"Yes. But found out hardly more than Stencil has told you." Which was the case. Florence only a few summers ago had seemed crowded with the same tourists as at the turn of the century. But V., whoever she was, might have been swallowed in the airy Renaissance spaces of that city, assumed into the fabric of any of a thousand Great Paintings, for all Stencil was able to determine. He had discovered, however, what was pertinent to his purpose: that she'd been connected, though perhaps only tangentially, with one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities in the years preceding the Great War. V. and a conspiracy. Its particular shape governed only by the surface accidents of history at the time.

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

I.

In April of 1899 young Evan Godolphin, daft with the spring and sporting a costume too Esthetic for such a fat boy, pranced into Florence. Camouflaged by a gorgeous sunshower which had burst over the city at three in the afternoon, his face was the color of a freshly-baked pork pie and as noncommittal. Alighting at the Stazione Centrale he flagged down an open cab with his umbrella of cerise sills, roared the address of his hotel to a Cook's luggage agent and, with a clumsy entrechat deux and a jolly-ho to no one in particular, leaped in and was driven earoling away down Via dei Panzani. He had come to meet his old father, Captain Hugh, F.R.G.S. and explorer of the Antarctic - at least such was the ostensible reason. He was, however, the sort of ne'er-do-well who needs no reason for anything, ostensible or otherwise. The family called him Evan the Oaf. In return, in his more playful moments, he referred to all other Godolphins as The Establishment. But like his other utterances, there was no rancor here: in his early youth he had looked aghast at Dickens's Fat Boy as a challenge to his faith in all fat boys as innately Nice Fellows, and subsequently worked as hard at contradicting that insult to the breed as he did at being a ne'er-do-well. For despite protests from the Establishment to the contrary, shiftlessness did not come easily to Evan. He was not, though fond of his father, much of a conservative; for as long as he could remember he had labored beneath the shadow of Captain Hugh, a hero of the Empire, resisting any compulsion to glory which the name Godolphin might have implied for himself. But this was a characteristic acquired from the age, and Evan was too nice a fellow not to turn with the century. He had dallied for a while with the idea of getting a commission and going to sea; not to follow in his old father's wake but simply to get away from the Establishment. His adolescent mutterings in times of family stress were all prayerful, exotic syllables: Bahrein, Dar es Salaam, Samarang. But in his second year at Dartmouth, he was expelled for leading a Nihilist group called the League of the Red Sunrise, whose method of hastening the revolution was to hold mad and drunken parties beneath the Commodore's window. Flinging up their collective arms at last in despair, the family exiled him to the Continent, hoping, possibly, that he would stage some prank harmful enough to society to have him put away in a foreign prison.

At Deauville, recuperating after two months of goodnatured lechery in Paris, he'd returned to his hotel one evening 17,000 francs to the good and grateful to a bay named Cher Ballon, to find a telegram from Captain Hugh which said; "Hear you were sacked. If you need someone to talk to I am at Piazza della Signoria 5 eighth floor. I should like very much to see you son. Unwise to say too much in telegram. Vheissu. You understand. FATHER."

Vheissu, of course. A summons he couldn't ignore, Vheissu. He understood. Hadn't it been their only nexus for longer than Evan could remember; had it not stood preeminent in his catalogue of outlandish regions where the Establishment held no sway? It was something which, to his knowledge, Evan alone shared with his father, though he himself had stopped believing in the place around the age of sixteen. His first impression on reading the wire - that Captain Hugh was senile at last, or raving, or both - was soon replaced by a more charitable opinion. Perhaps, Evan reasoned, his recent expedition to the South had been too much for the old boy. But on route to Pisa, Evan had finally begun to feel disquieted at the tone of the thing. He'd taken of late to examining everything in print - menus, railway timetables, posted advertisements for literary merit; he belonged to a generation of young men who no longer called their fathers pater because of an understandable confusion with the author of The Renaissance, and was sensitive to things like tone. And this had a je ne sais quoi de sinistre about it which sent pleasurable chills racing along his spinal column. His imagination ran riot. Unwise to say too much in telegram: intimations of a plot, a cabal grand and mysterious: combined with that appeal to their only common possession. Either by itself would have made Evan ashamed: ashamed at hallucinations belonging in a spy thriller, even more painfully ashamed for an attempt at something which should have existed but did not, based only on the sharing long ago of a bedside story. But both, together, were like a parlay of horses, capable of a whole arrived at by same operation more alien than simple addition of parts.

