwardly. "We'll have plenty of time."

He waved me away and I crouched down on the embankment behind him. He stood with the gun poised, waiting for the lorry to come closer.

"Nobody wants to get hurt," he said, snuggling the butt of the gun into his shoulder. "You watch. I'll fire at them and they'll run away. Then they'll call their mercenaries or their airplanes to come and bomb us. But by then it'll be too late."

"Don't let them get too close."

"I want to give them a real fright."

I could see the lorry clearly now, about a quarter of a mile off. It was open-topped and looked to be full of men. I saw Amilcar take careful aim and squeeze the trigger. Nothing happened. Safety catch, I thought. Jesus. He fiddled with the gun and took aim again.

He fired a long burst. Then he fired a quick sequence of short bursts afterward. The brass cartridges tinkled prettily on the tarmac as the echoes of the shots dispersed across the marsh.

The lorry had stopped abruptly. I heard the sound of confused shouting. Amilcar lay down beside me.

"Watch," he said.

The lorry began to back away rapidly, swerving from side to side. Amilcar took aim and fired again from the prone position. I stuck my fingers in my ears.

In the silence that followed, I heard the frantic tearing of gears as the lorry did a three-point turn. Now the men in the lorry started firing themselves. Far out in the marsh a long spray of bullets churned up water. The lorry finally negotiated its turn, and I heard the engine rev as it accelerated off. There was a manic crackling and popping of gunfire as it retreated, like fat on a skillet. No bullets came near us.

Amilcar stood up and emptied his magazine after them. He let his gun drop and gave a disgusted laugh. The sound of firing diminished.

"Why can't we win this war?" he asked. "It's so easy."

I did not hear or see him hit. One of the dozens of aimlessly fired bullets found its target. I was rising to my feet and saw the exit wound form, a sudden spit of blood in the middle of his back, like a fist-sized bolus of phlegm, a tussock of minced flesh suddenly sprouting.

He fell sideways, doubled up, and lay there, one arm weakly paddling, like a baby waving.

I scrambled over to him. The fall had knocked his spectacles half off his face. His eyes were tightly closed. His top lip was clamped hard between his teeth. He was making strange, grunting, talking noises in his throat, like a guttural dialect of Chinese.

I took his spectacles off. I felt completely, entirely helpless.

"What should I do Amilcar?" I said, feebly. "What should I do?"

I saw his black face lose its sheen, go opaque like drying paint. He opened his eyes and I saw them bulge.

"Don't let them catch you," he said with a huge effort.

"I'm not talking about me," I said desperately. "I'm talking about you!"

But he couldn't speak anymore. About three minutes later, he died.

I left his body there and strode back to the village. I felt light-headed, absurdly fit, as if I were being blown along by a stiff, following breeze. I forced myself to sit down when I reached the gun pit. I was quivering with huge reserves of energy suddenly unleashed, as if there had been hidden stockpiles of adrenaline in my body, now bequeathed me to do with whatever I wanted. Run twenty miles, demolish the village with my bare hands, chop down a forest of trees.

I sat on the sandbagged wall by the elegant gun for over an hour, debating what to do. Two possible courses of action dominated my thoughts during this period. The first was Amilcar's body: what to do with it? I knew how unhappy he would be to be left out there by the road to bake in the sun. I wondered if I had the strength to dig a grave for him or whether I should simply set him on fire. The second was whether to try and finish what he had accomplished. If I could detonate the mines and blow up the causeway I knew that would have made him happy.

I sat and thought, and in the end could bring myself to do neither. I did the sensible thing.

I made a thorough search through the abandoned stores and weaponry, looking for something white. Eventually I found an empty crate, about twice the size of a tea chest, that was lined with a coarse grayish-cream calico. I ripped it away to reveal foil beneath. I could not imagine what the chest had contained.

I went into the bush with a machete and cut two long poles and with my squares of calico fashioned two white flags. I took one to the gun pit and wedged the pole in the sandbags. There was no wind and the flag hung inert. But it was unmistakably a flag of truce, I told myself, quite unambiguously so.

I glanced up the causeway but I was glad to note that the heat haze made it impossible for me to see Amilcar's body by the roadside. I walked a few paces out toward him but I found I could go no farther.

What could I do for him now? I couldn't set him on fire. I had no kerosene or petrol. I couldn't simply set a match to his new uniform and hope that would do the job. Bury him, a voice spoke in my head. Could I take a spade and scrape a grave for him, roll him in and shovel the dirt back on his body? Tip him in the marsh?...I turned away, angry at my impotence, frustrated with my lack of ingenuity.

I took my second flag and returned to the center of the village. I dragged a couple of empty wooden crates into the middle of the road and erected my flag above them. I rigged up a poncho to cast some shade and crawled into one of the crates to wait.

I waited all day. Fatalistically, patiently, deliberately not thinking too far beyond the present moment. I had a clear view down the littered road. The entrance to the causeway was obscured by a bend but I could see the barrel of the gun in the gun pit and the askew pole of my flag of truce.

About midafternoon I heard a short burst of firing in the distance and then silence. As the afternoon advanced, a dry breeze sprang up that caused the flag above my head to flap and crack bravely. That made me feel better. I could just see the calico square at the gun pit, similarly vigorous. Surely, I reasoned, every army knew the significance of a white flag. I was a prisoner of UNAMO waiting to be rescued.

I saw them coming at dusk, half a dozen figures slipping professionally from house to bush, from doorway to compound wall. I crawled out from my crate and poncho shelter and stood up holding both hands high above my head.