“What does he teach?” “I ... I’m not sure. No, don’t laugh. I only met him once. At a friend’s house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual.” “It must have been if you can’t recall what he said.” I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating ... I was almost jealous as a matter of principle. “I’m afraid I don’t make much sense.” She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. “Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children.” “What does he do? does he preach? work?” “I don’t know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven’t seen anyone who was there that evening since.” “But now you think you want to go back to find out?” “Yes. I’ve thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You’d think one would forget such a thing, but I haven’t.” “What was his name?” “Cave, I think. John Cave.” “A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.” Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that _this_ was to be Clarissa’s plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris’s own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf’s fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor’s chisel. TWO 1 I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips ... this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa’s comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also ... * * * * * It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I’ve heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.