We knew each other’s intimacies, each other’s skills and weaknesses. We forgave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. “The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.” That was the real Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog.

Sometime in 1931 I joined a Bedouin caravan and was told there was another one of us there. Fenelon-Barnes, it turned out. I went to his tent. He was out for the day on some small expedition, cataloguing fossil trees. I looked around his tent, the sheaf of maps, the photos he always carried of his family, et cetera. As I was leaving I saw a mirror tacked up high against the skin wall, and looking at it I saw the reflection of the bed.