"You promised to bury it face down in the sand," I said.
He looked at me. "You know better than that," he said. "I promised nothing of the sort."
"It's like falling in love with a ghost, only worse," I said.
"That's where you're wrong. There's nothing ghostly about her."
I mixed him a sleeping draught, using the little water we had left.
In five minutes he was snoring. I pried the mirror from his fingers and propped it up against a rock, so that he could see her face when he woke up.
Then I stretched myself out in the sand, kicked off my shoes and stared up at the sky. The sun was just sinking to rest, and there was a thin sprinkling of stars in the middle of the sky.
The stars seemed cold and immeasurably remote.
Would it work out?
Could it possibly work out? Was I sticking out my neck in a gamble so big it was like attempting to pierce the sun, and hammer out a new humanity on a great blazing anvil heated to millions of degrees centigrade?