He would see his father. In spite of the heart's vagrancy, the cerise umbrella, the madcap clothes. Was rebellion in his blood? He'd never been troubled enough to wonder. Certainly the League of the Red Sunrise had been no more than a jolly lark; he couldn't yet become serious over politics. But he had a mighty impatience with the older generation, which is almost as good as open rebellion. He became more bored with talk of Empire the further he lumbered upward out of the slough of adolescence; shunned every hint of glory like the sound of a leper's rattle. China, the Sudan, the East Indies, Vheissu had served their purpose: given him a sphere of influence roughly congruent with that of his skull, private colonies of the imagination whose borders were solidly defended against the Establishment's incursions or depredations. He wanted to be left alone, never to "do well" in his own way, and would defend that oaf's integrity to the last lazy heartbeat.

The cab swung left, crossing the tram tracks with two bone-rattling jolts, and then right again into Via dei Vechietti. Evan shook four fingers in the air and swore at the driver, who smiled absently. A tram came blithering up behind them; drew abreast. Evan turned his head and saw a young girl in dimity blinking huge eyes at him.

"Signorina," he cried, "ah, brava fanciulla, sei tu inglesa?"

She blushed and began to study the embroidery on her parasol. Evan stood up on the cab's seat, postured, winked, began to sing Deh, vieni alla finestra from Don Giovanni. Whether or not she understood Italian, the song had a negative effect: she withdrew from the window and hid among a mob of Italians standing in the center aisle. Evan's driver chose this moment to lash the horses into a gallop and swerve across the tracks again, in front of the tram. Evan, still singing, lost his balance and fell halfway over the back of the carriage. He managed to catch hold of the boot's top with one flailing arm and after a deal of graceless floundering to haul himself back in. By this time they were in Via Pecori. He looked back and saw the girl getting out of the tram. He sighed as his cab bounced on past Giotto's Campanile, still wondering if she were English.

II.

In front of a wine shop on the Ponte Vecchio sat Signor Mantissa and his accomplice in crime, a seedy-looking Calabrese named Cesare. Both were drinking Broglio wine and feeling unhappy. It had occurred to Cesare sometime during the rain that he was a steamboat. Now that the rain was only a slight drizzle the English tourists were beginning to emerge once more from the shops lining the bridge, and Cesare was announcing his discovery to those who came within earshot. He would emit short blasts across the mouth of the wine bottle to encourage the illusion. "Toot," he would go, "toot. Vaporetto, io."

Signor Mantissa was not paying attention. His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith - even Cellini - shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction. His eyes were streaked and rimmed with the pinkness of what seemed to be years of lamenting. Sunlight, bouncing off the Arno, off the fronts of shops, fractured into spectra by the falling rain, seemed to tangle or lodge in his blond hair, eyebrows, mustache, turning that face to a mask of inaccessible ecstasy; contradicting the sorrowing and weary eyeholes. You would be drawn inevitably again to these eyes, linger as you might have on the rest of the face: any Visitors' Guide to Signor Mantissa must accord them an asterisk denoting especial interest. Though offering no clue to their enigma; for they reflected a free-floating sadness, unfocused, indeterminate: a woman, the casual tourist might think at first, be almost convinced until some more catholic light moving in and out of a web of capillaries would make him not so sure. What then? Politics, perhaps. Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a poet-liberal. But if he kept watching long enough the plasma behind those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of grief - financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith, betrayal, impotence, loss - until eventually it would dawn on our tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a street-long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at.

The reason was obvious and disappointing: simply that Signor Mantissa himself had been through them all, each booth was a permanent exhibit in memory of some time in his life when there had been a blond seamstress in Lyons, or an abortive plot to smuggle tobacco over the Pyrenees, or a minor assassination attempt in Belgrade. All his reversals had occurred, had been registered: he had assigned each one equal weight, had learned nothing from any of them except that they would happen again. Like Machiavelli he was in exile, and visited by shadows of rhythm and decay. He mused inviolate by the serene river of Italian pessimism, and all men were corrupt: history would continue to recapitulate the same patterns. There was hardly ever a dossier on him, wherever in the world his tiny, nimble feet should happen to walk. No one in authority seemed to care. He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers whose eyesight was clouded over only by occasional tears, whose outer rim was tangent to rims enclosing the Decadents of England and France, the Generation of '98 in Spain, for whom the continent of Europe was like a gallery one is familiar with but long weary of, useful now only as shelter from the rain, or some obscure pestilence.

