One evening, as I wound the gliders down on the winch, a sudden gale rose over the crest of Coral D. While I grappled with the whirling handle, trying to anchor my crutches in the sand, two figures approached across the desert floor. One was a small hunchback with a child’s overlit eyes and a deformed jaw twisted like an anchor barb to one side. He scuttled over to the winch and wound the tattered gliders towards the ground, bis powerful shoulders pushing me aside. He helped me on to my crutches and peered into the hangar. Here my most ambitious glider to date, no longer a kite but a sail-plane with elevators and control lines, was taking shape on the bench.

He spread a large hand over his chest. “Petit Manuel-acrobat and weight-lifter. Nolan!” he bellowed. “Look at this!” His companion was squatting by the sonic statues, twisting their helixes so that their voices became more resonant. “Nolan’s an artist,” the hunchback confided to me. “He’ll build you gliders like condors.”

The tall man was wandering among the gliders, touching their wings with a sculptor’s hand. His morose eyes were set in a face like a bored Gauguin’s. He glanced at the plaster on my leg and my faded flying jacket, and gestured at the gliders. “You’ve given cockpit to them, major.” The remark contained a complete understanding of my motives. He pointed to the coral towers rising above us into the evening sky. “With silver iodide we could carve the clouds.”

The hunchback nodded encouragingly to me, his eyes lit by an astronomy of dreams.

So were formed the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. Although I considered myself one of them, I never flew the gliders, but I taught Nolan and little Manuel to fly, and later, when he joined us, Charles Van Eyck. Nolan had found this blond-haired pirate of the cafe terraces in Vermilion Sands, a laconic teuton with droll eyes and a weak mouth, and brought him out to Coral D when the season ended and the well-to-do tourists and their nubile daughters returned to Red Beach.