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desert,’ I say, scratching uselessly against the page, ‘because she had escaped custody.’ The pen won’t write.
    The Administrator folds his arms. ‘We are all specks in the desert. When we look so far out into the landscape, we become the landscape. The desert imprints itself on our retina, enters us.’
    I stare at him. He could be a talkative man, a lonely man. But I don’t think so. I think he is punishing me for humiliating him. This is the Arabic equivalent of a stoush behind the pub. Melee by metaphor.
    ‘I’m not here to study the desert,’ I say. ‘I’m here to do my job.’
    ‘You won’t last long,’ says the Administrator, ‘if you ignore the desert.’
    I jab at the white plain of paper. ‘You found her wandering in the dunes with no possessions, no documents?’
    He hesitates. ‘Sister Antony would know if she had anything on – on her person,’ he says delicately. ‘All I saw was the camera.’ He nods at the photos. ‘Meersun, the daughter of Betsoul, a protégée of the Sister’s, found her first.’
    I jab at the paper again. ‘So the woman was brought in and then – ’ Laforche is still. ‘We were told that an Australian called Devlin was coming. And she placed a scorpion on her face.’
    I am ravaged beyond the pit in my stomach, the permanent pain below my heart. Beyond darkness.
    Laforche looks away. ‘She was lucky. It was an old scorpion, scarred and weary. No longer as potent.’
    The point of the pen is breaking through the paper.
    ‘This is a region,’ says Laforche slowly, ‘where the women hide daggers in their hair. The girls have poison necklaces, for times of war. Maybe that is what the woman was doing. She picked up the scorpion by one leg, how I don’t know, and she draped it around her, like a necklace.’
    I flinch but he doesn’t notice.
    ‘She said, “I’m going home”. And then the scorpion moved all over her. Who would have thought it would move so fast? It stung as it went, stabbing again and again with its devil tail. As it crawled over her eyelid, she fell slowly, like someone falling through clouds.’
    We stare at each other. This was the tipping point, as Mitch would say, with his usual trite way of reducing calamities; the moment when I should appeal to Laforche’s gallantry, his pride, whatever drove his feeling for the woman.
    I think of asking him for help. My stomach heaves. I scribble around the pockmarks in the paper and say, ‘You don’t know what she is capable of.’
    Laforche says, ‘I do not know what you are capable of.’
    The pen still won’t write.
    ‘It’s the dry air,’ says Laforche.
    ‘It’s a NASA pen,’ I say. ‘Specially designed for extreme conditions.’
    He pulls out a drawer. The knowing eye of the girl in the photograph gazes up at me.
    Laforche gives me a pencil. I sigh, acknowledge my defeat. I take the pencil and write.
    There is a small smile on the Administrator’s lips.
    The Asylum has two levels of deeply recessed arcades on all sides of a wide courtyard. The sick bay is located directly opposite the Administrator’s office. It is 11 am when we step out into the shuddering air.
    We skirt the cracked fountain in the centre of the courtyard. Its square-headed lion gapes dry-mouthed at us. Chickens scratch at tufty plants growing around the chipped base. The heat falls on me like stone. I can barely see in the searing light, even with my sunglasses on. Along the upper arcade, female patients sit between the washing hung in the stone arches. I squint and count five: thin, slack-jawed, mostly dark-skinned, with cropped hair.
    ‘We only take special cases,’ says Laforche. ‘Only what the Church sends us. So if we are not sent . . . ’ He points to a rusted iron grate in the compacted earth. ‘After the old monastery burnt down in 1408, the new one was built around the well.’ He made it sound like yesterday.
    ‘Rimbaud used to write in . . . ’ He turns, almost stepping on a chicken which was