Cesare drank from the wine bottle. He sang: Il piove, dolor mia Ed anch'io piango . . .

"No," said Signor Mantissa, waving away the bottle. "No more for me till he arrives."

"There are two English ladies," Cesare cried. "I will sing to them."

"For God's sake -"

Vedi, donna vezzosa, questo poveretto, Sempre cantante d'amore come - "Be quiet, can't you."

"-un vaporetto." Triumphantly he boomed a hundred-cycle note across the Ponte Vecchio. The English ladies cringed and passed on.

After a while Signor Mantissa reached under his chair, coming up with a new fiasco of wine.

"Here is the Gaucho," he said. A tall, lumbering person in a wideawake hat loomed over them, blinking curiously.

Biting his thumb irritably at Cesare, Signor Mantissa found a corkscrew; gripped the bottle between his knees, drew the cork. The Gaucho straddled a chair backwards and took a long swallow from the wine bottle.

"Broglio," Signor Mantissa said, "the finest."

The Gaucho fiddled absently with his hatbrim. Then burst out: "I'm a man of action, signor, I'd rather not waste time. Allora. To business. I have considered your plan. I asked for no details last night. I dislike details. As it was, the few you gave me were superfluous. I'm sorry, I have many objections. It is much too subtle. There are too many things that can go wrong. How many people are in it now? You, myself and this lout." Cesare beamed. "Two too many. You should have done it all alone. You mentioned wanting to bribe one of the attendants. It would make four. How many more will have to be paid off, consciences set at ease. Chances arise that someone can betray us to the guardie before this wretched business is done?"

Signor Mantissa drank, wiped his mustaches, smiled painfully. "Cesare is able to make the necessary contacts," he protested, "he's below suspicion, no one notices him. The river barge to Pisa, the boat from there to Nice, who should have arranged these if not -"

"You, my friend," the Gaucho said menacingly, prodding Signor Mantissa in the ribs with the corkscrew. "You, alone. Is it necessary to bargain with the captains of barges and boats? No: it is necessary only to get on board, to stow away. From there on in, assert yourself. Be a man. If the person in authority objects -" He twisted the corkscrew savagely, furling several square inches of Signor Mantissa's white linen shirt around it. "Capisci?"

Signor Mantissa, skewered like a butterfly, flapped his arms, grimaced, tossed his golden head.

"Certo io," he finally managed to say, "of course, signor commendatore, to the military mind . . . direct action, of course . . . but in such a delicate matter . . ."

"Pah!" The Gaucho disengaged the corkscrew, sat glaring at Signor Mantissa. The rain had stopped, the sun was setting. The bridge was thronged with tourists, returning to their hotels on the Lungarno. Cesare gazed benignly at them. The three sat in silence until the Gaucho began to talk, calmly but with an undercurrent of passion.

"Last year in Venezuela it was not like this. Nowhere in America was it like this, There were no twistings, no elaborate maneuverings. The conflict was simple: we wanted liberty, they didn't want us to have it. Liberty or slavery, my Jesuit friend, two words only. It needed none of your extra phrases, your tracts, none of your moralizing, no essays on political justice. We knew where we stood, and where one day we would stand. And when it came to the fighting we were equally as direct. You think you are being Machiavellian with all these artful tactics. You once heard him speak of the lion and the fox and now your devious brain can see only the fox. What has happened to the strength, the aggressiveness, the natural nobility of the lion? What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?"

Signor Mantissa had regained some of his composure. "It is necessary to have both, of course," he said placatingly. "Which is why I chose you as a collaborator, commendatore. You are the lion, I -" humbly - "a very small fox."

"And he is the pig," the Gaucho roared, clapping Cesare on the shoulder. "Bravo! A fine cadre."

"Pig," said Cesare happily, making a grab for the wine bottle.

"No more," the Gaucho said. "The signor here has taken the trouble to build us all a house of cards. Much as I dislike living in it, I won't permit your totally drunken breath to blow it over in indiscreet talk." He turned back to Signor Mantissa. "No," he continued, "you are not a true Machiavellian. He was an apostle of freedom for all men. Who can read the last chapter of Il Principe and doubt his desire for a republican and united Italy? Right over there -" he gestured toward the left bank, the sunset "he lived, suffered under the Medici. They were the foxes, and he hated them. His final exhortation is for a lion, an embodiment of power, to arise in Italy and run all foxes to earth forever. His morality was as simple and honest as my own and my comrades' in South America. And now, under his banner, you wish to perpetuate the detestable cunning of the Medici, who suppressed freedom in this very city for so long. I am dishonored irrevocably, merely having associated with you."

