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mental refugee of course, being Irish, but you miss our angoisse.’ What she is groping after is really the distinctive quality which emanates not from us but from the landscape — the metallic flavours of exhaustion which impregnate the airs of Mareotis.
    As she speaks I am thinking of the founders of the city, of the soldier-God in his glass coffin, the youthful body lapped in silver, riding down the river towards his tomb. Or of that great square negro head reverberating with a concept of God conceived in the spirit of pure intellectual play — Plotinus. It is as if the preoccupations of this landscape were centred somewhere out of reach of the average inhabitant — in a region where the flesh, stripped by over-indulgence of its final reticences, must yield to a preoccupation vastly more comprehensive: or perish in the kind of exhaustion represented by the works of the Mouseion, the guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses; the burning stupid metaphor of Berenice’s hair glittering in the night sky above Melissa’s sleeping face. ‘Ah!’ said Justine once ‘that there should be something free, something Polynesian about the licence in which we live.’ Or even Mediterranean, she might have added, for the connotation of every kiss would be different in Italy or Spain; here our bodies were chafed by the harsh desiccated winds blowing up out of the deserts of Africa and for love we were forced to substitute a wiser but crueller mental tenderness which emphasized loneliness rather than expurgated it.
    Now even the city had two centres of gravity — the true and magnetic north of its personality: and between them the temperament of its inhabitants sparked harshly like a leaky electric discharge. Its spiritual centre was the forgotten site of the Soma where once the confused young soldier’s body lay in its borrowed Godhead; its temporal site the Brokers’ Club where like Caballi* the cotton brokers sat to sip their coffee, puff rank cheroots and watch Capodistria — as people upon a river-bank will watch the progress of a fisherman or an artist. The one symbolized for me the great conquests of man in the realms of matter, space and time — which must inevitably yield their harsh knowledge of defeat to the conqueror in his coffin; the other was no symbol but the living limbo of free-will in which my beloved Justine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself. In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, ‘not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him’.* Anything pressed too far becomes a sin.
    Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher, and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism.
    That this identification was a true one I know — for much later when, with so many misgivings, she invited me to join the little circle which gathered every month about Balthazar, it was always what he had to say about gnosticism which most interested her. I remember her asking one night, so anxiously, so pleadingly if she had interpreted his thinking rightly: ‘I mean, that God neither created us nor wished us to be created, but that we are the work of an inferior deity, a Demiurge, who wrongly believed himself to be God? Heavens, how probable it seems; and this overweening hubris has