The Promise Ese (2) "They come and go," he said, desultory. "Like yours and everybody's." What did it matter if the cramps were sometimes severe and all- consuming? But still he kissed her hair in a mischievous fashion. "No need to sweat, Sweet-o-mine," he said, softly. "Your boy's grown up. He's outgrown love and games," and besides Emily's staid reserve made him feel old. They had crawled through muck together; a congealing rime of ash and disappointment defined the creases of their face. He knew from experience that snow would prove an ineffectual soap. * * * Clara's manager, Pat Hickox, tolerated Hector, lovable rogue, and looked forward to their jocular debates on cultural affairs and to after theatre drinks in Miss De Lune's dressing-room where sparkling glasses, earrings, repartee seasoned a very gentlemanly jealousy. And though by flashing talent and title the chap had clinched a lower rung and key, his claim drew scant reflection from the splendid star aglow atop the tree. Hallucination, or was the Hickox glow on the wane, wondered Hector as the said triumvirate, missing one, stumbled up to Clara's door? This hopeful suspicion followed on the heels of a social success at Claire De Lune's home-coming soiree at which he had carpeted the entire throng with his speech in homage to the Ellen Terry acting tradition, the Bernhardt ennui and the Siddons commingling with eminent persons. None of his hastily whipped up blancmange made any sense at all and delighted his enemies almost more than the tipsy well-wishers. Marvellous that this man of action dared to explore well-trod regions of the liberal arts and make pronouncements as if his trail was the first. Many, in assorted fields, had questioned his calculations and their methods of production. Could he expect the fog to sweep away future footprints as completely as the driven snows? Not unless etched with deep conviction, impressed. He did utter impressively. "You seem almost your old self," Clara smiled, radiant and rosy-cheeked, inflamed by champagne and promotional success, for her alliance with the famous explorer undeniably drew notice. "Pat and I were talking while we were away about, you know, your half-heartedness. It's gone. Has something happened?" "Nothing in particular. Emily has moved back to Ermine Street. She can manage a household wonderfully well so it�s one less bother for me, for us." He thought: For my creditors. She thought: Marital bliss. "I'm rarely at home, of course." By now they had brightened up the boudoir with a young fire and boiled some water in Clara's new electric kettle. "You wouldn't believe the gadgets they have there now," she meant America, "but I don't think I could live in New York. It's almost too brash after the war. It's like polishing up one corner of the globe to blacken the others. All talk of 'old worlds' crumbling. And empires in decline." Clara bubbled with an urge to declaim, towards what end Hector couldn't see, unless she was trying to 'put him off'. He yawned uncontrollably. He had been most talkative earlier. She said, "Well then, dearie, have you been keeping my little nest warm?" She could trace a smell of his tobacco which bundles of fresh flowers struggled to overpower. "Remember I said you could stay here when... I don't know, when you felt restless or seedy, because it all seems easier when we are together, don�t you think? I leave my worries elsewhere and expect you to follow suit." She sat at her mirror. Pins and paste and show fell away. Hector's age diminished. Forty-five to twenty-eight. The flame light swashed Clara all over like an aurora. It was so much fun. He could play with this woman, he could whisper tasteless jokes he'd overheard. She'd giggle, they could be boys together, naughty and uproarious but still she was graceful and round as a queen in progress. She would lead and he would attend upon her, then like the court favourite, part the magnificent hangings, disarray pomp and powder, and crush the virgin in her. Intrigue. A complicated play of emotion. Hickox was 'helping out'. Hector felt like a kept man. These people live a cardboard carousel ride of a life. The swirling plucked at his cuffs, the mechanism sucked him in, the wily high-class, lover-swapping farce that the east-coasters affected in their mink-white palaces. Clara seemed less set. She seemed European. She hove to through the merciless gales of fashion. She was steady. She knew the game. Emily would console his failures, Clara dispel them. While Clara snored, he marvelled that such a heavenly creature could, Hector lay awake ruminating about the varieties of women attached to the varieties of men. Before his eyes the filthy, weather beaten faces of certain of the men murkily arose, like ghosts through blubber-smoke then the nondescript plumped-up faces of their female halves, a number of whom he had met, floated between, like moths looking to mate. The quieter ones on the ice it turned out generally had loud wives and the loutish ones had mice. As it should be. Yet one disruptive crew-member was met at the dock by a wife of leonine stature and all