"If -" again the pained smile - "if the commendatore has perhaps some alternative plan, we should be happy . . ."

"Of course there's another plan," the Gaucho retorted, "the only plan. Here, you have a map?" Eagerly Signor Mantissa produced from an inside pocket a folded diagram, hand-sketched in pencil. The Gaucho peered at it distastefully. "So that is the Uffizi," he said. "I've never been inside the place. I suppose I shall have to, to get the feel of the terrain. And where is the objective?"

Signor Mantissa pointed to the lower left-hand corner. "The Sala di Lorenzo Monaco," he said. "Here, you see. I have already had a key made for the main entrance. Three main corridors: east, west, and a short one on the south connecting them. From the west corridor, number three, we enter a smaller one here, marked 'Ritratti diversi.' At the end, on the right, is a single entrance to the gallery. She hangs on the western wall."

"A single entrance which is also the single exit," the Gaucho said. "Not good. A dead end. And to leave the building itself one must go all the way back up the eastern corridor to the steps leading to Piazza della Signoria."

"There is a lift," said Signor Mantissa, "leading to a passage which lets one out in the Palazzo Vecchio."

"A lift," the Gaucho sneered. "About what I'd expect from you." He leaned forward, baring his teeth. "You already propose to commit an act of supreme idiocy by walking all the way down one corridor, along another, halfway up a third, down one more into a cul-de-sac and then out again the same way you came in. A distance of -" he measured rapidly - "some six hundred meters, with guards ready to jump out at you every time you pass a gallery or turn a corner. But even this isn't confining enough for you. You must take a lift."

"Besides which," Cesare put in, "she's so big."

The Gaucho clenched one fist. "How big."

"175 by 279 centimeters," admitted Signor Mantissa.

"Capo di minghe!" The Gaucho sat back, shaking his head. With an obvious effort at controlling his temper, he addressed Signor Mantissa. "I'm not a small man," he explained patiently. "In fact I am rather a large man. And broad. I am built like a lion. Perhaps it's a racial trait. I come from the north, and there may be some tedesco blood in these veins. The tedeschi are taller than the Latin races. Taller and broader. Perhaps someday this body will run to fat, but now it is all muscle. So, I am big, non e vero? Good. Then let me inform you -" his voice rising in violent crescendo - "that there would be room enough under your damnable Botticelli for me and the fattest whore in Florence, with plenty left over for her elephant of a mother to act as chaperone! How in God's name do you intend to walk 300 meters with that? Will it be hidden in your pocket?"

"Calm, commendatore," Signor Mantissa pleaded. "Anyone might be listening. It is a detail, I assure you. Provided for. The florist Cesare visited last night -"

"Florist. Florist: you've let a florist into your confidence. Wouldn't it make you happier to publish your intentions in the evening newspapers?"

"But he is safe. He is only providing the tree."

"The tree."

"The Judas tree. Small: some four meters, no taller. Cesare has been at work all morning, hollowing out the trunk. So we shall have to execute our plans soon, before the purple flowers die."

"Forgive what may be my appalling stupidity," the Gaucho said, "but as I understand it, you intend to roll up the Birth of Venus, hide it in the hollow trunk of a Judas tree, and carry it some 300 meters, past an army of guards who will soon be aware of its theft, and out into Piazza della Signoria, where presumably you will then lose yourself in the crowds?"

"Precisely. Early evening would be the best time -"

"A rivederci."

Signor Mantissa leaped to his feet. "I beg you, commendatore," he cried. "Aspetti. Cesare and I will be disguised as workmen, you see. The Uffizi is being redecorated, there will be nothing unusual -"

"Forgive me," the Gaucho said, "you are both lunatics."

"But your cooperation is essential. We need a lion, someone skilled in military tactics, in strategy . . ."

"Very well." The Gaucho retraced his steps and stood towering over Signor Mantissa. "I suggest this: the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco has windows, does it not?"

"Heavily barred."

"No matter. A bomb, a small bomb, which I'll provide. Anyone who tries to interfere will be disposed of by force. The window should let us out next to the Posta Centrale. Your rendezvous with the barge?"

"Under the Ponte San Trinita."

"Some four or five hundred yards up the Lungamo. We can commandeer a carriage. Have your barge waiting at midnight tonight. That's my proposal. Take it or leave it. I shall be at the Uffizi till supper time, reconnoitering. From then till nine, at home making the bomb. After that, at Scheissvogel's, the birriere. Let me know by ten."

