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in their kilts and their tall boots. He in his kilt and bare feet was all one
great shiver. The wind whipped the warmth out of him, and the spray kept it
away.
    But when Dancer had come to land, when it slid up on the shore, he cared for nothing but that
he should stand on solid earth again, and no need in the morning to clamber
aboard ship, no need to sail further, not till he went back to Egypt.
    All of his shipmates had leaped down, every one, swarming
over the sides, whooping, singing, dancing on the breast of the earth their
mother. There were people waiting for them, dancing, too, and singing: women,
men, children, what must be half the people of this island, all come together
to welcome them home.
    They even welcomed Kemni, caught his hands and whirled him
about and dropped him dizzy to the sand. Kemni minded not at all. He embraced
the earth; he kissed it. He would have made love to it, if he had been a little
wilder.
    It was not his own earth, his Black Land, nor yet the Red
Land that bordered it. But it was earth. It would suffice.

VI
    Kemni rose at last, well dusted with sand, staggering on
ground that did not rock and sway like a ship’s deck, and found himself the
center of a circle of stares. Every idler and hanger-on in this port seemed fascinated
by his sandy and unstable self.
    And there before them all was a woman of beauty to break the
heart. She looked, somewhat, like Iphikleia; but all Cretans looked like one
another. She was smaller, a delicate handful, and her breasts were even sweeter.
He could have circled her waist with his two hands.
    Iphikleia he dreamed of, and burned for when he woke. This
was beyond dreaming. This, he would die for.
    She must be a goddess, or a goddess’ image. And yet she
regarded him with such a look of pure and wicked delight that he caught himself
grinning like a fool. She laughed, sweet as water bubbling from a spring, and
brushed the sand from his shoulders. “Oh!” she said. “Such a lovely gift the
sea has brought to me. Where do you come from, beautiful man?”
    “He comes from Egypt,” Iphikleia’s clear voice said from
just behind him, “and he comes from their king.”
    “All the better,” the stranger said. “Come, beautiful man!
Come to the palace with me.”
    Kemni did not think he could have resisted, even if he had
wanted to. She had taken him by the hand, easy and trusting as a child, but no
one of all those about looked on her as such. They were as dazzled as he was,
and as helpless against her.
    Of all the ways he had thought to come to the palace of the
Labyrinth, this was the least conceivable: walking hand in hand with this most
beautiful of women, listening to her light sweet chatter. He was dimly aware of
a city around him, white walls, streets paved with smooth stones and glimmering
shells, flashes of bright color everywhere his eye happened to glance: a tumble
of flowers down a wall, vivid paint along a portico, a gleam of gold in shadow.
And everywhere there were people, slender, with black ringlets worn long, and
wide dark eyes. But clearest then and always to his memory was her face lifted
to his, for she came only as high as his chin, and her voice running on.
    “My name is Ariana,” she said. “I was born up there, in a
high white room that looks out past a spire of stone to the sea. I have the sea
in my blood. Is it true what they say, that Egyptians have sand there, and
river mud?”
    Kemni laughed before he thought, half amused, half taken
aback. “That is one way of putting it,” he said.
    “You speak our language very well,” said Ariana. “Iphikleia
taught you, I suppose. She’s a fine teacher.”
    “She is very . . . severe,” Kemni said.
    Ariana’s laughter rippled to the blue heaven. “She likes
people to think that. It comes of being such a scapegrace as a child—she tries
to make up for it by being the most dignified of women. But I know,” said
Ariana, “that she’s really as wild as ever. Did