The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [42]
As Eric returned through the patio with the box of tea, Port came in the door from the street.
“Mr. Moresby!” he cried. “What a pleasant surprise!”
Port tried to keep his face from falling. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought I’d recognized your car outside.”
“Just one second. I’ve got to deliver this tea to Mother. She’s in the kitchen waiting for it.” He rushed through the side door, stepping on one of the obscene dogs that lay exhausted just inside in the dark. It yelped lengthily. Port hurried upstairs to Kit and imparted the latest bad news to her. A minute later Eric pounded on the door. “I say, do have tea with us in ten minutes in room eleven. How nice to see you, Mrs. Moresby.”
Room eleven was Mrs. Lyle’s, longer but no less bare than the others, and directly over the entrance. While she drank her tea, she kept rising from the bed where everyone was sitting for lack of chairs, going to the window and crying “Mosh! Mosh!” into the street.
Presently Port could no longer contain his curiosity. “What is that strange word you’re calling out the window, Mrs. Lyle? “
“I’m driving those thiving little niggers away from my car.”
“But what are you saying to them? Is it Arabic?”
“It’s French,” she said, “and it means get out.”
“I see. Do they understand it?”
“They’d jolly well better. More tea, Mrs. Moresby!”
Tunner had begged off, having heard enough about the Lyles from Kit’s description of Eric. According to Mrs. Lyle, Ain Krorfa was a charming town, especially the camel market, where there was a baby camel they must photograph. She had taken several shots of it that morning. “It’s too sweet,” she said. Eric sat devouring Port with his eyes. “He wants more money,” Port thought. Kit noticed his extraordinary expression, too, but she put a different interpretation on it.
When tea was over, and they were taking their leave, since they seemed to have exhausted all the possible subjects for conversation, Eric turned to Port. “If I don’t see you at dinner, I’ll drop in on you tonight afterward. What time do you go to bed?”
Port was vague. “Oh, any time, more or less. We’ll probably be out fairly late looking around the town.”
“Righto,” said Eric, patting his shoulder affectionately as he shut the door.
When they got back to Kit’s room she stood gazing out the window at the skeletal fig tree. “I wish we’d gone to Italy,” she said. Port looked up quickly. “Why do you say that? Is it because of them, because of the hotel?”
“Because of everything.” She turned toward him, smiling. “But I don’t really mean it. This is just the right hour to go out. Let’s.”
Ain Krorfa was beginning to awaken from its daily sun-drugged stupor. Behind the fort, which stood near the mosque on a high rocky hill that rose in the very middle of the town, the streets became informal, there were vestiges of the original haphazard design of the native quarter. In the stalls, whose angry lamps had already begun to gutter and flare, in the open cafes where the hashish smoke hung in the air, even in the dust of the hidden palm-bordered lanes, men squatted, fanning little fires, bringing their tin vessels of water to a boil, making their tea, drinking it.
“Teatime! They’re really Englishmen dressed for a masquerade,” said Kit. She and Port walked very slowly, hand in hand, perfectly in tune with the soft twilight. It was an evening that suggested languor rather than mystery.
They came to the river, here merely a flat expanse of white sand stretching away in the half light, and followed it a while until the sounds of the town became faint and high in the distance. Out here the dogs barked behind the walls, but the walls themselves were far from the river. Ahead of them a fire burned; seated by it was a solitary man playing a flute, and beyond him in the shifting shadows cast by the flames, a dozen or so camels rested, chewing solemnly on their cuds. The man looked toward them as they passed, but continued his music.