"What do you mean?"

"Wait and see." She pointed.

I turned. Mallabar emerged from the canteen's kitchen with two foil-capped bottles of Asti Spumante. Everyone stopped talking as, with undue ceremony, he assembled glasses, popped the corks and poured out the foaming wine, silencing with histrionic gestures all speculation as to the cause of this rare treat.

So we waited dutifully, with our charged glasses, while Mallabar stood at the head of the table, head slightly bowed, jaws and cheeks working as if he were actually masticating, tasting the speech he was about to deliver. I sensed people gathering behind me and turned. All the kitchen staff were ranged behind me and most of the field assistants. Joo caught my glance and mouthed something at me but I couldn't interpret it. Mallabar looked up at the ceiling; his eyes seemed moist. He cleared his throat.

"These last three years," he began huskily, "have been the hardest I have ever known in more than two decades at Grosso Arvore." He paused. "That we have been able to continue our work is due in large part to you"-he thrust both hands at us-"my colleagues and dear friends. Under the most trying circumstances-the most trying-and in the face of increasing difficulties, we have struggled on to sustain that vision that was born here so many years ago."

Now he smiled. He beamed, showing us his strong teeth.

"Those black days, I think we can now say, are behind us. A brighter future beckons at the end of the rainbow." He nodded vigorously. "I heard this afternoon that the DuVeen Foundation of Orlando, Florida, is to award us a grant of two and three-quarter millions of dollars, U.S., spread over the next four years!"

Hauser cheered, we all clapped. Toshiro whistled deafeningly.

"We are already recruiting in the States and the U.K.," Mallabar continued triumphantly. "I can tell you that within months the census will be resuming. We are negotiating with Princeton University for two more research fellowships. Many other exciting developments are afoot. Grosso Arvore, my dear good friends, is saved!"

We raised our glasses and, prompted by Hauser, drank to the health of Eugene Mallabar.

After the Asti Spumante we moved on to beer. We sat around the table, exulting in our good fortune, chatting and laughing. Even I, the newcomer, felt cheered, not so much at the news but at the patent elation on the faces of the others, the old-timers. Four more years, a big grant by an important foundation...where one led, others would surely follow, we decided. Hard currency-solid dollars-would soften the restrictions imposed by the government as a result of the civil war. Perhaps Mallabar was right: a brighter future did beckon at the end of the rainbow.

Later, as we were leaving, Mallabar came up to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and left it there. I wondered if he were a little drunk.

"Hope," he said sonorously, "I was wondering if you could do me a favor." He squeezed my shoulder. With his other hand he caressed his beard-I could just hear the rasp of tidy bristles.

"Well...what?"

"Could you do this week's provisioning run? I know it's Anton's turn but I need him here. I can't spare him." He smiled fondly at me, not showing his teeth. "We have to reassess all our various projects, in the light of the DuVeen grant. We can't waste a moment."

I thought. He was referring to the fortnightly run into the provincial capital where we stocked up on supplies. It was at least a three-day trip, sometimes longer, and we usually adhered strictly to the rota. I had made it a month ago.

"It would be a special favor to me," he said carefully, more pressure being applied to my shoulder. "You would be my goose who laid the golden egg."

"How could I refuse."

"Bless you." A final squeeze. "Good night my dear. See you tomorrow."

I walked slowly back to my tent, wondering if there were other motives behind this "special favor." Was it a punishment or was it a way of saying no hard feelings? I strolled past Hauser's lab, and then on my left the vast pale columnar trunk of the hagenia tree. A nightjar fluted its haunting five-note call.

Something moved at the entrance to my hut. I stopped.

"Mam, it is I, Joo."

I went into the tent and lit the hurricane lamp. Joo stood outside. I asked him in but he said he had to get back to his village.

"I saw Lena, Mam. I come to tell you."

"And?"

"She has her baby."

"Oh." I had the sensation of a sagging, a falling inside me.

I thanked him, we said good night and he left for home. I sat down on my bed, suddenly tired. Stupidly, I felt tears smart in my eyes.

NOISE OR SIGNAL?.