his bravado shrank. Hector wondered if, conversely, his men surmised things about their leader and his private relationships. Like Cook's wife or any adventurer's sweetheart, they wait and they manage. But then how does it run when they are reunited? How did his men slot in after the ordeal, to their family roles? How did they satisfy their women or were they not touched by it. A matter of practicality, he supposed, the women need children but they must want companionship as well, but then they have their female friends, family alliances, a sisterhood. Does that sort of bond exist as with men or maybe only men united in hardship? He fell asleep. * * * The next few weeks dragged over Carpenter an obscuring thick mist. A sunny and beautiful happiness with Clara swiftly mired in one theatrical sludge after another. Mackintosh a spy! He couldn't type fast enough anyway. Hector's dictation careened like an untethered pup, jumping then rolling before crashing and heavily sighing. At which point Mac cranked over his memory for the proper phrase. Occasionally a most inapt term crept in, evaded Hector's cursory read through then embarked on an ethereal concourse bailing insult and regret upon all it passed. Still Carpenter liked to have him at beck and call because of his unquestioned loyalty South. It was not surprising, then, Emily's distrust of his reportage which she partly relied upon for information as to her husband's whereabouts. As for Hectors �activities,� the mystery remained. Mac stood a little in awe of Lady Carpenter who represented a filtered version of Sir Hector, with gusto, charm, determination, humour gone. A tincture of resignation drip, drip, dripped. Why she couldn't afford to be more generous, however, Mac was unable to fathom. He was hardly paid for his pains. He was stretched both ways like rubber but, for self-preservation, always exerted a backwards pull. He wouldn't give that extra inch even if Emily insisted upon names. They strolled along the Embankment, Nanny trundling Percy behind in his pram. Emily carried a packet of letters and newspaper cuttings that Mackintosh thought might arrest her suspicious nature. Acclaim for the film of Sir Hector's last expedition was gradually wheedling stray young men like sated woodworms, into the light of potential dangers. "Perhaps this public attention might compel elites to fund another push on the penguins realm." Money had dried up but had the public's enthusiasm entirely withered? Woo them with aeroplanes and wireless. "Yes," she dripped. "Sir Hector can 'gauge a mood', as the expression goes, and I've been hearing of nought but the wonderful lure of 'whizz-bangery'. Mac, you've been there. What possible gains can the aeroplane hope to win? Much of the area has been explored. He tells me its not ambition for himself, but to serve the ambitions of younger men fielding their own destinies. He may as well operate a cruise-line. I know... that�s another option of his on the plate." Even a hint of Lady Carpenter's having borrowed Sir Hector's style of slangy expression flummoxed Mackintosh, but he likened the long-term effects of Sir Hec's boomy oratory to shell-shock. A wife would suffer most. "Anything else?" She sat down dead on a bench and arched her eyebrows at Mac. He sat down next to her, conspiratorially. A breeze wafted diesel smells from a bridge. Nanny had lifted Percy up to the railings and was pointing out barges, dredges and pleasure craft that spangled the river. "I know for certain," Mac began to whisper up-breeze, "he remains on friendly terms with both Hickox and Miss De Lune. They dine at the Connaught and dance." A ridiculous picture of wasp-waisted, swan-necked Claire DeLune and bullish, eager Hector swirling around the dance floor of The Connaught Hotel momentarily gagged Emily, then she said: "It's getting worse. How can he expect support from high places when he's cavorting like a...goose. What about this Mr Hickox. What does he do while they waltz?" Mackintosh hadn't the heart to dispute Emily's genteel idea of dancing. A waltz it certainly was not, the two-step. "He just sits, watches, catches up with acquaintances. Rarely are the three alone. Once...," Mac hesitated, "An associate of Sir Hector's brother joined them. A face I had seen in the papers, I mean the court papers whilst the proceedings were underway [the criminal proceedings] maybe a witness, maybe a co-accused, a name I don�t quite remember...� In fact he did. It was Smith. Mackintosh wriggled uncomfortably, his sentence drowned out by a bridge hooter. He overheard Nanny squeal excitedly: "Look Percy, it�s opening for that boat to pass through!" as a clunky but sleek vessel puttered beneath the pitched span. Emily shuddered. It was a dark boat, like the arctic ones. Jack Carpenter, the less bankable of the two brothers, plucked shady associates as if they were uncultivated, rambling strawberries. As if he could judge their tartness by their sheen, he gathered freely. If he was the power behind the �face�... Emily stopped herself from mumbling, "Poor Hector," in that futile tone that run-ragged mothers used. He wasn't her Boy any longer, as he kept reminding. What was kinder for the children - the scandal of divorce or a taint of criminality? Even after a divorce, everyone would still acknowledge them as the 'explorer's' children. Just being fathered by a man who 'almost made it to the pole' handicapped them enough, she supposed. She said: �Maybe it was by chance, this encounter?" For reply he merely cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. "They have had a prior acquaintance then...