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villa in North Khartoum, I found that the girl hadn’t any Sudanese papers at all, except for the visa which had got her into the country. Nor did she have any invitation from the Eritreans to go through into their embattled region. Just to get as far as Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where an Eritrean truck could fetch her, she would need an ornate movement permit from the Sudanese.
    I tried to swallow the irritation I felt. I knew that all the next day would be spent in the offices of Sudanese immigration, in police offices as well, waiting on benches with an Islamic patience which isn’t really my character, while officials took their mysterious time, not wishing to offend God by working faster than they knew He did.
    â€œDid you come on an impulse?” I asked her.
    â€œNo. But I wanted to come here as quick as I could.”
    I wanted to ask her whether her mother knew she was here. But though she looked like a child, she had a woman’s presence, and it was her business. I asked her if she had any passport pictures, and she searched languidly inside the large leather bag she carried and dropped perhaps a dozen tiny straight-faced photographs on the seat beside me.
    â€œThat’s good,” I said. “You need photographs for everything. You’ll need half a dozen documents. Even a permit to take scenic photographs.”
    â€œBut I don’t have a camera,” she told me.
    â€œWouldn’t your family want you to bring home a photograph of Masihi?”
    She waved this possibility aside. “The rebels have a camera section. They can give me a photograph.”
    But she sounded as if she half expected to stay in Eritrea for good.
    The route to Stella Harries’ place goes up Zubeir Phasher Street, a typically broad Khartoum thoroughfare. That night its pavements were silted up with sand from a habub of a few days past. But there was also a detritus of garbage and rubble which might easily prove to be, on closer inspection, some huddled child shipped up from the south as a house slave by a pederastic Sudanese officer and now used up and thrown onto the streets. For that was another way the poor of the provinces made it to the big city.
    â€œYou speak English so well,” I remarked to the girl, making conversation in this sad city.
    â€œMy mother managed a French hotel in London.”
    â€œAfter Masihi …?”
    â€œYes. I went to school there for six years.” I was going to make some conventional noise about her disrupted childhood, but she nodded toward the road ahead. “Look, there’s a policeman.”
    We were nearing the great circle of road which runs around the outskirts of the market named Suq Two, always still brightly lit late at night, a great swath of canvas under which peaches, oranges, and dates are displayed. At the stem of the Suq Two roundabout a Sudanese policeman walked into the street armed with an ancient British rifle and waved at me to stop. I obeyed.
    The policeman leaned in at the cabin window. I cursed the infidel halter-neck the girl was wearing.
    â€œSalaam!” I told the man, and since he seemed to be a Nuba and the Nuba often spoke English, asked, “Is there any problem, sir?”
    I knew even as an occasional visitor that the man wanted to test me, to work out in what degree I harbored the most treasured Sudanese virtues—politeness, composure, that patience which is in fact a kind of humility in the face of time’s great circle. I handed over my papers, the ones which had smiling from them a slightly plumper, slightly younger, not quite as bald Darcy. A photograph in fact taken before the tribal disaster hit Bernadette and me.
    The Nuba handed back my papers and inspected the girl, asking only for her passport. He stared with particular emphasis at her shoulders, as if he was punishing her with desire.
    â€œDo you have any Scotch with you?” he asked.
    I told him I didn’t drink. That wasn’t