The man I work with-Gunter-started to go deaf fairly recently. The doctors couldn't explain why but his hearing problems became so bad that be was obliged to be fitted with a hearing aid. He told me that, initially, he found the amplified sound in his head alarmingly hard to cope with. Everything came at him in a rush, he said, trying to explain the effect; sounds were suddenly unfamiliar and new. "You see, Hope," he said a little plaintively, "the problem was that I couldn't tell what was irrelevant and what was important...I couldn't tell noise from signal."

I think: Join the club. Learning to listen is like any process of education. You have to sift through a mass of phenomena and discard what is unimportant. You have to distinguish the signal from the noise. When you find the signals a pattern might emerge, and so on.

That was what John Clearwater was attempting to do with his work on turbulence. Here was an area that was all "noise," completely random and unpredictable. "Hyperbolic" was a word he used. Was there any pattern in turbulence? Were there any signals being given off? And suppose there were, would a pattern form? And what would that tell us about other disorderly systems in the universe? He told me once that he was looking for equations of motion to predict the future of all turbulent systems....

The eye sees. It explores the optic array before us. Things shift and change, but the eye searches always for concepts of invariance. That is the way the visual world is pinned down and understood. John was on a different tack: it was variance that fascinated him now-systems in flux, erratic and discontinuous. He was trying to comprehend happenstance, he told me, and write the book of the unruly world we lived in.

On Brazzaville Beach the waves roll and tumble and flatten on the sand in a sizzle of foam. Endlessly, wave after wave. On a beach in Scotland once, John pointed out to sea and said: what I want to do is write the geometry of a wave.

Hope did not notice any further changes in John Clearwater as the weeks progressed. He had stopped drinking but it made no difference to his demeanor. He spent more time away from the flat at the college but his new sphere of interest-turbulence-did not appear to be all-consuming.

In early spring they went to Scotland for a holiday, renting a cold cottage in the Borders near Biggar for a fortnight. They traveled to Ipswich and spent a weekend with John's mother (his father had died a decade previously). She was an old frail gray lady, her back hooped in a pronounced dowager's stoop which made her look up at you sideways, cocking her head to obtain a clearer, oblique view out of one bright eye. She lived with John's brother, Frank, and his wife, Daphne, in a new housing development on the outskirts of the city. Frank was a pharmacist, bald and genial. He and Daphne had two young boys-Gary and Gerry-who were polite and disciplined. To Hope it was a dull and interminable weekend of endless snacks and meals and television, most of which she spent in a state of confused befuddlement, trying to divine John Clearwater's origins in this bland suburban mulch. From time to time she caught herself sneering, and warned herself against being too contemptuous: for most of the world, she realized, this was the Good Life.

She got drunk on the train home to London, drinking whisky and eating chocolates (she was not so slim in those days) and chatting volubly about her life as a schoolgirl in Banbury and Oxford. John found it amusing. He sat opposite her with his bitter lemon, goading her on to more daring revelations.

Her own life at this stage was in something of a hiatus. Her thesis was complete, immaculate, submitted, and she was waiting for the oral examination. For the very first time in her life, it seemed, the future lay open ahead of her, empty and innocuous. She luxuriated in her idleness; it seemed pointless, she thought illogically, to apply for a job with her Ph.D. unexamined. So she read and shopped, visited friends and went to films in the afternoon, repainted their bedroom and looked vaguely for a larger flat. She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognize that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. "It's like money in the bank, old girl," he would say, "money in the bank." She was happy and she recognized that fact, as instructed. Being married had many advantages, she realized, one of which was joint bank accounts. John's salary easily paid for everything.

Hope's thesis was entitled Dominance and Territory: Relationships and Social Structure. She had drifted into ethology almost by accident after her degree in botany, judiciously steered in that direction by her supervisor, old Professor Hobbes. But when she felt the urge to study again she realized she had grown tired of laboratories and of animals in cages and so she resumed her botanizing and resurrected some work she had done years before on trees. She thought that it would at least get her out of doors. Professor Hobbes had no objections and he directed her up a few avenues of research that he himself was too busy to explore. She wrote a paper on "The Tilia Decline: An Anthropogenic Interpretation." Hobbes said it wasn't publishable, but he might find the data useful for a talk he was giving at a symposium in Vienna. Hope had no objections; she was fond of Edgar Hobbes, and all his pupils knew this was part of the quid pro quo for his patronage. He had no worries about her doctorate, and neither had she; her work was thorough, exact and surprisingly literate, Hobbes said, for a scientist. Her oral examination was a formality and, eventually, one chilly afternoon, she emerged from her college to walk the streets as Dr. Hope Clearwater.