� A weary dread began to shrivel her investigations. Mac recalled the nameless one passing around slips of paper, one which wound its way to the office. He groped in his pocket. "I have something here that may help you identify Sir Hector's dinner partner," he said, whipping forth a frail leaf torn from a cash-book. One side had an address pencilled on it. Emily took the note and flattened it on her knee. �106 Leathwaite Road� she read and thought, is it London, is it Leeds, Edinburgh, Basle? The corners of her lips turned down with frustration, sorrow, incomprehension. Percy tottered to his Mother, she said, abstracted: "Hello dear." Nanny called, "I'm blowing my nose, Madam," and fussed with her supply of sundry white cloths. Not a handkerchief among them. Then suddenly the child lunged at the railings and had it not been for an athletic amanuensis he might have cleared them like a rebel chimpanzee. Mac passed him back to his 'very, very sorry Sir� Nurse. Flicked by the breeze from Percy's curious fingers, a paper snowflake curtsied over and over then corkscrewed towards the tons of water surging below scattered, indistinct groups of pedestrians. But one, bemusedly, noted its descent and probable dissolution. Emily imagined her 'clue' disintegrating like sugar somewhere astern the snaking black boat. Chapter2 He would have to keep it between Jack and himself. Surely this 'small matter of business' involved nothing more than the 'laying out' of some borrowed capital and Hectors 'roping-in' of a titled guarantor. Smith had been alarmingly non-specific. Definitely not what one expected of an accomplished angler, they chose their baits to tempt specific fish. If any forthcoming propositions included a goodwill jaunt to say St Moritz, Carpenter would consider it a prudent marriage of agendas. He could take Clara - flush her from the footlit world, a world of shadow and glare, to the matt-pink drawing-room world, consistently ill-lit and monochrome. Was one milieu any less stagy than the other? She could strut with equal aplomb across flooded decks of marble or linoleum. Least he could be grateful to Jack for introducing them if not for almost stalling his run on respectability and financial ease. If not for almost diverting his name from history towards oblivion. If not... The spectral courtroom haunted Hector's consideration. His brother Jack dwarfed by the mint-condition mahogany of the dock and their mother, a night-clad apparition, bemoaning this one benighted son, at the very moment her feted one came bowling into the invalids closet to present his Antarctic book bound in packing-case and etched with the grit from their hut. He then became her hope. The son who noisily faltered, who lacked talent, the ostentatiously ambitious, least intellectually-smooth son, the sailor brawny and bold who blustered his way out of trouble. Jack would sink deep into the slough but Hector forge tackle and escape. Now Jack had arisen again, had he? * * * Blandford Forum evolved to suit its name. Blocks of unremarkable rubble in the centre of a miserable green patchwork where Jack Carpenter had retired after his gaol term to roost like an anonymous hen in a shop as roomy and convenient as a coop. It sold curios such as the ponderous Jacobean broth-scalder that a nervous couple had moments before sheepishly exposed to his scrutiny. Jack could plainly read desperation in their faces. Their spoons were their hoard. But when Hector walked in, he began to neatly wind the dull cutlery back in its flannel shroud for old spoons were as good as dead. "Come back tomorrow," he told them smartly. "I will have checked my catalogues by then. These spoons, you must appreciate, bear no crests. But you never know..." The couple seemed meekly satisfied and edged their way past the gentleman with elbows tight like folded wings so as not to disturb the many pretty objects jostling for shelf space. Hector sheltered under his hat as if their eyes were spitting rain. As soon as the pair had dropped onto the street, however, he took of his hat and his eyes were wide. Jack spoke: "For the first time in my life, I can honestly say I am dumbfounded. You should have let me know you were coming." Hector had vowed never to see his disgraced brother again. "Well you would more likely write dumbfounded than put it in speech," rejoined Hector. They warily sized up each other. Must feed them enough in prison, Hector thought. Then what could be surmised about one, fit the other. An applied quiescence in the juvenile enthusiasms that so attracted people, a self-control so recently perfected, grief. But Jack also saw a humbled man, the epitome of foreboding. Jack suggested they adjourn to a mossy courtyard at the rear of the shop, for a smoke. Hector agreed and there against limey, cobbled bricks softened by cool sun, their spherical arguments rebounded. Sharp metal splinters from old farm contraptions clawed at their clothes and crinolines stacked like fish traps. Jack bulged on the three-legged stool which he had positioned to catch the sun-stream. "That fellow, Smith...