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talking about the shantytowns and the horrible little black animals crawling about in the rubbish. You thought you were talking about things no one had seen before you. You thought you were being so much more concerned than everybody else. But you were saying nothing. It was just a cheap way of showing off.”
    “Well, I’ve stopped seeing the shantytowns now.”
    They were on the highway. The sun was slanting into their faces. The hills smoked; but, in spite of the continuing still heat, the light on the hills had altered, had turned from the light of midday to the light of afternoon. The yellowing smoke haze above the hills held hints of the sunset to come; already, high in the sky, the end-of-day clouds had begun to form.
    They came to the factory area: traffic, blackened verges, factory buildings still looking impermanent in the flat landscape of the old plantations, ornamental trees and smooth-trunked young royal palms standing on browned factory lawns like things rescued fromthe forest. Here and there, deep in the fields behind the factories, were automobiles in the trunks of which men were loading bundles of cut grass, fodder for the cows and other animals they still kept, the pens sometimes to be seen at the back of the huts and houses on the highway.
    There was a man running steadily on the road ahead of them, indifferent to the traffic and the fumes: an elderly Negro, long-necked, lean-faced, in black running shorts and a soaked white vest. He was a well-known figure, a disordered man, who at odd times of day and night took to the roads and ran for miles. And Jane thought that that was something else she had stopped seeing: people like the runner, people like the wild men who lived in the hills, among the new developments, or down in the city, in the back yards of certain thoroughfares: derelicts, a whole parallel society.
    She said, “Is the government really afraid of Jimmy?”
    “The government’s’ afraid of everybody. And Jimmy is right. They’ve got to build him up and pretend they are supporting him. The doer. And Jimmy has this English reputation. He can’t just be got out of the way.”
    “What a strange idea he must have of England.”
    “I suppose he understood it well enough for his purpose.”
    Jane said, “You don’t sound as though you like him.”
    “It isn’t a matter of liking. And I don’t mind Jimmy. He’s like the others. He’s looking for someone to lead.”
    “Of course, he’s having everybody on, isn’t he? And everybody’s having him on. Everybody is pretending that something exists that doesn’t exist.”
    Roche said: “You have to work with what’s there.”
    “But he must know those fields are in an appalling state. Doesn’t he know that? Or is he just mad like everybody else?”
    Slowly in the thickening traffic, and always with the sun in their eyes, they came, through the suburbs, to the city: to the burning rubbish dump, with its mounds of fresh garbage; to the new housing estate, with its long red avenues now full of men and women and children; to the market, where refrigerated trailers stood in the unpaved forecourt; to the sea road, where there hadonce been talk of a waterfront cultural center, of walks and restaurants, a theater and a marina, but where now red dust from the bauxite loading station settled on everything. The road was bumpy here, irregular at the edges; on the unmade sidewalks, tufted with hardy grass, there were sections of concrete pipes on which slogans had been daubed, and old flattened heaps of gravel and other road-mending material, mingled now with bauxite dust, yellowed scraps of newspaper, and bleached cigarette packs.
    Jane said, “What’s a succubus?”
    Fine red dust powdered Roche’s dark glasses, so that he looked unsighted. He said, “It sounds like an incubus. But that must be wrong.”
    “That was what Harry de Tunja said, when I told him we were going to Jimmy Ahmed’s. He said that Jimmy was a succubus.”
    “It