That evening, she and John went out for a celebratory meal. They found a French restaurant in Knightsbridge that was expensive enough to raise the occasion to "rare treat" status and ordered a bottle of champagne.

"Come on, John," she said. "You've got to have one glass. At least."

"No." He smiled pleasantly. "It doesn't agree with me. Not when I'm working."

"Christ, it's Saturday tomorrow." She poured him a glass anyway.

He raised it in a toast. "Congratulations, Doc," he said. "Lots of love."

They clinked glasses. She drank hers down in large gulps and watched him set his carefully on the white tablecloth. It fizzed, untouched, brimful, all through the meal.

Apart from his new alcohol-free life, there were no other significant changes in John's life that Hope could easily discern. But, subtly, indubitably, things were different. For a long time she blamed herself for experiencing this feeling, on the grounds that if you persistently go around thinking something is different, this in itself will be sufficient to establish that fact. Covertly, she observed and analyzed him, and she had to admit there was very little to go on. Perhaps she was imagining things? They went out together, they talked to each other just as often, they shared enthusiasms and exasperations as before, they made love with the same frequency.... But despite all that, in the end she knew that, in some as yet undefined way, he was not the same man she had met and married.

The victim, the catalyst, the guilty party, had to be-she decided with some reluctance-his work. She almost would have prefered a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, or some deficiency in her own nature that marriage had revealed, but her rival was mathematics. John was no longer as engaged with her as he had been. She was no longer the main focus of his thoughts. It was this shift that had been nagging at her over the weeks. That portion of his conscious mind that she had occupied had diminished. He did discuss his work with her, true, but even the broad, simplified terms he employed were not sufficient for her to grasp it fully. She could not understand what he was doing, or what excited him. She made efforts, but the gap between them was not intellectual so much as conceptual-his brain operated on a different level and in a different sphere from hers. As far as his work in mathematics was concerned there was never going to be anything more to share.

But I have my own work too, she thought, and as if to prove it to herself spent three weeks writing an article entitled Aggression and Evolution. She boldly submitted it to Nature where, to her surprise, it was accepted. Thus encouraged, she started applying for a few jobs and got her reading up to date. She made a point of discussing her work with John-the latest controversies in ethology, new directions in life sciences, as they were now being called-which, to her vague irritation, he found highly interesting. But it made little difference. She saw, in due time, that he was held and involved in what he did in a way that was to her fundamentally strange. It wasn't like work-as she and the rest of the world considered it-at all. She could not understand it, and, she concluded with a dull ache of despair, that meant she would never really understand him either.

THE MARGIN OF ERROR.

Should Hope Clearwater have seen the signs? Should she have recognized the early signals?...

When a skyscraper is built, one of the most obsessively precise jobs is the positioning and fixing of the first, vast, steel girders that form the foundations of the whole airy frame of the building. The margin of error involved in the positioning of these tons of metal is minuscule. It must be no greater than an eighth of an inch. A minute deviation at this stage-a hole drilled a few millimeters askew, an angle miscalculated by a fraction of a degree, can have dramatic consequences later. Eight hundred feet up, that insignificant three-millimeter shift has grown into a fourteen-yard chasm.

John called it the for-want-of-a-nail syndrome. For want of a nail the battle was lost. Something small suddenly becomes hugely enlarged. Something calm suddenly becomes enraged. Something flowing smoothly in one instant becomes turbulent. How or why does this happen? What if, John said, there are small perturbations that we miss or ignore; tiny irritations that we regard as fundamentally inconsequential. These small perturbations may have large consequences. In science, so in life.

