“That isn’t much of a hospital you have there,” said the captain.

“The Italians built it. For the ministry of colonial archives.”

“They were hardly here long enough.”

“Look at the hotel,” said the clerk.

They looked at the hotel while they kept walking along the middle of the main street. They could not use the sidewalk which was sometimes no more than a curb. When it was not just a curb there would be chairs and tables which belonged to a coffee house, or stalls with fly-black meat where the butcher was, or perhaps lumber because a carpenter worked on the ground floor. It was that kind of a main street, not very long, and the hotel was the biggest building and even had thin little trees in front.

“It reminds me of Greece,” said the captain. “I don’t mean really Greek, but I can’t think of anything closer.”

“The Germans built it, and they were here less time than the Italians.”

“In America,” said the captain, “it would be a bank.”

“It was a Kaserne. You know, garrison quarters, or something like that.”

They talked like that until they came to Whitfield’s house, because they did not quite know what to say about the other matter. The clerk showed the way up a side street, through an arch in a house where a breeze was blowing, across the courtyard in back, and to the house behind that.

“The French built it,” he said. “They were here the longest.”

“The Arabs didn’t build anything?”

“There are native quarters,” said Whitfield, with his tone just a little bit as if these were still Empire days.

His two rooms were on the second floor and there was even a balcony. The captain looked at the balcony while the clerk yelled down the stairs for his Arab to bring two buckets of water and some lemon juice. There was no view, the captain saw, just rooftops and heat waves above that. And the balcony was not usable because it was full of cartons.