scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes
became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader
streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the
tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became
charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The
people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating
themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or
cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.

He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of
loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had
revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to
the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and
had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any
of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and
the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to
match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of
being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone
into a café and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a
wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of
an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who
had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not
lived up to their position as the brides of Christ. Dismal night,
forerunner of a hundred such. "Oh, God, what is the use of it all? I sit
here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl
who is sick to go to these countries from which I've come back cold and
famined...."

But he went on, since the occasion seemed to demand it, giving a gay
account of the beauty which he remembered so intensely because it had