Gifford lay back for a moment, thinking of Louise and Richard Lowry, the image of them together touching the barest residue of emotion. Then he tried to wave away the haze with his hand.
‘What’s that—?’
‘Sir?’
‘Damn it, I thought I saw one.’ He shook his head slowly as the white form he had fleetingly glimpsed vanished among the opalescent slopes. ‘Too early, though. Where’s that whisky?’
‘Coming, sir.’
Panting slightly after the exertion of sitting up, Gifford looked around restlessly at the clutter of tents. Diagonally behind him, emerging from the lengthening focus of his eyes, loomed the long ridges of the Toltec city. Somewhere among its spiral galleries and corridors were Louise and Richard Lowry. Looking down from one of the high terraces across the alluvial bench, the distant camp would seem like a few bleached husks, guarded by a dead man propped up in a chair.
‘Darling, I’m awfully sorry. We tried to get back but I twisted my heel — ‘ Louise Gifford laughed lightly at this ‘rather as you did, now that I come to think of it. Perhaps I’ll be joining you here in a day or two. I’m so glad Mechippe looked after you and changed the dressing. How do you feel? You look a lot better.’
Gifford nodded drowsily. The afternoon fever had subsided but he felt drained and exhausted, his awareness of his wife’s chattering presence only stimulated by the whisky he had been drinking slowly all day. ‘It’s been a day at the zoo,’ he said, adding, with tired humour: ‘At the reptile enclosure.’
‘You and your snakes. Charles, you are a scream.’ Louise paced around the stretcher-chair, downwind of the cradle, then withdrew to the lee-side. She waved to Richard Lowry, who was carrying some specimen trays into his tent. ‘Dick, I suggest we shower and then join Charles for drinks.’
‘Great idea,’ Lowry called back. ‘How is he?’
‘Much better.’ To Gifford she said: ‘You don’t mind, Charles? It will do you good to talk a little.’
Gifford gestured vaguely with his head. When his wife had gone to her tent he focused his eyes carefully on the beaches. There, in the evening light, the snakes festered and writhed, their long forms gliding in and out of each other, the whole darkening horizon locked together by their serpentine embrace. There were now literally tens of thousands of them, reaching beyond the margins of the beach across the open ground towards the camp. During the afternoon, at the height of his fever, he had tried to call to them, but his voice had been too weak.
Later, over their cocktails, Richard Lowry asked: ‘How do you feel, sir?’ When Gifford made no reply he said: ‘I’m glad to hear the leg is better.’
‘You know, Dick, I think it’s psychological,’ Louise remarked. ‘As soon as you and I are out of the way Charles improves.’ Her eyes caught Richard Lowry’s and held them.
Lowry played with his glass, a faintly self-assured smile on his bland face. ‘What about the messenger? Is there any news?’
‘Have you heard anything, Charles? Perhaps someone will fly over in a couple of days.’
During this exchange of pleasantries, and those which followed on the subsequent days, Charles Gifford remained silent and withdrawn, sinking more deeply into the interior landscape emerging from the beaches of the delta. His wife and Richard Lowry sat with him in the evenings when they returned from the terrace city, but he was barely aware of their presence. By now they seemed to move in a peripheral world, players in a marginal melodrama. Now and then he would think about them, but the effort seemed to lack point. His wife’s involvement with Lowry left him unperturbed; if anything, he felt grateful to Lowry for freeing him from Louise.
Once, two or three days later, when Lowry came to sit by him in the evening, Gifford roused himself and said dryly: ‘I hear you found treasure in the terrace city.’ But before Lowry could produce a reply he relapsed again into his vigil.
One night shortly afterwards, when he was woken in the early hours of the morning by a sudden spasm of pain in his foot, he saw his wife and Lowry walking through the powdery blue darkness by the latter’s tent. For a fleeting moment their embracing figures were like the snakes coiled together on the beaches.
‘Mechippe!’
‘Doctor?’
‘Mechippe!’
‘I am here, sir.’
‘Tonight, Mechippe,’ Gifford told him, ‘you sleep in my tent. Understand? I want you near me. Use my bed, if you want. Will you hear if I call?’
‘Of course, sir. I hear you.’ The head-boy’s polished ebony face regarded Gifford circumspectly. He now tended Gifford with a care that indicated that the latter, however much a novice, had at last entered the world of absolute values, composed of the delta and the snakes, the brooding presence of the Toltec ruin and his dying leg.
