“That love in the first line. I'm sorry about that. I don't mean it, of course. It was just in the dream."

"All right, we’re scrapping it anyway." And she crumpled the work of three hours of darkness and threw it on the floor. Tetuani gladly picked it up and bore it off to nest with other garbage. "I think," she said, "we'll go for a walk. There's another sonnet we have to work out, isn't there?"

"Another?"

"One you mentioned yesterday. About the Revolt of the Angels or something."

“I’m not sure that I -" He frowned. She punched him vigorously on the arm, saying:

"Oh, don't dither so. We haven't much time." She led him out of the bar, stronger than she looked, and the customers, all of whom were new, assumed that Enderby was an old customer who had had enough.

"Look," Enderby said, when they stood on the esplanade, “I don't understand anything about this at all. Who are you? What right have you? Not," he added, "that I don't appreciate-But really, when you come to consider it -"

The wind whipped rather coldly, but she felt no cold, arms akimbo in her ridiculously brief dress. “You do waste time, don't you? Now how does it begin?"

They walked in the direction of the Medina, and he managed to hit some of it out into the wind. It was as though she were telling him to get it all up, better up than down.

Sick of the sycophantic singing, sick

Of every afternoon's compulsory games -

Sturdy palms set all along the sea-front, the fronds stirred by that wind. The donkeys with loaded panniers, an odd sneering camel.

“That's the general idea, isn't it? Heaven as a minor public school. Did you go to a minor public school?"

"I went,” said Enderby, "to a Catholic day-school." It was Friday, and the devout were shuffling to mosque. The imam or bilal or whatever he was was gargling over a loudspeaker. Brown men, of Rif or Berber stock, followed the voice, looking at her legs, though, with bright-eyed frank but hopeless desire. "It's a lot of superstitious nonsense," she said. "Don't, whatever the temptation, go back to it. Use it as mythology, pluck it bare of images, but don't ever believe in it again. Take the cash in hand and waive the rest."

"An indifferent poet, Fitzgerald." Enderby loved her for saying what she had said.

"Very well, let's have something better."

Sick of the little cliques of county names,

The timebomb in his brain began to tick -

Luncheon in a little restaurant crammed with camp military gear, not too far from the Hotel El Greco. It was run by two men in love with each other, one American, the other English. A handsome Moorish boy who waited on seemed himself in love with the Englishman, who was flaxen, bronzed, petulant and given to shouting at the cook. The Moor was not adept at hiding emotion: his big lower lip trembled and his eyes swam. Enderby and she had a thin dull goulash which she said loudly was bloody terrible. The English lover tossed his head and affricated petulantly against his alveolum, then turned up the music-a sexy cocksure American male voice singing, against a Mahlerian orchestra, thin dull café society songs of the ‘thirties. She prepared to shout that the bloody noise must be turned off: it was interfering with their rhythm. Enderby said:

"Don't. Please. I’ve got to live in this town."

“Yes," she said, her green eyes, their gold very much metal, hard on him. “You lack courage. You’ve been softened by somebody or something. You’re frightened of the young and the experimental and the way-out and the black dog. When Shelley said what he said about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he wasn't really using fancy language. It's only by the exact use of words that people can begin to understand themselves. Poetry isn't a silly little hobby to be practised in the smallest room of the house."

He blushed. “What can I do?”

She sighed. "Get all these old things out of your system first. Then push on."

Beating out number. As arithmetic,

As short division not divided aims,

Resentment flared. But then, carved out in flames,

He read: That flower is not for you to pick.

“It's time," she said, "you started work on a long poem."

"I tried that once. That bastard stole it and vulgarised it. But," and he looked downhill, seaward, "he's paid. Wrapped in a Union Jack, being gently gnawed." “You can get something here. This is a junction. Deucalion's flood and Noah's. Africa and Europe. Christianity and Islam. Past and future. The black and the white. Two rocks looking across at each other. The Straits may have a submarine tunnel. But it was Mallarmé who said that poetry is made with words, not ideas."

"How do you know all this? You're so young."

She spat out breath very nastily. "There you go again. More interested in the false divisions than the true ones. Come on, let's have that sestet."

The sestet ended in a drinking-shop not far from the Souk or Socco, over glasses of warmish pastis. Drab long robes, hoods, ponchos, ass-beaters, loud gargling Moghrabi, nose-picking children who used the other hand to beg. Sympathetic, Enderby gave them little coins.

Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,

Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell

Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,

Poised on the brink, thought and created hell.

Light shimmered in miraculous refraction

As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.

"That bloody," Enderby said. "It's meant really to express grudging admiration. But that only works if the reader knows I've taken the line from Tennyson's poem about the eagle."

"To hell with the reader. Good. That needs a lot of going over, of course, but you can do that at leisure. When I'm gone, I mean. Now we'd better take a look at that Horatian Ode thing. Can we have dinner at your place?"

"I'd like to take you out to dinner," Enderby said. And, "When you're gone, you said. When are you going?"

"I'm flying off tomorrow evening. About six."

Enderby gulped. "It's been a short stay. You can get a very good dinner at a place called the Parade. I could get a taxi and pick you up about -"

"Still curious, aren't you? Bit of a change for you, isn't it, this curiosity about people? You've never cared much for people, have you? From what you've told me, anyway. Your father let you down by marrying your stepmother, and your mother let you down by dying too young. And these others you've mentioned, men and women."

"My father was all right," Enderby said. "I never had anything against him." He frowned, though ungrudgingly.

"Many years ago," she said, "you published a little volume at your own expense. Inevitably it was very badly printed. You had a poem in it called 'Independence Day'."

"I'm damned if I remember."

"A rather bad poem. It started:

Anciently the man who showed

Hate to his father with the sword

Was bundled up in a coarse sack

With a frantic ape to tear his back

And the squawking talk of a parrot to mock

Time's terror of air-and-light's lack

Black

And the creeping torpor of a snake."

"I can't possibly have written that," went Enderby, worried now. "I could never possibly have written anything as bad as that."

"No?" she said. "Listen.

Then he was swirled into the sea.

But that was all balls and talk.

Nowadays we have changed all that,

Into a cleaner light to walk