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You are also responsible, he interrupted. You also chose to go there. I have rented to journalists before. I know how you are (this last he said with stunning contempt).

I promise you, if you disturb Mr. B.'s family in any way you will receive no help from me, I said. I will not be happy. Right now I am very happy because I enjoy talking to you so much. If you bother anyone but me I will be quite unhappy. Then maybe I will not be very nice.

You were very lucky, he said. So you must pay.

We understand each other there, I said. What you say is very true and relevant to all walks of life. Thank you for imparting your philosophy to me.

His cellular phone rang just then, so he had to go off to Sunday dinner with his family. He was eager to go now because the food would soon be getting cold. Before, his business with me had been quite urgent. I offered to buy him a drink and show him still more photographs of my friends' mutilated bodies, but he would not stay. So I sat alone on the bed, looking at the damage estimate, which was typed in a language I could not read, and I was unable either to laugh or to cry.

Peter returned to the mount called Olivet whenever he could, at first because he sought yet for signs of Him Whom he worshipped, but once he'd taken upon himself the first black mantle of priesthood, once he had founded his church, his craving for JESUS lost its ache and became instead a wholesome nostalgia: — This place, he said to himself, is where I became what I am. — And he meant this not out of any sinful pride, for he fully expected to die for the LORD as JESUS had done (and we know that in this he was to be gratified). So Peter walked the path of hardpacked quartz pebbles; his robe caught and tore on the gray bushes; he ascended the way his FRIEND had gone and looked up at Heaven until his face was sunburned; he sat on the spot where the two Angels had appeared, and there he rested all day, smiling with his head in his hands. In the evenings that cut like blue and ancient knives, birds pelted the sky in droves, sounding their different notes, and the Joshua trees seemed to stretch upward as their shadows lengthened; His shadow must have become impossibly, mournfully elongated as He had risen (but the silhouette of His face would have remained as it was, a face of ordinary proportions, bowed upon a great pillar of cooling shadow) — and the Joshua trees whose arms invoked all directions like the crooked legs of spiders began to tremble in the wind, and the ridges to the west turned purple with black tree-dots, while the ridges to the east, receiving the last of the sun's low-slanting rays, glowed hot and pink above the darkness.