In her
thin arms she held a heavy baby in a gilt cap, like a monkey. And
the wheel turned and whirled until it seemed to be spinning
dreams, thick as motes in the sun. The clay rose in smooth
spirals under his hand, and the wheel sang, 'Shall the vessel
reprove him who made one to honour and one to dishonour?' And I
saw the potter thumping his wet clay, and the clay, plastic as
dream-stuff, shaped swift as light, and the three Fates stood at
his shoul- der. Dreams, dreams, and all in the spinning of the
wheel, and the rich shadows of the old broken courtyard where he
sat. And the wheel stopped and the thread broke, and the little
new shapes he had made stood all about him, and he was only a
potter in Peshawar."
Her voice was like a song. She had utterly forgotten my
existence. I did not dislike it at the moment, for I wanted to
hear more, and the impersonal is the rarest gift a woman can give
a man.
"Did you buy anything?"
"He gave me a gift - a flawed jar of turquoise blue, faint
turquoise green round the lip. He saw I understood. And then I
bought a little gold cap and a wooden box of jade-green Kabul
grapes.
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