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accompanied the Deputy-Director, the area they were bound for in this vast country presented some possible threat which made the discreet, disguised-by-function presence of at least half his usual Security a precaution? So she and Gladwell were together on the back seat, very comfortable, he had no
need to give any attention to the road, his man at the wheel had the air of a horse making surely for the stable.
    It was far away. They rose and descended round a mountain pass, and caused people in two country towns to stare back at the majestic car’s glossy blackness as the populace in distant times and far countries must have watched a royal carriage go by. In the third town he stopped (the other journey, he’d paused at a roadside store), this time before the town’s landmark, a supermarket, and went in attended by the driver-bodyguard, perhaps only to carry provisions. She had her own secreted in her largest straw bag. The shaming resort to charity: a dose of sugar in place of an answer to the state of beggary. The children were there, the same children. She handed out a pack of sweets. The bodyguard and his charge returned loaded with food—must have been a long list from the wife. Then his man was in attendance on a visit to a liquor store behind the battered iron-pillared-and-roofed pavement that was the style of old frontier towns—along with the shopkeeper’s Jewish name was pioneer immigrant provenance: I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. Bottles clanked in the trunk as the car moved off and the driver-bodyguard was instructed in their language to halt and rearrange his packing of provisions. Once more, refreshment had been brought for her; this time it was imported mineral water.
    They talked between comfortable intervals—unlike his imposed silences—watching the country go by. The candelabra aloes were in bloom, flaming votive offerings to the ultimate cathedral that is the late winter sky when the heat has come, as it does, before the rains, a scouring to the bone that needs a term other than the one named Spring in Europe. The Cultural Attaché
of the British had remarked to her at dinner last week, August’s the cruellest month, not T. S. Eliot’s April.
    They came to the kind of terrain where activity by man has made savannah of what once was forest. Sparse scrub was nature’s attempt to return among weathered rubble, half-buried rust-encrusted unidentifiable iron parts, even a jagged section of a wall where foundations traced by weeds outlined what might have been a building. Beyond some sort of slag heaps a rise where the picked-over remains of what must have been elaborate structures—houses?—of a considerable size, in scale with the giant hulks of fallen trees too heavy to have been carted away for firewood, still made their statement as an horizon. In other parts of the country she had seen farmsteads abandoned by whites pillaged for whatever might be useful; nothing of this extent. —What was here?—
    â€”Used to be a mine. Long time ago. Before.—
    â€”Copper?—
    â€”Yes.—
    â€”But what happened? Why isn’t it still worked?—
    â€”I don’t know. Maybe the ore was finished—but in the war they say it was attacked and flooded, underground, the pumps were smashed. You can ask the Minister of Mines; the Buffalo Mine.—
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    There was a great deal of entertaining up at the Manager’s house, weekends. On Monday morning a member of the kitchen and ground staff whose job it was set off to walk fifty miles to town with the master’s note for the liquor store. A case of Scotch whisky. The man walked back with twelve bottles in the case on his head, arriving
Friday. Every Friday. The feat was a famous dinner-party story, each weekend: that’s my man—what heads they have, eh, thick as a log.
    A stop at the last town to buy supplies the driver-bodyguard loaded. I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. A case of Scotch whisky.