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He twitched his shaggy eyebrows at me. 'Promotion in your army is bad!' he enquired lazily.

'That kind is. Normally, if you're going to stay in the line of command – field officer – you're promoted from lieutenant-colonel to brigadier; battalion CO to brigade CO. If you only go up one step it's a warning that you're being shunted sideways into a specialist job.' I sighed. 'I suppose it was my own fault. It was my pride to be a damned good intelligence officer, and they wanted to keep me that way. Anyway, I resigned my commission and started the firm I've been running for the last seven years.'

'Chicken colonel,' mused Byrne. 'I never made more than sergeant myself. Long time ago, though.'

'During the war,' I said.

'Yeah. Remember I told you I walked away from a crash?'

'Yes.'

'I liked what I saw during that walk – never felt so much alive. The other guys wouldn't come. Two of them couldn't; too badly injured – and the others stayed to look after them.

So I walked out myself.'

'What happened to them?' I asked.

He shrugged. 'I gave the position of the plane and they sent a captured Fiesler Storch to have a look. Those things could land in fifty yards. It was no good; they were all dead.'

'No water?'

He shook his head. 'Goddamn Arabs. They wanted loot and they didn't care how they got it.'

'And you came back here after the war?' I asked.

He shook his head. 'I let the war go on without me. During the time I was walking through the desert I got to thinking. I'd never seen such space, such openness. And the desert is clean. You know, you can go without washing for quite a time here and you're still clean – you don't stink. I liked the place. Couldn't say as much for the people, though.' He poured some more mint tea. 'The Chaamba Arabs around El Golea aren't too bad, but those bastards in the Maghreb would skin a quarter and stretch the skin into a dollar.'

'What's the Maghreb?'

'The coastal strip in between the Mediterranean and the Atlas.' He paused. 'Anyway, early in '43 I got a letter to say my Pop was dead. He was the only family I had, so I had no urge to go back to the States. And General Eisenhower and General Patton and more of the top brass were proposing to go to Italy. I didn't fancy that, so when the army went north I came south looking for more favourable folks than Arabs. I found 'em, and I'm still here.'

I smiled. 'You deserted?'

'It's been known as that,' he admitted. 'But, hell; ain't that what a desert's for?'

I laughed at the unexpected pun. 'What did you do before you joined the army?'

'Fisherman,' he said. 'Me and my Pop sailed a boat out o' Bar Harbor. That's in Maine. Never did like fishing much.'

Fisherman! That was a hell of a change of pace. I suppose it worked on the same principle that the best recruiting ground for the US Navy is Kansas. I said, 'You're a long way from the sea now.'

'Yeah, but I can take you to a place in the Tenere near Bilma – that's down in Niger and over a thousand miles from the nearest ocean – where you can pick up sea-shells from the ground in hundreds. Some of them are real pretty. The sea's been here and gone away. Maybe it'll come back some day.'

'Ever been back to the States?'

'No; I've been here thirty-five years and like to die here,' he said peacefully.

Mokhtar was away a long time, nearly five hours, and when he came back he had the gutted carcass of a gazelle slung across his shoulders. Byrne helped him butcher it, talking the while.

Presently he came over to me and squinted into the sun. 'Getting late,' he said. 'I reckon we'll stay here the night. Billson is either between here and Assekrem or he ain't. If he is, we'll find him tomorrow. If he ain't, a few hours won't make no difference.'

'All right.'

'And we've got fresh meat. Mokhtar tells me he stalked that gazelle for twenty kilometres and downed it in one shot.'

'You mean he walked twenty kilometres!'

'More. He had to come back. But he circled a bit, so say under thirty. That's nothing for a Targui. Anyway, Mokhtar's one of the old school; he learned to shoot with a muzzle-loader. With one of those you have to kill with one shot because the gazelle spooks and gets clear away before you can reload. But he likes a breech-action repeater better.'

And so we stayed u nder the shadow of Ilamen that night. I lay in the open, wrapped in a djellaba provided by Byrne, and looked up at those fantastic stars. A sickle moon arose but did little to dim the splendour of those faraway lights.

I thought of Byrne. Hesther Raulier had compared him with Billson, calling him, 'another crazy man'. But the madness of Byrne was quite different from the neurotic obsession of Billson; his was the madness that had struck many white men – not many Americans, mostly Europeans – Doughty, Burton, Lawrence, Thesiger – the lure of the desert. There was a peacefulness and a sanity about Byrne's manner which was very comforting.