“You do have gin,” said the captain.

“Those are empty.”

The clerk turned the ceiling fans on, one in each room, and then went to the landing again to yell for the Arab. He came back, taking off his clothes.

“I don’t think he’ll come,” he said and threw his jacket on a horsehair couch. The couch was not usable because it was full of books.

“Who, the mayor?”

“No, Remal will come. He said so in the hospital.”

“I don’t understand why he wanted to see you and me.”

“That’s because he didn’t say.”

The clerk kept walking all this time and dropping his clothes. When he got to the second room he was quite naked.

There was a brass bed in this room, a dresser, and a tin tub with handles.

“I’ll just have to use the same water again,” said the clerk, and stepped into his tub.

“Did you say you had gin, Whitfield?”

The clerk sighed when he sat down in the water, reached down to the bottom of the tub, and brought up a bottle. The label was floating off.

“This way it keeps a degree of coolness,” he said. “There is ice only at the hotel. You see the glasses?”

The captain saw the glasses on the dresser and then was told to fetch also the clay jug from the window sill. The gray earthenware was sweating small, shiny water pearls which trembled, rolled over the belly of the jug and became stains shaped like amoebae.

“It’s a sour wine,” said the clerk. “Very safe,” and he uncorked the gin bottle.

They mixed gin and sour wine and the glasses felt fairly cool in their hands.

“ Min skoal din skoal,” said the clerk for politeness.

The captain didn’t recognize the pronunciation and said nothing. He made himself another glass while the clerk watched from the bathtub. There was a deep cushiony valley where the captain sat on the bed and the clerk thought, He looks like an egg sitting up, beard notwithstanding. I am drinking too fast “What a sight,” said the captain. “That creature we found there.”