Hope has a small perturbation in her life at the moment. A woman from the village behind the beach is careless about tethering her goat. Several times a week it breaks free and makes its way to Hope's garden behind her beach house. Hope watches it now as it grazes on her hibiscus hedge. She has thought about remonstrating, but the woman-called Marga-is a tough, bossy character. Hope can imagine the entire village becoming involved in their dispute, and she needs the village, and in a way they need her. The system is stable. She can spare a few hibiscus flowers.

Hope watched the countryside unreel through the carriage window, dull and gray, green and brown, the hard umber clods of the winter fields dusted with frost. No wonder she felt depressed: a low sky, a drab world, a cold wind...she wasn't born for English winters, she decided; meteorologically she was inclined to the hot south. To distract herself she switched her attention from the view to a mental image of her destination, her friend Meredith's cottage, conjuring up a log fire, a hot meal, red wine and soft armchairs. That was better, that was all right, and she knew an approximation of that was waiting for her. It was just unfortunate that Meredith was so dirty, that she never seemed to clean or dust her home. Hope always worried about the sheets too. There had been a time when she didn't care where or upon what she slept. Even now she would not have described herself as unduly fussy, but these days there was a minimum requirement of whatever bed she found herself sleeping in-clean sheets. She was almost sure that Meredith would not offer her an unchanged bed, but that "almost" was an insidious concern. Best just to drink a lot, she told herself, and forget.

The man sitting opposite her had a tie rather like one of John's, she noticed. John was away at a convention in New York at Columbia University. It was their first protracted separation since their marriage and she was missing him badly. But not at first. At first she had felt guilty at how much she was enjoying being on her own again, but that sensation had only lasted a day and a night. When he phoned-he phoned regularly-she told him this and he said he was missing her too. She knew he was lying-not lying, perhaps, but merely being nice. He talked with such vigor about the conference and the seminars he was attending, the old friends from Cal Tech he was encountering, that she guessed he only started to think about her when he picked up the phone to make his duty call.

Why was she being so unkind about him, she asked herself impatiently? Why was she so ruthlessly analyzing their marriage? What did it gain? She took out a cigarette, unthinkingly, and rolled it between her fingers.

"Excuse me," the man with John's tie said. "This is a non-smoker."

"I know," she said. "That's why I'm not smoking."

She was pleased to see that her response had thrown him, rather. Defiantly, she put the unlit cigarette in her mouth and left it there. She rested her chin on her fist and stared out at the cooling towers of Didcot power station as they slowly drifted by. I must be getting addicted, she thought. Bloody John Clearwater...she had started smoking in self-defense, and now she found she really quite enjoyed it. She let the cigarette hang sullenly from her lips. There was an old television show, she remembered, where the lead character, a private eye or cop, did the same thing as his personal gimmick, always taking out a cigarette, sticking it in his mouth, but never lighting it. He had a parrot as a pet. Big white one, a cockatoo. It was all rather affected and striven for, she thought, and that unlit cigarette became particularly irritating. She glanced at the man opposite, who was reading with rigid concentration, and hoped she was irritating him too.

Meredith Brock was a don, an architectural historian, and one of some eminence, so Hope had come to realize, much to her astonishment. Meredith was an old friend; they had known each other since their school days. They were the same age and Hope was slightly affronted that Meredith had made a name for herself so young, albeit in such a recondite area. Her renown had come about as a result of a massive survey of medieval English buildings that she had worked on. An old historian-whose lifelong endeavor the survey had been-had hired her as his assistant to see the books through the presses and had died just as the entire multivolume project had been published. It fell to Meredith to publicize and defend the enterprise-it was controversial and nicely opinionated-and because of her age and her looks she had enjoyed a fleeting celebrity. She duly became the only architectural historian any lazy editor, producer or committee chairman could think of and her profile had swiftly risen. It was when Hope had read Meredith's name in two newspapers, heard her voice on the radio and seen her on television, all in one week, that she realized just how far her friend had come.

