A Handful of Dust

“She sounded very well. I didn’t see her.”

“But you said you were going to see her.”

“Yes, I thought I was, but I turned out to be wrong. I talked to her several times on the telephone.”

“But you can telephone her from here, can’t you, daddy? Why did you go all the way to London to telephone her?… Why, daddy?”

“It would take too long to explain.”

“Well tell me some of it… Why, daddy?”

“Look here, I’m tired. If you don’t stop asking questions I shan’t let you ever come and meet the train again.”

charming and experienced woman like Brenda Last is just the person to help him. He’s got a very affectionate nature, but he’s so sensitive that he hardly ever lets it appear… to tell you the truth I felt something of the kind was in the air last week, so I made an excuse to go away for a few days.

himself in deep water and attempted to swim, found himself among boulders again and attempted to grapple with them. Then he reached the falls.

They were unspectacular as falls go in that country—a drop of ten feet or less—but they were enough for Dr. Messinger. At their foot the foam subsided into a great pool, almost still, and strewn with blossom from the forest trees that encircled it. Dr. Messinger’s hat floated very slowly towards the Amazon and the water closed over his bald head.

He had picked up bêtes rouges in the bush and they were crawling and burrowing under his skin; the bitter oil which Dr. Messinger had given him as protection, had set up a rash of its own wherever he had applied it. Every evening after washing he had burned off a few ticks with a cigarette end but they had left irritable little scars behind them; so had the djiggas which one of the black boys had dug out from under his toe

bought Miss de Vitré a woolen rabbit at the barber’s shop.

“How I wish I was a man,” said Thérèse de Vitré.

Tony told her about the expedition; of the Peruvian emigrants in the middle ages and their long caravan working through the mountains and forests, llamas packed with works of intricate craftsmanship; of the continual rumors percolating to the coast and luring adventurers up into the forests; of the route they would take up the rivers, then cutting through the bush along Indian trails and across untraveled country; of the stream they might strike higher up and how, Dr. Messinger said, they would make woodskin canoes and take to the water again; how finally they would arrive under the walls of the city like the Vikings at Byzantium. “But of course,” he added, “there may be nothing in it. It ought to be an interesting journey in any case.”

She was eighteen years old;

Days of shadow and exhaustion, salt wind and wet mist, foghorn and the constant groan and creak of straining metal. Then they were clear of it, after the Azores. Awnings were out and passengers moved their chairs to windward. High noon and an even keel; the blue water lapping against the sides of the ship, rippling away behind her to the horizon; gramophones and deck tennis; bright arcs of flying f

“… You see there has been a continuous tradition about the City since the first explorers of the sixteenth century. It has been variously allocated, sometimes down in Matto Grosso, sometimes on the upper Orinoco in what is now Venezuela. I myself used to think it lay somewhere on the Uraricuera. I was out there last year and it was then that I established contact with the Pie-wie Indians; no white man had ever visited them and got out alive. And it was from the Pie-wies that I learned where to look. None of them had ever visited the City, of course, but they knew about it. Every Indian between Ciudad Bolivar and Para knows about it. But they won’t talk. Queer people. But I became blood-brother with a Pie-wie—interesting ceremony. They buried me up to the neck in mud and all the women of the tribe spat on my head. Then we ate a toad and snake and a beetle and after that I was a blood-brother—well, he told me that the City lies between the headwaters of the Courantyne and the Takutu. There’s a vast track of unexplored country there. I’ve often thought of visiting it.

“I’ve been looking up the historical side too, and I more or less know how the City got there. It was the result of a migration from Peru at the beginning of the fifteenth century when the Incas were at the height of their power. It is mentioned in all the early Spanish documents as a popular legend. One of the younger princes rebelled and led his people off into the forest. Most of the tribes have a tradition in one form or another of a strange race passing through their territory.”

“But what do you suppose this city will be like?”

“Impossible to say. Every tribe has a different word for it. The Pie-wies call it the ‘Shining’ or ‘Glittering,’ the Arekuna the ‘Many Watered,’ the Patamonas the ‘Bright Feathered,’ the Warau, oddly enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they make. Of course one can’t tell how a civilization may have developed or degenerated in five hundred years of isolation…”