"But the tree, commendatore. It cost close to 200 lire."

"Damn your tree." With a smart about-face the Gaucho turned and strode away in the direction of the right bank.

The sun hovered over the Arno. Its declining rays tinged the liquid gathering in Signor Mantissa's eyes to a pale red, as if the wine he'd drunk were overflowing, watered down with tears.

Cesare let a consoling arm fall round Signor Mantissa's thin shoulders. "It will go well," he said. "The Gaucho is a barbarian. He's been in the jungles too long. He doesn't understand."

"She is so beautiful," Signor Mantissa whispered.

"Davvero. And I love her too. We are comrades in love." Signor Mantissa did not answer. After a little while he reached for the wine.

III.

Miss Victoria Wren, late of Lardwick-in-the-Fen, Yorks., recently self-proclaimed a citizen of the world, knelt devoutly in the front pew of a church just off Via dello Studio. She was saying an act of contrition. An hour before, in the Via dei Vecchietti, she'd had impure thoughts while watching a fat English boy cavort in a cab; she was now being heartily sorry for them. At nineteen she'd already recorded a serious affair: having the autumn before in Cairo seduced one Goodfellow, an agent of the British Foreign Office. Such is the resilience of the young that his face was already forgotten. Afterward they'd both been quick to blame the violent emotions which arise during any tense international situation (this was at the time of the Fashoda crisis) for her deflowering. Now, six or seven months later, she found it difficult to determine how much she had in fact planned, how much had been out of her control. The liaison had in due course been discovered by her widowed father Sir Alastair, with whom she and her sister Mildred were traveling. There were words, sobbings, threats, insults, late one afternoon under the trees in the Ezbekiyeh Garden, with little Mildred gazing struck and tearful at it all while God knew what scars were carved into her. At length Victoria had ended it with a glacial good-bye and a vow never to return to England; Sir Alastair had nodded and taken Mildred by the hand. Neither had looked back.

Support after that was readily available. By prudent saving Victoria had amassed some 400 pounds from a wine merchant in Antibes, a Polish cavalry lieutenant in Athens, an art dealer in Rome; she was in Florence now to negotiate the purchase of a small couturiere's establishment on the left bank. A young lady of enterprise, she found herself acquiring political convictions, beginning to detest anarchists, the Fabian Society, even the Earl of Rosebery. Since her eighteenth birthday she had been carrying a certain innocence like a penny candle, sheltering the flame under a ringless hand still soft with baby fat, redeemed from all stain by her candid eyes and small mouth and a girl's body entirely honest as any act of contrition. So she knelt unadorned save for an ivory comb, gleaming among all the plausibly English quantities of brown hair. An ivory comb, five-toothed: whose shape was that of five crucified, all sharing at least one common arm. None of them was a religious figure: they were soldiers of the British Army. She had found the comb in one of the Cairo bazaars. It had apparently been hand-carved by a Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an artisan among the Mahdists, in commemoration of the crucifixions of '83, in the country east of invested Khartoum. Her motives in buying it may have been as instinctive and uncomplex as those by which any young girl chooses a dress or gewgaw of a particular hue and shape.

Now she did not regard her time with Goodfellow or with the three since him as sinful: she only remembered Goodfellow at all because he had been the first. It was not that her private, outre brand of Roman Catholicism merely condoned what the Church as a whole regarded as sin: this was more than simple sanction, it was implicit acceptance of the four episodes as outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace belonging to Victoria alone. Perhaps it was a few weeks she had spent as a girl in the novitiate, preparing to become a sister, perhaps some malady of the generation; but somehow at age nineteen she had crystallized into a nunlike temperament pushed to its most dangerous extreme. Whether she had taken the veil or not, it was as if she felt Christ were her husband and that the marriage's physical consummation must be achieved through imperfect, mortal versions of himself - of which there had been, to date, four. And he would continue to perform his husband's duties through as many more such agents as he deemed fit. It is easy enough to see where such an attitude might lead: in Paris similarly-minded ladies were attending Black Masses, in Italy they lived in Pre-Raphaelite splendor as the mistresses of archbishops or cardinals. It happened that Victoria was not so exclusive.

She arose and walked down the center aisle to the rear of the church. She'd dipped her fingers in holy water and was about to genuflect when someone collided with her from behind. She turned, startled, to see an elderly man a head shorter than herself, his hands held in front of him, his eyes frightened.