Hope looked at her now as she made them both a drink. She is pretty, Hope thought grudgingly, prettier than me. But she did nothing to exploit her looks. Her clothes were cheap and out of fashion. She wore too much makeup and very high heels, all the time. Her hair was long but never allowed to hang free; it was always held up and arranged in loops and swags by a combination of combs and clips. Hope thought she was at her most attractive when she had just woken up: hair down, tousled, face clean and mascara-free. They were good enough friends for Hope to be able to tell her this, gently to encourage ideas of a new look, a lowering of heels, a less lurid shade of lipstick. Meredith had listened patiently, shrugged and said what was the point?

"It's no good for people like you and me, Hope," she had told her, wearily. "We can't really take it seriously. It's hard enough even making a vague effort. This whole-" she picked at her acrylic jersey's appliqued satin flowers, "this whole flimflam."

Meredith handed her a gin and tonic, one small ice cube floating, no lemon. Hope picked a wet hair off the outside of the cloudy glass. At least the tonic was fizzing.

"Careful, lovely. It's strong."

Hope sipped, sat back in her chair and stretched her legs. Meredith threw a log on the fire. A pallid ray of winter sun brightened the cottage windows for an instant, then all was pleasant gloom again.

"So how is Mr. Clearwater?" Meredith asked. Hope told her, but did not expand on her own disquiet. It was too early in the day for confidences, they could wait until after dinner. So they talked generally about John, about being married, about not being married, about what job Hope might find. As they chatted, Hope wondered: does she like John? They had met once before the wedding, and possibly a couple of times since. Everything had seemed very cordial, tolerably pleasant. Why not? She looked at Meredith. No, she thought, she probably doesn't.

Meredith went through to the kitchen to organize the lunch. Hope sipped her gin, noticing already the effects the alcohol was having on her. She found her thoughts returning inevitably to her husband. She thought of nothing or no one else these days, it seemed to her. Was that healthy? Should she be worried? What was it about him, she wondered, slightly fuddled, that had drawn her to him, given her such confidence?

The gin, the heat of the fire, the softness of the armchair, were sending her to sleep. She stood up and wandered across the room and looked at Meredith's bookshelves. Antiquities of Oxfordshire, Traditional Domestic Architecture in the Banbury Region, Dark Age Britain, Landscape in Distress...suddenly she knew what it was about John; what obsessed her. John had a secret she could never share. John had knowledge that was denied to virtually everyone on earth. She felt her cheeks hot and pressed her glass to them. That was it: John had secrets and she envied him. This was what had fascinated her about him almost immediately, but she had never really understood it. John and his mathematics, John and his game theory, John and his turbulence...she would never, could never know about them. She envied him his secret knowledge, but it was, she saw, an envy that was strangely pure, almost indistinct from a kind of worship. He was at home in a world that was banned to all but a handful of initiates. You gained entrance if you possessed the necessary knowledge, but she knew it was knowledge that was impossible for her to acquire. That was what made it special. It was magic, in a way. But then a magician might perform some extraordinary trick that made you gasp with incredulity, but it would be possible for you to reproduce it, if he let you in on his secret, if he showed you how. John could spend a lifetime trying to show me how, she thought, but it would make no difference. If you don't have the right kind of brain then all the effort and study in the world can't help you. So what did that imply? To enter the secret mathematical world John Clearwater inhabited, you had to have a rare and special gift: a particular way of thinking, a particular cast of mind. You either had that gift or you hadn't. It couldn't be learned; it couldn't be bought.

Hope took a book from the shelf and turned the pages, not looking at them, thinking on, feeling the gin surge through her veins. This envy I feel, she thought, it wasn't like admiring someone with a special talent-a painter, say, a musician, a sportsman. Through diligent practice and expert coaching you could experience an approximation of what that talented person achieved: paint a picture, play a sonata, run a mile. But when she looked at what John did, she knew that was impossible. An ordinarily numerate person could, by dint of hard work, go so far up the mathematical tree. But then you stopped. To go beyond required some kind of faculty or vision that you had to be born with, she supposed. Only a very few occupied those thin whippy branches at the extremity, moved by the unobstructed breezes, exposed to the full fat glare of the sun.