� Hector shifted his burden of misapprehension from shoulder to the open palm of his hand. Only because he strongly believed in his brothers masterminding the 'Smith show� did he describe the circumstances of the three encounters with Smith, blithely. Then he looked quizzical, relieved to have told it to someone whom he felt instinctively understood. "Which Smith?" Jack asked, tautly. "How many do you know?" "As Rawlings, I know several in this town, as Carpenter, I know only two." What degree of faith could be placed in his brother's testimony? He had fiendishly tricked some money from a decent elderly lady. She had trusted him, cocooned him in a lace chrysalis, then brimming with lavish expectations of what butterfly he would become, discovered a brown and hairy spider gnawing at her silk ribbons, devouring them utterly. Dishonour. Incarceration. Hector's epic soul recoiled from such meannesses. "Everyday," he began, "a man comes across Smiths of many kinds - blacksmiths, wordsmiths, gunsmiths but the Smith that confronted me the other evening, was none of these." "Why do you presume this business has my stamp on it," Jack barked, irked by Hector's cryptic, wounded-doe appeals for information. "I've never so much as scraped plates for any underworld chieftains. And whatsmore Smith is no longer known to me, so if you wish me to advise you on a plan of action, I can only do so as an impartial observer." Hector began to roam, thoughtfully. All his fantastic ideas, of Jack surfacing with stories of pearly treasures beneath the sea and the brothers dredging it together and of a prospectus, lay shattered. He had wondered if Smith's overtures hadn�t been a circuitous way of Jacks getting in touch. "Yes, yes," continued Jack, "And he may be a blackmailer or...� He was thinking assassin but unless Hector had been surreptitiously exchanging landmark- naming for political or sexual gaming, what motive? I don't want to be here, the phrase pounded in time to the roaming, I don't want to be here, I don't want to be here. Jack could see him shutting down. Perhaps he was deeply fraught and not bored. "Mustn't jump to conclusions, Hec old thing, particularly as Smith's raison'd'etre is still mysterious. Go to Battersea and clear it up." Leathwaite road adjoined Clapham Common. An accommodating acreage of shrubbery for corpse disposal. Jack had once categorized Hector's circumambulations of vast rooms into the ruminant plod, the drag, the suicide charge, the busy amble and the man-of -the- world billiard-ball swagger. A correlation of space with length of stride was all too obvious in the claustrophobic confines of the shops little yard. The penguins� spree. "Naturally I will go there," Hector said, idly crushing his cigarette stub into a brick-cleft. " Now you have assured me of your non-involvement I feel our families are saved from further scandals...of this flavour." "Oh so it's not a question of you seeking my advice?" Jack felt illuminated and free. "In that case I can say how I think your years on the ice have taken their toll. Penguins waddle, true?" "On land. In the water they glide with as much vigour and grace as the albatross. Then they can also leap from the water onto the floe seemingly without effort. I can't think of another animal to compare them with in the leaping department, Deer, I suppose. Are you interested in the creatures of the polar regions? If so then you should see our movie, grand footage of seals and penguin colonies even of the killers. Some of the wildlife stuff was shot later to pad out the dramatic sequences of everyday life and the ships demise. But it gives you the sensation of standing mug to mug with a sea elephant." "I was merely going to remark upon your ungainly gait." Hector laughed, "Some of the penguin species are only this high," he put a hand to his knee, "so unless I am an emperor, why not make seal an analogy. An almost exclusive intake of seal fat will mould you into a passable replica of one." So saying he nudged aside a wicker hive then displayed himself like a basking seal upon the oil-smeared flagstones. A stillness quivered through him as if the pose was eternal rest. He stared at the square of naked sky above. "At the frozen tips of the earth, all animal life knows the importance of waiting. It waits for the return of day, for spring's succulent green shoots, for its mate to call or for its chick to fledge." Hector inclined onto his elbows. "I am waiting for fate to overtake me and what about you, Jacky? A snug little cell you have built for yourself here - well-armed with all these spiky defences prepared to repulse life. What�s this thing?" He sat up and placed on his lap a rusted kind of dog-comb. "I think it�s called a feather-splitter, for splicing the wings of hawks and falcons. Makes them less wild." The antique business made Jack feel secure and he thought it a bit caddish for Hector to bring up the cell thing. " I don't think it appropriate for us to be seen in the town together but come upstairs to my sanctum. Your face was fairly regular in the "Sun' for a while.