"You are English," he said.

"I am."

"You must help me. I am in trouble. I can't go to the Consul-General."

He didn't look like a beggar or a hard-up tourist. She was reminded somehow of Goodfellow. "Are you a spy, then?"

The old man laughed mirthlessly. "Yes. In a way I am engaged in espionage. But against my will, you know. I didn't want it this way:"

Distraught: "I want to confess, don't you see? I'm in a church, a church is where one confesses . . ."

"Come," she whispered.

"Not outside," he said. "The cafes are being watched."

She took his arm. "There is a garden in the back, I think. This way. Through the sacristy."

He let her guide him, docile. A priest was kneeling in the sacristy, reading his breviary. She handed him ten soldi as they passed. He didn't look up. A short groined arcade led into a miniature garden surrounded by mossy stone walls and containing a stunted pine, some grass and a carp pool. She led him to a stone bench by the pool. Rain came over the walls in occasional gusts. He carried a morning newspaper under his arm: now he spread sheets of it over the bench. They sat. Victoria opened her parasol and the old man took a minute lighting a Cavour. He sent a few puffs of smoke out into the rain, and began: "I don't expect you've ever heard of a place called Vheissu."

She had not.

He started telling her about Vheissu. How it was reached, on camel-back over a vast tundra, past the dolmens and temples of dead cities; finally to the banks of a broad river which never sees the sun, so thickly roofed is it with foliage. The river is traveled in long teak boats which are carved like dragons and paddled by brown men whose language is unknown to all but themselves. In eight days' time there is a portage over a neck of treacherous swampland to a green lake, and across the lake rise the first foothills of the mountains which ring Vheissu. Native guides will only go a short distance into these mountains. Soon they will turn back, pointing out the way. Depending on the weather, it is one to two more weeks over moraine, sheer granite and hard blue ice before the borders of Vheissu are reached.

"Then you have been there," she said.

He had been there. Fifteen years ago. And been fury-ridden since. Even in the Antarctic, huddling in hasty shelter from a winter storm, striking camp high on the shoulder of some as yet unnamed glacier, there would come to him hints of the perfume those people distill from the wings of black moths. Sometimes sentimental scraps of their music would seem to lace the wind; memories of their faded murals, depicting old battles and older love affairs among the gods, would appear without warning in the aurora.

"You are Godolphin," she said, as if she had always known.

He nodded, smiled vaguely. "I hope you are not connected with the press." She shook her head, scattering droplets of rain. "This isn't for general dissemination," he said, "and it may be wrong. Who am I to know my own motives. But I did foolhardy things."

"Brave things," she protested. "I've read about them. In newspapers, in books."

"But things which did not have to be done. The trek along the Barrier. The try for the Pole in June. June down there is midwinter. It was madness."

"It was grand." Another minute, he thought hopelessly, and she'd begin talking about a Union Jack flying over the Pole. Somehow this church towering Gothic and solid over their heads, the quietness, her impassivity, his confessional humor; he was talking too much, must stop. But could not.

"We can always so easily give the wrong reasons," he cried; "can say: the Chinese campaigns, they were for the Queen, and India for some gorgeous notion of Empire. I know. I have said these things to my men, the public, to myself. There are Englishmen dying, in South Africa today and about to die tomorrow who believe these words as - I dare say as you believe in God."

She smiled secretly. "And you did not?" she asked gently. She was gazing at the rim of her parasol.

"I did. Until . . ."

"Yes."

"But why? Have you never harrowed yourself halfway to - disorder - with that single word? Why." His cigar had gone out. He paused to relight it. "It's not," he continued, "as if it were unusual in any supernatural way. No high priests with secrets lost to the rest of the world, jealously guarded since the dawn of time, generation to generation. No universal cures, nor even panaceas for human suffering. Vheissu is hardly a restful place. There's barbarity, insurrection, internecine feud. It's no different from any other godforsakenly remote region. The English have been jaunting in and out of places like Vheissu for centuries. Except . . ."

She had been gazing at him. The parasol leaned against the bench, its handle hidden in the wet grass.

"The colors. So many colors." His eyes were tightly closed, his forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. "The trees outside the head shaman's house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the sunlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived inside a madman's kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape."

She was taken by surprise: her laugh was high and brittle. He hadn't heard. "They stay with you," he went on, "they aren't fleecy lambs or jagged profiles. They are, they are Vheissu, its raiment, perhaps its skin."

"And beneath?"