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forth between three homes.
    To own three sited all in the same building, even though the building was large and sprawled into many shady colonnades, white-glittering domes, towers of marble and courts where lizards darted at the feet of priceless statues … That was unique. And their unique proprietor was the man who, some declared, was the greatest living poet: Mustapha Sharif.
    But if anybody said as much in his hearing, he would wryly observe that there was very little competition nowadays.
    Possession of his third skelter, high in a minaret where five times daily an elderly and arthritic muezzin came to call to prayer those of the local people who had not been seduced into following the infidel creed, the Way of Life, was not an achievement he advertised. The world might assume the existence of the first skelter; so famous a man was bound to have one at least. The lucky ones might even,by invitation, pass the privateer which guarded it and lavish on their host praise for the splendor of his home, which he could not see but always modestly said was worth maintaining for the pleasure it gave to others.
    Equally, once having arrived whether by skelter or on foot or camel-back, visitors might guess at a second skelter. His estate was on rocky ill-favored ground, long unclaimed, but a skelter could and did bring in sweet water, delicate foods, relics salvaged from elsewhere on the planet.
    But the third … Only two, out of all his many servants, were even aware that it was located behind that locked door on the last but one landing of a twisted staircase made of drab, worn tiles.
    There was no light in the room, only a current of warm air from a high-set ventilator. He emerged into it, swiftly and deftly exchanged his climatized suit – necessary for the visit to Sweden – for his usual burnous and sandals, and after listening very carefully for the sound of footsteps unlocked the door, stepped out, re-locked it. The heat of Africa brushed him like fine wires, making his chill skin tingle.
    On the point of turning downward on the staircase, he checked and changed his mind and instead took the last short flight up to the rooftop. He needed time to digest what he had learned.
    There was a stool set out near the parapet. He felt for it, positioned it where he could lean comfortably forward, and faced the direction of ancient Luxor, which – so he had been told – was in line-of-sight from this tower. But he had scarcely begun to learn to think in pictures before he lost his vision. Instead he thought in terms of his other senses: the hot dry air bore him sounds that he readily identified, scents that he knew as intimately as his own hunger or thirst or fatigue. There were dates, camel-dung, humanity, cook-fires, growing crops, spices, wet cloth tentered on poles to bleach, and several other distinguishable aromas in the air today. The odors of life, not of death!
    There was going to be another poem. He could feel the shy probing of its first tendrils at the back of his mind,those tender early shoots which eventually would knot and crack flagstones into fragments.
    He toyed with a phrase or two. The images were elusive. It was too soon yet. But the time would come.
    Content to wait, preferring not to wonder whether eventually someone might read and understand his work rather than simply admire it, and draw a correct conclusion about his inspiration, he turned his mind to another matter: Hans Dykstra.
    He had made a mistake in choosing that man to go with him to the nine lost homes. There had better not be a tenth.
    In the beginning, it had seemed that Hans would be an ideal companion. There were others who might have been equally eager to buy illegal disused codes, but they were greedy, like his own former partner … whom he had been compelled to lose, regretfully but with small compunction, when he started to pilfer items rare enough to be valuable in such quantities that the authorities grew suspicious and clamped down. He