Hope looked at the book she held in her hands, a little dazed at the clarity of her insight. She saw a photograph of the aisle of a church, transept columns, glass, vaulting. She smiled: she envied Meredith a little too, but it was a more mundane envy. Meredith had special knowledge. She knew everything about old buildings, the exact names for the precise objects. She knew what a voussoir was, the difference between Roman and Tuscan doric, where to find the predella on an altarpiece, what you kept in an ambry, employed words like misericord, modillion and mouchette with confident precision. But then, Hope thought, so do I. I know the difference between pasture and meadow, can distinguish crack willow from white willow, I know what kind of flower Lithospermum purpureocaeruleum is. With time and effort I could learn all Meredith's knowledge and she could learn mine. But John's world, John's knowledge, is beyond me, un-reachable.

She walked through to the kitchen, rather chastened by the rigor of her gin-inspired analysis. A roast chicken steamed in the middle of the pine table. Meredith was draining vegetables in a colander. Hope deliberately did not look at the state of the cooker. One of Meredith's several cats leapt up on the table and carefully picked its way through the place mats and cutlery to the chicken, which it sniffed and, Hope thought, licked.

"No you don't," Meredith said gently, setting a bowl of brussels sprouts on the table and making no more effort to chase the cat away. "That's our lunch, greedy swine." She pulled her chair back.

"Sit down, Hope," she said. "And bloody cheer up, will you? Look like death."

DIVERGENCE SYNDROMES.

I spend a lot of time walking on the beach, thinking about the past and my life so far. So far, so good? Well, you will be able to make up your own mind, and so, perhaps, will I. My work is easy and I finish it quickly. I have plenty of time to remember.

Fragments of John Clearwater's conversation come back to me. When he was working on turbulence, he told me he had had such good results because be had decided to tackle the subject in a new way. In the past, he said, people tried to understand turbulence by writing endless and ever more complicated differential equations for the flow of fluids. As the equations became more involved and detailed, so their connection to the basic phenomenon grew more tenuous. John said that his approach was all to do with shapes. He decided to look at the shapes of turbulence and, immediately, he began to understand it.

It was at this time that his talk was full of concepts he referred to as Divergence Syndromes. He explained them to me as forms of erratic behavior. And in a subject like turbulence, naturally, there will almost always be a divergence syndrome somewhere. Something you expect to be positive will turn out to be negative. Something you assume will be constant becomes finite. Something you take confidently for granted suddenly vanishes. These are divergence syndromes.

This sort of erratic behavior terrifies mathematicians, John said, especially those of the old school. But people were learning, now, that the key response to a divergence syndrome was not to be startled, or confounded, but to attempt to explain it through a new method of thought. Then, often, what seemed at first shocking, or bizarre, can become quite acceptable.

As I stroll the length of this beach I consider all the divergence syndromes in my life and wonder where and when I should have initiated new methods of thought. The process works admirably with benefit of hindsight, but I suspect it wouldn't be quite so easy to apply at a moment of crisis.

It was at Sangui, Joo's village, that the tarred macadam road began. I turned onto it, heard the empty trailer, towed behind the Land-Rover, bump up over the curb and settled down for the long drive into town. Normally it took between four and five hours, but that was assuming there were no major accidents on the way, that the bridges were in reasonable repair, that there were no protracted delays at the numerous military roadblocks and that you didn't get caught behind one of the supply columns returning from provisioning the federal troops fighting in the northern provinces.

I rather enjoyed this drive-I had done it three times before-and on each occasion relished the buoyant end-of-term sensations it provoked. Turning off the laterite track in Sangui onto the crumbling, potholed tarmac of the main road south was like crossing a border, a frontier between two states of mind. Grosso Arvore was behind me, I was on my own for a few days. Almost alone: two kitchen porters, Martim and Vemba, sat in the back of the Land-Rover on piles of empty sacks. I had offered them the front seats, as I always did, but they preferred their own company in the rear.