� Now why should Rawlings be totting around the place with a recognizable hero? Might he be recruiting Rawlings for an expedition? �You've met the locals, the two with the spoons. Village life is like the cloistered one - a closed order." Suddenly Jack felt it was good to be speaking about 'them' instead of with them. Hector admitted another engagement, yet his curiosity won over. Not actually affection for his brother but a chance to uncover implications for himself, if Smiths actions turned criminal. Where was there another such alien and blasted, earthy configuration of dwellings for his potential ruin to tunnel? Bland-ford.... what possible dignity could it af-ford to broken Carpenters. * * * Whilst occupied in the region [Hector was booked to deliver an evening lecture in Dorchester], he thought he may as well pay a call on the literary bombshell, William Sorley-Sharpe. Ensconced behind a gigantic wall festooned with meshing vines, the gables of a Victorian factory-red building pricked, alert, like cats ears. Sharpe lived loudly there with his Fabian wife and a savage Dachshund. Hector had dabbled in the shallows of rarefied literary thermal - pools to warm his feet, but never truly succumbed to their luscious, licking waters, it was more a case of his floundering having attracted the great-white wits, their lizard-like eyes keenly attuned to selecting the expert bathers from the frankly hopeless and then ripping them to shreds. Awkwardly, Hector had tried to deflect them from his scent of lax education, some that is who minded. His running away to sea at age sixteen, generally mellowed any faux pas with a patina of Melville or Jack London or coal miners who wrote. His having down pat a conversational device of flipping the trajectories of oncoming barbs and shooting them back at their manufacturers, aided the creep towards pseudo-artistic acceptance. At once he noticed and admired the hulking combination of metals, a mighty steed of a motorcycle smudging gravel in the Sharpe's driveway. Their maid said it belonged to an acquaintance of the Sharpes very recently returned from the Middle East. Hector was shown into the disorganized study where three backs at a bookshelf simultaneously swivelled like weathervanes. "Sir Hector, how nice of you to visit." Alice Sorely-Sharp extended her hand and beamed. " We saw an advertisement for your slide show tonight. Will it be like Hunts, poor Hunt...� "Not quite." Because I'm alive and he is dead, retorted thought. Hector detected they could all mind-read. Following further introductions and pleasantries, a pristine volume was thrust into his hands. With four people in an undernourished study, Hector felt captainish though wasn't at all confident he could dominate the new man. Sharpe was alright. He sucked-in Hector's glorious exudations as a crippled sailor would drink in the tobacco smoke, salt-smell and exotic yarns discharged with cargoes from far-flung ports. And because Carpenter openly eschewed that undemocratic clique-system that generates class-systems, Alice could almost applaud his dearth of intellectual rigour. It was a volume of war poetry which the motorcyclist appeared to covet with the ardour of a lover, a lover of precious things. Hector dipped in, pretty modern stuff. He couldn't resist an urge to stir. He trained his eyes on the sandy-hair of Potts, for this was the small fellow's name, then jauntily enumerated the multifarious functions which his deprived comrades had found the pages and plates of the ships extensive library, perfectly designed to fulfill. Kindling fires and wiping pans. Of course the most shameful job undertaken by the most divinely printed authors, he invited the trio to deduce or choose to ignore. Potts sort of cowered like a university chap, Hector initially observed but actually said, in a smouldery voice, that he believed the ultimate and most beneficial use for any bound or unbound work was as an incendiary. His own "Morte D'Arthur� met its end on a railway sleeper in the middle of a desert, rammed with explosives and soaked in fuel. Blazing the pathway to mediaeval wisdom like a Phrygian torch in the star-peppered night. "G. E. has spent a number of years combing Syrian wastelands for ruined cities," said William winking at Potts who grinned back, excluding Hector from their joke, "But lately its been the war..." "I've just come back from Jordan. We are trying to establish a state there for the Arabs." "Are you a politician? I'm sorry but I can't place the name 'Potts'," Hector queried. "Mr Potts is really Colonel Pink, the Arabian Pink, Isn�t that so G.E. I can't bear all this tomfoolery. William thinks