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the inertia of sexual conventions, and his own reluctance to involve himself intimately with others, had slipped away. In addition he felt that the past day at Port Matarre, the ambivalent atmosphere of the deserted town, in some way placed them at a pivotal point below the dark and white shadows of the equinox. At these moments of balance any act was possible.
    As they reached his door Louise drew her hand away and stepped forward into the darkened room. Sanders followed her and closed the door. Louise turned toward him, the pale light from the neon sign below illuminating one side of her face and mouth. Knocking her glasses to the floor as their hands brushed, Sanders held her in his arms, freeing himself for the moment from Suzanne Clair and the dark image of her face that floated like a dim lantern before his eyes.
     
    Shortly after midnight, as Sanders lay asleep across the pillow on his bed, he woke to feel Louise touch his shoulder.
    "Louise-?" He reached up and put his arm around her waist, but she disengaged his hand. "What is it-?"
    "The window. Go to the window and look up to the southeast."
    "What-?" Sanders gazed at her serious face, beckoning him across the room in the moonlight. "Of course, Louise-"
    She waited by the bed as he crossed the faded carpet and unlatched the mosquito doors. Peering upward, he stared into the star-filled sky. In front of him, at an elevation of forty-five degrees, he picked out the constellations Taurus and Orion. Passing them was a star of immense magnitude, a huge corona of light borne in front of it and eclipsing the smaller stars in its path. At first Sanders failed to recognize this as the Echo satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least tenfold, transforming the thin pinpoint of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jeweled flowers that afternoon.
    Thinking lamely that perhaps the balloon might be breaking up, forming a cloud of aluminum like a gigantic mirror, Dr. Sanders watched the satellite setting in the southeast. As it faded, the dark canopy of the jungle flickered with a million points of light. Beside him Louise's white body glittered in a sheath of diamonds, the black surface of the river below spangled like the back of a sleeping snake.

3 Mulatto on the catwalks
    In the darkness the worn columns of the arcade receded toward the eastern fringes of the town like pale ghosts, overtopped by the silent canopy of the forest. Sanders stopped outside the entrance of the hotel, and let the night air play on his creased suit. The faint odor of Louise's scent still clung to his face and hands. He stepped out into the road and looked up at his window. Unsettled by the image of the satellite, which had crossed the night sky like a warning beacon, Sanders had left the narrow, high-ceilinged hotel room and decided to go out for a walk. As he set off along the arcade toward the river, now and then passing the huddled form of a native asleep inside a roll of corrugated paper, he thought of Louise, with her quick smile and nervous hands, and her obsessional sunglasses. For the first time he felt convinced of the complete reality of Port Matarre. Already his memories of the _leproserie_ and Suzanne Clair had faded. In some ways his journey to Mont Royal had lost its point. If anything, it would have made more sense to take Louise back to Fort Isabelle and try to work out his life afresh there in terms of her rather than Suzanne.
    Yet the need to find Suzanne Clair, whose distant presence, like a baleful planet, hung over the jungle toward Mont Royal, still remained. For Louise, too, he sensed that there were other preoccupations. She had told him something of her unsettled background, a childhood in one of the French communities in