The road was straight, running through dry scrubland and patchy forest that spread south from the hills of the escarpment behind me to the ocean, two hundred miles away. It was early morning and the sun was just beginning to burn off the dawn haze. The routine was familiar. The first day was occupied getting to the town. I would spend the night at the Airport Hotel and the next day would be made up of an enervating round of visits to the bank and department store and the various merchants who provided the project with food and supplies, black market drugs and medicines. Occasionally, there were trips to be made to workshops and garages for machinery to be fixed, or spare parts searched for, and this could add an extra day or two to the trip. But on this occasion I was merely provisioning. A long day's shopping awaited me tomorrow. Then I would spend one further night at the hotel before heading back for home, a much slower undertaking, with the Land-Rover and its trailer heavily loaded. Thirty miles an hour was our average speed.

The road ran through an unchanging landscape. Every ten miles or so we would encounter a small village. A cluster of mud huts thatched with palm fronds; a few traders' stalls set out on the verge selling oranges and eggplant, sweetmeats and cola nuts. The journey was not dangerous-the fighting was distant and only the federal army had aircraft-but we were always warned not to attempt it after dark. Ian Vail had broken down once, and was very late returning, but Mallabar had refused to send out a search party for him until the next morning. I was never absolutely clear what we were meant to be frightened of. Brigands and bandits, I supposed: there was a risk of highway robbery after dark. Apparently there were gangs roaming the countryside, composed mainly of deserters from the federal army. It was these men that the many roadblocks were designed to deter or catch. Every half hour or so one would come across these outposts, nothing more than a plank of wood propped against an oil drum jutting out into the road, and beyond it in the fringe of the bush or beneath the shade of a tree, a lean-to or palm frond shelter containing four or five very bored young soldiers wearing odd scraps of uniform. You had to slow down and halt whenever you saw one of these oil drums. Someone would peer at you and then, usually, motion you onward with a lethargic wave. If they were feeling bloody-minded they would make you step out of your vehicle, examine your papers and make a cursory search.

These were the moments I did not enjoy particularly: standing in the sun beside the Land-Rover being scrutinized by a young man in a torn undershirt, camouflage trousers and baseball boots, with an ex-Warsaw Pact AK47 slung over his shoulder. It always seemed especially quiet at that moment. It made me want to shift my feet, or cough, just to break the silence that pressed around me as the soldier examined my laisser-passer. In the half dozen times I had been stopped, never once had another car or lorry driven by. It was as if the road belonged exclusively to me.

On this journey, though, we were being waved through without exception. The mood of the men seemed more jocular, and more than once as I had driven off I had seen beer bottles being raised to lips. I remembered what Alda had told me about the defeat of UNAMO forces. Perhaps this was a prearmistice relaxation and the war would be over soon.

We reached the Cabule River by late afternoon. The ramshackle buildings on the far bank marked the outskirts of the town. Our wheels rattled noisily on the metal planking of the ancient iron bridge. The river was four hundred yards wide here. It took a great slow swerve around the town before disgorging its brown water into the dank creeks of its mangrove-clogged delta ten miles away down the coast. The edge of the continent ran straight here-mile after mile of beach and thundering surf. The silty Cabule was navigable only by vessels of the shallowest draft. All the bauxite from the mines-this province's major source of wealth-had to be transported to the capital and its harbor by rail. Bauxite mines, some timber, a few sugar and rubber plantations, sharecropping and the Grosso Arvore National Park were all this area of the country had to recommend it.

I drove slowly through the town. On either side of the road were deep ditches. A few brick buildings housed empty shops and drinking dens. In the mud-walled compounds beyond them smoke rose from charcoal fires as the evening meal was prepared. The first neon lights-ultramarine and peppermint-flickered in the shack-bars and on the concrete terraces of the hotel-brothels and nightclubs. Music bellowed from loudspeakers perched on roofs or hung from rafters. In the crawling traffic, taxi drivers sat with their fists pressed on their horns. Children knocked on the side of the Land-Rover trying to sell me Russian watches, feather dusters, yo-yos, felt-tip pens, pineapples and tomatoes. There were many soldiers on the streets, carrying their weapons as unconcernedly as newspapers. Old men sat on benches beneath the dusty shade trees and watched naked children spin hoops and chase each other in and out of the rubbish bins. At an uneven table two young spivs with shiny shirts played stylish Ping-Pong, stamping their feet in the dust and uttering hoarse cries of bravado as they ruthlessly smashed and countersmashed.

