Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled by Dorothy Gilman Page A

told him. “I could never sleep without knowing if we found
something
. Where’s that hand screen?”
    Joe found one left on the ground near Site Two. They carried the sack and the screen to a nearby lantern and sat down beside it. “We do this sort of thing every day—tirelessly,” said Joe, dropping handfuls of dirt and pebbles across its surface.
    “Paper!” cried Mrs. Pollifax suddenly. “Look, scraps of white paper!”
    “I’m looking,” Joe said. “What do I do with them?”
    She unwound her white headscarf and he gathered together the scraps of paper and dropped them into it. When they had emptied the burlap sack they had culled a neat pile of scorched and torn pieces of paper. “Except, alas, no passport,” she mourned.
    Joe reached for a crumpled sample from the collection and whistled faintly through his teeth. “No passport but there’s an American here
somewhere
. Look at this!”
    He handed her one of the scorched remnants and by the light of the lantern she saw English print, something torn from a book, and leaning closer she read,
Poems by Emi
—and below it,
I Was Hun
—Fire had eaten away the rest, leaving its ragged edge brown with singe.
    For a moment, tired and sleepless, Mrs. Pollifax thought she was going to cry. “English,” she whispered.
    Joe, plucking out another scrap said, “Hey—there’s more English and this one’s written by hand; it says ‘taught to be incons …’ ” He looked at the quantity of scorched papers and shook his head. “This is going to be like gluing together shards of Ommayan pottery!” One glance at Mrs. Pollifax’s face in the light of the lantern and he forgot their contraband. “Good God,” he said with a gasp, “you’ve lost your bandage and it’s starting to bleed again. You must be exhausted, we should never, never have—You need sleep.”
    “I—I think you’re right,” she said with a wry smile.
    He helped her to her feet, gripped her arm and escorted her to Amy’s tent. “I’ll take these scraps with me—I’m rather good at jigsaw puzzles—and see what sense I can make of them. I’ll do it with a flashlight outside my tent so I won’t wake Farrell.”He added crossly, “You should have told me; I should have—Oh damn it, sleep. All
day
if you want,
Khaleh
Emily.”
    “Thank you,” she told him gravely, walked into the dark tent, glanced at a sleeping Amy, found a blanket and without bothering to remove her clothes lay down and at once fell asleep.

9

    I n Langley, Virginia it was ten o’clock in the morning when Bishop picked up the telephone to hear that Amman, Jordan was calling: that would be Rawlings, of course, in their Jordan office. “Hold on a minute,” he told him. “I believe he’s on another line.”
    He buzzed Carstairs and then walked into his office to see whether he was ordering lunch sent up from the cafeteria, or was still talking with Jacob Mboro in the Sudan. There had lately been a number of calls to and from the Sudan and Bishop, curious, and knowing little about the country, had looked it up in their library. Carstairs had been more helpful. “Largest country in Africa,” he said. “Underpopulated and needy. To simplify, draw a line roughly across the middle, at Khartoum: the top half is Arab, and mostly Muslim; the bottom half of the country are the natives, Christians or animists, and they want autonomy. Call it civil war or guerilla war; it’s been going on for years.”
    He opened the door in time to hear Carstairs say, “Good, I’ll see what I can do,” and cut the connection. Seeing Bishop he said cynically, “I must be getting old. Life was so much simpler when half the world backed the Soviet Union, and theother half lived in terror of the Soviet Union. Remove the Cold War and internal conflicts multiply in countries by the week.”
    Bishop said meekly, “Rawling’s on line one from Jordan, sir.”
    “Ah yes, Rawlings,” he said, and to Bishop, “I’ll want this