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near miss. O why can’t man reach for the apple instead of waiting for Eve?” Why indeed? “The universe is always bliss side up if only he knew it.”
    To sleep. To dream. Light airs, ever so faintly sulphurous seemed to drift into the room through the curtains. Does lava have any smell—or am I imagining things?
    I had an extraordinarily vivid dream of our long-lost selves reliving a short sequence of our Cyprus lives. The house had been built on a promontory hard by a little Turkish mosque. Underneath was a tiny beach where we bathed half the night. Though the island hadplunged into an insurrection against our rule there were pockets of emptiness where one could still find a moment of ordinary peace in which to swim and talk—yet never be too far from a pistol. By that time I was working in Nicosia but I used to slip over the Kyrenia range as often as possible to meet her. As a matter of fact I had got her into bad habits—for we often drove outside the sectors under army control and deep into enemy country, so to speak, in order to see a particular church or bathe at a special beach I knew. How dangerous was it? Not very, but the thing was problematic and depended upon a chance meeting with a platoon of resistance fighters armed with automatic weapons. It salted the whole operation with a fitful uneasiness. One never knew.
    And then, too, one had a bad conscience like naughty children who know they are disobeying their parents. But these sallies brought us very close together. She sat beside me with my pistol lying in her lap—just to have it handy in case we were overtaken on some country road by some youthful band of hotheads. More than once a car had been overtaken and shot up by the EOKA youth. Through all the beautiful hills and dales of the island we traveled thus, with our lunch in a hamper and our towels beside us. Nothing ever happened, thank God. But once I had a glimpse of the courage of Martine. We had climbed a hill to visit a church and left the car along the olive groves. Having stayed rather longer than usual we came down at dusk to find threedarkly clad men in the middle foreground advancing towards the grove where our car lay.
    It looked suspiciously like a reception committee which had finally made contact—perhaps signaled by one of the villages through which we had passed. My heart sank as I measured our distance from the car. I cursed myself for taking such risks, especially with the precious lives of others. How foolhardy to imagine that just by staggering our times and places for excursions we could in the long run escape the vigilance of the terrorists! But there was no time for breast-beating, for they had seen us coming. At all costs we must recover our car. They had something in their hands, perhaps weapons. It was still too far to see clearly. My hand sought the little pistol which lay under a napkin in the food haversack. We advanced arm-in-arm with a simulated nonchalance.
    I could have imagined a slightly tremulous Martine in the circumstances, but not at all. The hand on my arm was firm and untrembling and her step was light and confident. It was a moment of tension which did not last long however. We saw that they were forest guards making some sort of inventory of the trees—forest guards and tax collectors no doubt. The only weapons they carried were pens and ink and writing blocks. They talked in preoccupied tones, and looked up idly to see us pass in front of them and regain the car. It was irritating to have been scared by such a meeting; and Martine, divining my pique, smiled and pinchedmy arm affectionately. “Not this time,” she said, as I let in the clutch and eased the car out of the olive shadow on to the tarmac. The sunny glades smelled of rosemary and dust even in the dream; a blessed wind rose with our movement and cooled our foreheads. Martine was deeply thoughtful—that beautiful face with its snow-brown skin held sideways