He resolved to ask for the help of Johnny Westerfield at the Ministry of Defense, who owed him a favor from some years back when he had underwritten a deal between the ministry and a civil contractor for the sale of provisions to the army, five hundred tons of stewing steak, obtaining very favorable terms on the grounds, naturally not made public, that the meat had passed the date by which it was due to be consumed, though by less than a week, a purely technical matter.
Somerville was unable to investigate the mystery of the vanishing circle any further on the following day. It was the time of the month when the wages of the workpeople fell due, and the nearest banking agency they had been able to establish was at Shiritha, a full day’s journey from Tell Erdek, necessitating a strong escort, an overnight stay, and a late return home next day.
After dinner on the day of his departure, Elliott walked about in the courtyard for a while in the light of the lanterns set in the walls. He smoked two cheroots in the course of this, and then he saw what he had been hoping to see. Edith came out, though it seemed she did not intend to linger there long; the night air was cool, and she still wore the white cotton dress she had worn at dinner, with nothing over her shoulders.
He came forward to meet her and spoke at once, without any preliminary greeting, as soon as he was near enough. “If you have a mind to ride out tonight, later on, there is something I think it would interest you to see.”
“What is that?” she said.
“I’d like it to be a surprise. Will you come?”
“You mean, alone, just the two of us?”
“Yes.”
Edith hesitated for a long moment, aware that her breathing had quickened. Then she laughed, but less certainly than she had intended and would have wished. “You can’t be serious,” she said, knowing he was. She could see little of his face, which was in shadow, but there was a lantern on the wall behind him, and light from it lay slantwise on his head and gleamed on his blond hair like a halo worn at a rakish angle. “You must be mad,” she said. “In the middle of the night?” It was unprecedented, imprudent in just about every way it could be.
“You see it best in the dark,” he said.
“It must be quite something.”
He made no reply to this but stood there still and attentive. And this attentiveness of his, this silent waiting on her unwisdom, seemed suddenly to Edith like the waiting that had attended on her all her life and had always been disappointed, the gathering for a plunge she had never made. “In the middle of the night?” she said again. There would be people about, there was Hassan at the gate…
Some tutelary spirit, the god of schemers, kept Elliott from speech now. If he had tried to persuade her, if he had begun to urge his case, she would have found reasons for refusing. But he kept her in silence, and in this silence exhilaration swept through her. “Yes, all right,” she said. “Why not?”
In the agitation of her feelings she barely comprehended the rest of what was said. They would meet at midnight in the compound beyond the courtyard, where the stables were. They could leave by the gate of the stockade that enclosed the compound. This gate was barred from inside by a wooden bolt. They would have to leave it unbolted, but no one would notice any difference, not at that hour. If they were quiet they would not be seen. She was to wear dark clothes, something to cover her head. It was a clear night; they would see well enough by starlight; he knew the way.
On this they parted. Edith waited through the time in her room. At intervals she thought she would not go, but each time, after the voice of caution, there came that slightly breathless, reckless sense that she was awaited, expected, not just by Elliott but by all the presences in the night outside. Well before midnight she changed into jodhpurs and a jersey of black wool and wrapped a dark scarf around her head. And after this change of clothes she had no more second thoughts about going.
Elliott was waiting in the compound. He had already saddled two horses, both blacks. He showed no sign of gladness that she had come, as if he had never been in any doubt about it. She saw that he had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a cartridge belt across his body. Together they led the horses out and, at a distance of some yards, mounted.
He had been right; the stars gave light enough to see the track. He rode ahead at an easy pace, she following behind. As the night closed around them, her excitement, the sense of escape, grew less; she was not afraid, but she felt the enormity of what she was doing, the departure from all custom and propriety.
The rhythm of the riding, the faint light in which no landmarks could be distinguished, combined to take from her all measurement of time. At one point she thought she could make out, in the distance, paler levels that might have been floodwater, and some time after this the need for silence lessened for a while because the outcry of frogs filled the spaces of the night, a sound at once multiple and single, like a vast, protracted belching after some unimaginably rich feast.
They veered away, began to mount a long slope toward higher ground. The clamor of the frogs grew less. Above her, above the crest of the rise, Edith saw that the sky was lit with a fan-shaped rose-violet glow. She could hear the frogs still, but the sound was different now, more murmurous, like a sort of droning or humming, seeming to rise and fall. The glow of light was low in the sky, and it too was not steady but dilated and shrank as if in time to this chorus. Elliott dismounted well below the summit at a ridge of rock where they could tether the horses. They went the rest of the way on foot, scrambling now and again, disturbing loose shale. She saw now that the flare in the sky varied in color also, though only slightly; there was a sort of pulsing or throbbing in it, from violet to saffron to pale rose. The sound was not being made by the frogs: it came from somewhere beyond the crest, it sounded like singing.
The ground flattened as they drew near the top. Elliott lay prone here, full length, and motioned her to do the same. From this position he began edging up the last few feet, and she followed him. The singing was louder now. The rocks they were looking down over were lit by a warmer light than could have come from the stars. She heard Elliott utter a low exclamation. He spoke close to her ear as she drew level with him: “Keep your head down. I didn’t bargain for this.”
She covered the last few inches and looked down. The breath caught in her throat. Below them the ground fell away steeply to a rocky plateau. Close to the center of this a cone of fire rose into the sky, gushing rainbow colors, showering fiery particles that lived only briefly. The amazing energy of the flames, the way they wavered and swayed to currents she could not feel took all her attention in the first moments, but then she saw that there were figures surrounding this pulsing column of light, moving in a circle, now forward, now back. Elliott spoke again, muttering close to her face: “I didn’t bargain for people down there. I saw it in the daytime, there was nobody. Alawi learned of it and told me, that’s my interpreter. Thank God I heard the singing, we might have had our heads blown off.”