Evelyn Waugh

“In a way I shall feel happier when she knows… it feels all wrong as it is at present, having it as a secret that Brenda doesn’t know… I’m not sure how she fits in her day. I suppose her last lecture is over at about five… I wonder if she goes home first to change if she’s going out to tea or cocktails. She can’t sit about much in the flat, it’s so small.”

“It’s a heartbreaking game,” she said.

know you aren’t putting your heart into this.”
“Oh,” said Tony. “Coop-coop-coop.”

“Oh yes,” said Jenny. “It was. It was my fault. I ought never to have gone there… a terrible curse hangs over me. Wherever I go I bring nothing but sorrow… if only it was I that was dead… I shall never be able to face them again. I feel like a murderess… that brave little life snuffed out.”

“What have I done to deserve it?”

“… You see there has been a continuous tradition about the City since the first explorers of the sixteenth century. It has been variously allocated, sometimes down in Matto Grosso, sometimes on the upper Orinoco in what is now Venezuela. I myself used to think it lay somewhere on the Uraricuera. I was out there last year and it was then that I established contact with the Pie-wie Indians; no white man had ever visited them and got out alive. And it was from the Pie-wies that I learned where to look. None of them had ever visited the City, of course, but they knew about it. Every Indian between Ciudad Bolivar and Para knows about it. But they won’t talk. Queer people. But I became blood-brother with a Pie-wie—interesting ceremony. They buried me up to the neck in mud and all the women of the tribe spat on my head. Then we ate a toad and snake and a beetle and after that I was a blood-brother—well, he told me that the City lies between the headwaters of the Courantyne and the Takutu. There’s a vast track of unexplored country there. I’ve often thought of visiting it.

“I’ve been looking up the historical side too, and I more or less know how the City got there. It was the result of a migration from Peru at the beginning of the fifteenth century when the Incas were at the height of their power. It is mentioned in all the early Spanish documents as a popular legend. One of the younger princes rebelled and led his people off into the forest. Most of the tribes have a tradition in one form or another of a strange race passing through their territory.”

“But what do you suppose this city will be like?”

“Impossible to say. Every tribe has a different word for it. The Pie-wies call it the ‘Shining’ or ‘Glittering,’ the Arekuna the ‘Many Watered,’ the Patamonas the ‘Bright Feathered,’ the Warau, oddly enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they make. Of course one can’t tell how a civilization may have developed or degenerated in five hundred years of isolation…”

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the company two months.

The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his work and would sometimes ‘address them individually as ‘George’ at stand-easies, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to affection for him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.

at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry — that stoic, redskin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting ‘Hooper’ and seeing if they still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: ‘Hooper Rallies’, ‘Hooper Hostels’, ‘International Hooper Cooperation’, and ‘the Religion of Hooper’. He was the acid test of all these alloys.