"Good afternoon."
Georgiana, who was "arranging" the room, turned around and discovered that General Lannes had actually come.
"Good afternoon," she said politely. "Why aren't you at the meeting?"
"There's nothing for me to do there," Lannes said coolly. "I'm not a civil official."
Georgiana did not know what to say.
"How would you like this room arranged?" Lannes asked.
"I want to cover the walls with wool cloth, add several leather sofas, and put some gilded botanical patterns on the cloth..."
"Sounds like a forest," Lannes interrupted rudely. "Plants and animals again."
She was so angry that she could not even maintain her polite smile.
"Actually, I don't much like Egypt. I prefer the civilized world, with wine, bread, and warm, comfortable beds. But the General likes it very much. More than once, he said that the desert had always held a special attraction for him. Whenever he crossed it, he was deeply moved, feeling that the desert was like a vast, boundless ocean that one could walk upon. It was precisely because of his imagination that I could face that cruel, barbaric, and interminable reality."
"Reality?"
"What do you think paradise should be like?" Lannes asked.
"I think it is a library," Georgiana said.
"I think it is a place where one can escape 'reality.' While we were aboard ship, the General promised that when the expedition returned, each of us would receive six aruras of land, equivalent to your six acres. But when we arrived, we found yellow sand everywhere. The famed cities were nothing like we had imagined either, merely some thatched huts. The soldiers joked then, 'This is your six aruras of land.' We thought the oasis would be better, but the forest was full of mosquitoes, and the food was terrible too. In short,