it�s farcical and plays it up but amongst friends incognitos are simply unfunny bores. Its not likely Sir Hector is going to run off to the press, is it Sir Hector? G.E hopes a change of name will lead people to found their judgements on the merit of his character and not reputation. But I don't know if he intends to publish under the pseudonym. By the way, I cannot continue to address you as Sir Hector. Will Hector do? You did tell us the knighthood just happened to be tied in with an acceptance of the money." Alice who had earlier left the tiny study to make arrangements for afternoon tea, had taken possession of the doorway, half-excited by the diverse sample of humanity that confronted her. The thin, the big and the self-contained. She wished the manly, vapid decorum to crumple and for her ceaseless jabbering to be its crumpler. Now, thought Hector, she will direct some satire at the King, whom he had met and found inoffensive. The woman was most likely a bolshy sympathizer from whom even the blowing up of children shook not a tear. Sharpe and his wife exemplified the 'marriage-of-minds' type partnership, almost an academic body. A woman without emotion was a woman who denied her sex. As the men filed past Mrs Sorley-Sharpe in the doorway, Hector saw her pat Pink or Potts on the back not like a mother but like a superior officer and he visibly flinched. Alice matched an adjective to object - 'unrepeatable action'. Wartime trauma had heightened Pott's physical sensitivity. As the afternoon wore on, Potts retraction of life became clearer. Whatever he did, he did it in a reduced-fat fashion. Was he trying to preserve his energy? Was he trying to outdo the furniture? All his mousy gestures and curled body-parts and lowered eyes and soft voice and over-hanging locks- slightly effete? Or was he acting the role of alienated, misunderstood youth, damaged goods? Hector himself had used to stand in the guarding- ones- integrity posture but only when a young black sheep in a snowy mob. Perhaps Potts wasn't yet easy with the Sharpe's or perhaps he shied from Hectors unscholarly achievements. Or was he simply incognito like brother Jack, hiding from himself and the world? Then again, if his business happened to be politics... "I tried politicking once," said Hector breezily to Pink, but I think it was my Irishness that weaned off the voters." The two had been left in the garden together, pointedly, by their hosts who must have felt them to share some interests because surely it wasn't a pairing of personality. Pink said he too had Irish blood, on his father�s side. But no further political ambitions. Hector would now forsake his internal Smithologizing for fund-raising. If only he could lift some august-body onto his cause, like every bloody university in England. "Have you a position pending at any particular scholarly institution?" he asked Pink. "I know the resolution of the war in Europe has left many at a loose end." Including himself. "Sharpe thinks you could become governor or Iraq." That was a long way from the treacherous Southern ice. Hector quickly began to despair of Pinks proving a munificent chance encounter. "I suppose I shall continue writing my book, ' Pink replied, precise. "I want to write about the desert people and their traditions and about certain cities and about.... I just want to write. The Arabian peninsula is full of fascinating things to write about." So here was another would-be Burton squirming in his ordinary clothes. But when they drew near to the wonderful shining machine suddenly G.E.'s eyes flashed like the headlamps of a speeding car clipped by sunlight and then released into passing shade. Outside, the deeply recessed, crisp sky-blue eyes allied him with the elemental blues of ocean and sky that only ice could absorb fully, and exalt. "I'm going to scour every lane and road in England. This is my ticket," he said, basting his hand with the sun-warmed juice of a new leather saddle. Having roved like himself, Pink thought, this other man would appreciate the pull of the yet untravelled. "I've taught myself alot about the internal combustion engine. Towards the end of our campaign the Rolls Royce thundered into the desert. It proved less temperamental then camel flesh and virtually eliminated our need of it." Hector chuckled deep in his throat before asking Potts if he ever ate camel. The answer was yes. Potts sinewy skin bore stigmata of exposure to fierce weathers, noticed Hector, his eyes following the worn hands petting of the motor-cycle in repose, like a solitary coal-veined boulder. In no way a pale, boneless flopping of the aesthetic hand. Crafty hands. "Esqiumaux dogs have their drawbacks. In certain seasons, under certain conditions such as sexual deprivation, starvation, blizzard, their aggression is legendary, we had one.... ripped its companions throat out. And then they would enmasse attack the floating penguin population. Leather halters were easily bitten through by the hungry beasts, even consumed."
Go to part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
Copyright © 2002 June M Harcourt |