The press of traffic nudged its way through the town center, past the five-story department store and the mosaic-walled national bank with its swooping modernist roof; past the white cathedral and the brutalist Department of Mines; past the police station and the police barracks, with its flagpole and ornamental cannons, the neat stacked pyramids of cannonballs like the swart droppings of some giant rodent.

Then we turned and headed back north again on the new road to the airport, past the hospital and the exclusive, fenced-in suburbs. We drove past the convent school-St. Encarnacin-past the shoe factory and the motor parks. The setting sun basted everything with a gentle peachy light.

The airport was far too large for such an undistinguished provincial capital. Built shortly after independence in 1964 by the West German company that owned and ran the bauxite mines, it was designed to take the largest commercial jets (optimism is free, after all). A sprawling modern hotel was constructed nearby to accommodate all the projected passengers. The bauxite was still being extracted, the mines and the processing plants functioned, after a fashion, but the airport and its white hotel were always heading for decline and desuetude. Five arrivals and departures a day were all it boasted, domestic flights linking other provincial cities. Air Zambia flew in once a week from Lusaka, but the much heralded UTA link to Brazzaville and Paris became another casualty of the civil war when rumors spread that FIDE, or was it EMLA?, had been sold ground-to-air missiles by the North Koreans.

The war had benefited the airport in other respects, however. Half the federal government's air force was based there now: a near squadron of Mig 15 "Fagot" fighters, three ex-RAF Canberra bombers, half a dozen Aermacchi trainers converted to ground attack and assorted helicopters. As we drove past the perimeter fence I could see the old Fokker Friendship revving up at the end of the runway about to depart on its evening flight to the capital, and beyond it, in their bays, the tubby, tilted-back silhouettes of the Migs.

At the hotel I said good night to Martim and Vemba, agreed to the time of our rendezvous the next morning, and checked in. The hotel was distinctly shabby these days, all incentive to keep it spruced up having long gone, but, after weeks at Grosso Arvore and my tent, it seemed to me still redolent of a tawdry but alluring glamour. It had a restaurant, a cocktail bar and a half olympic-sized swimming pool with a barbecue area. Its rooms were contained in two-story annexes, connected to the main building by roofed-over walkways that passed through tropical gardens. Scattered here and there were one- and two-bedroom bungalows for those guests who planned a longer stay. Sometimes, piped Latin-American music was played in the lobby. The staff wore white, high-collared jackets with gold buttons. At the entrance to the restaurant a notice requested, in English: LADIES PLEASE NO SHORTS. GENTLEMEN PLEASE TIES. Whether it was the ghosts from the heady days of the bauxite factory contractors' ball, or the still lingering pretensions of the current management, the Airport Hotel (this was its evocative name) had an ambience all its own. It also had air conditioning, sometimes, and hot and cold running water, sometimes, both luxuries that were permanently absent at Grosso Arvore.

I walked through the unkempt gardens to my room, unpacked, had a shower and changed into a dress. I felt fresh, cool and hungry.

I strolled along a walkway to the main building. It was now quite dark and the warmth of the night air, after the chill of my room, seemed to lie gently on my clean bare arms and shoulders like a muslin shawl. I could hear some rumba Muzak wafting over from the lobby's sound system and from all around me in the grass and bushes came the endless creek-creek of the crickets. I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa-smelling dust, woodsmoke, perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying.

I turned onto another path and quickened my pace toward one of the cottages. Its windows were shuttered but I could see light shining behind them.

I knocked on the door and waited. I knocked again and it was opened.

Usman Shoukry looked at me, not surprised, but trying not to smile. He was wearing loose linen shorts and a lilac T-shirt. His hair was shorter than the time I had last seen him.

"Look who's here," I said.

"Hope," he said, deliberately, as if he were christening me. "Come on in."

I did, and he shut the door. When I kissed him I stuck my tongue in his mouth and slipped my hands under his T-shirt and felt his back, running them up to his shoulder blades and then down beneath the waistband of his shorts, my palms resting lightly on his cool, hairless buttocks.