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What were the things she had done before? That he had done, where had he taken her?
    A map upon the table.
    A . . . accentuate to what? To their, to tr . . . re . . . a feeling . . . ”Play the Black . . . ” Finally what is it? Just a feeling, buttressed by . . . ( Pause .) Science. By Experience?
    To make us less afraid.
    “The ship is down,” they'd tried to find her for . . . They'd tried to find her for . . . The records had been opened since . . . Before the war, and then after the war. Who'd sat like me, and looked upon . . . The records of their trip . . . the . . . sketches of the artifacts—but not the gold.
    D: Others had gotten gold.
    C: And lived in, you see it . . . the cruelty of the Middle Age. Especially here—cursed by . . . We can see that there are cursed folk . . . I thought: What does it mean?
    The plagues of Egypt.
    Surely they afflicted . . . this is the: the power to see did not lessen their danger. For the Jews, though, it does not say, but it says they were not giv'n a sign until the final, so they must have lived with those ten plagues, and, stricken by them, too, looked for . . . ( Pause .) They . . . ( Pause. )
    I thought about the gash of, the blood on the door, what did it mean, and it was obviously a . . . an . . . imbalance. Differences in diet, some thing a . . . an . . . an . . . in, say a, a intestinal malady which they were not subject to. And the Egyptians died and the Jews lived and though subject to the plagues of that life they said it was a sign. So, here, the opposite. A curse. A heaviness. The weight of gold . . . and, as an element . . . for, certainly, all . . . if we look, as I looked in that room, protected by the walls, by heat, by the, “and blest by the dust of the crumbling manuscripts . . . ” Protected . . . And I saw all things are literal.
    They mean exactly what they seem to mean. ( Pause. ) Those men coming back were never to reach home. They were infected. They were weighted down, the same god which had sent the gold which sent the storm.
    Although others had gone before.
    Although these . . .
    And reached home ( Pause. )
    And reached home with their prize.
    Which formed the basis of their fortune.
    Three
    F: You see: one needn't have confidence, because it is also possible to lose—so there is a result to your actions what-ever you do. ( Pause. ) And you cannot combat human misery.
    G: Who cannot?
    F: A boy died. In Alabama. In some southern state. A black boy in a state where, they had said, and they needn't have said it . . .
    G: Niggers.
    F: In a word as things that we would say, that they would censure. You would say, “A conquered people.” As they were. A love of . . . of, a tradition of honor, true or not, as all traditions are. A history of loss. One aspect of white males at the door, at the schoolyard door, barring a frightened five-year-old, a black girl in a . . .
    G: In a yellow dress.
    F: Thirty years later in that state, in that same state a boy who, as a student had worked for the Governor, a black boy a white, a, Louisiana . . .
    G: What dif . . . ?
    F: Well, that's what we say, you see: Who possess the prerogative to say: Your History, your Mores, your . . . finally, what makes you different is, and, do not say “A Luxury . . . ” But, a stupidity , a trick, and, fostered on you by the: Too much time . . . too much time on your hands—as all culture— Heat. The need to . . . or, otherwise, say, say, “The Great Chain of Being,” if, in England, but not here, because here what we are is without hist . . . and things change, and some things do not change. ( Pause. ) But, to Western eyes, which is to say, the minds of people from the North, rapacious, sons steeped in the Blazonment . . . a knight rides out and, you know him by his shield, or as the Bard says, “Reputation.” We say, “Advertising,” yes, an English shirt, a French whore, a dumb cracker, a nig, any of those things one said, one said that only shallow people
    Cannot