As the first car drove back out past Bob and Will, the woman in it nodded happily. “Thanks! Why, it is just like Rome!” “Did she say Rome or home?” asked Will.
Another car wheeled toward the exit. “Yes, sir!” The driver reached out to shake Bob’s hand. “Just looking made me feel I could speak French!”
“French!” cried Bob. Both stepped forward swiftly as the third car made to leave. An old man sat at the wheel, shaking his head. “Never seen the like. I mean to say, fog and all, Westminster Bridge, better than a postcard, and Big Ben off there in the distance. How do you do it? God bless. Much obliged.”
Both men, disquieted, let the old man drive away, then slowly wheeled to look out along their small thrust of land toward the growing simmer of noon. “Big Ben?” said Will Bantlin. “Westminster Bridge? Fog?”
Faintly, faintly, they thought they heard, they could not be sure, they cupped their ears, wasn’t that a vast clock striking three times off there beyond land’s rim? Weren’t foghorns calling after boats and boat horns calling down on some lost river?
“Almost speak French?” whispered Robert. “Big Ben? Home? Rome? Is that Rome out
there, Will?”
The wind shifted. A broiling surge of warm air tumbled up, plucking changes on an invisible harp. The fog almost solidified into gray stone monuments. The sun almost built a golden statue on top of a breasted mount of fresh-cut snow marble.
“How—-” said William Bantlin, “how could it change? How could it be four, five cities? Did we tell anyone what city they’d see? No. Well, then, Bob, well!”
Now they fixed their gaze on their last customer, who stood alone at the rim of the dry peninsula. Gesturing his friend to silence, Robert moved silently to stand to one side and behind their paying visitor.
He was a man in his late forties with a vital, sunburned face, good, warm, clear-water eyes, fine cheekbones, a receptive mouth. He looked as if he had traveled a long way around in his life, over many deserts, in search of a particular oasis.
He resembled those architects found wandering the rubbled streets below their buildings as the iron, steel and glass go soaring up to block out, fill in an empty piece of the sky. His face was that of such builders who suddenly see reared up before them on the instant, from horizon to horizon, the perfect implementation of an old, old dream. Now, only half aware of William and Robert beside him, the stranger spoke at last in a quiet, an easy, a wondrous voice, saying what he saw, telling what he felt:
“In Xanadu … “
“What?” asked William.
The stranger half smiled, kept his eyes on the mirage and quietly, from memory, recited.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.”
His voice spelled the weather and the weather blew about the other two men and made them more still.
“So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.”
William and Robert looked off at the mirage, and what the stranger said was there, in the golden dust, some fabled Middle East or Far East clustering of minarets, domes, frail towers risen up in a magnificent sift of pollen from the Gobi, a spread of river stone baked bright by the fertile Euphrates, Palmyra not yet ruins, only just begun, newly minted, then abandoned by the departing years, now shimmered by heat, now threatening to blow away forever.
The stranger, his face transformed, beautified by his vision, finished it out:
“It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”
And the stranger grew silent.
Which made the silence in Bob and Will all the deeper.
The stranger fumbled with his wallet, his eyes wet.
“Thank you, thank you.”
“You already paid us,” said William.
“If I had more, you’d get it all.” He gripped William’s hand, left a five-dollar bill in it, jumped into his car, looked for a last time out at the mirage, then sat down, started the car, idled it with wonderful case at face glowing, eyes peaceful, drove away.
Robert walked a few steps after the car, stunned. Then William suddenly exploded, flung his arms up, whooped, kicked his feet, wheeled around.
“Hallelujah! Fat of the land! Full dinner plate! New squeaky shoes! Look at my fistfuls!”
But Robert said, “I don’t think we should take it.”
William stopped dancing. “What?”
Robert looked steadily at the desert. “We can’t ever really own it. It’s way out there. Sure, we can homestead the land, but … We don’t even know what that thing is.”
“Why, it’s New York and-” “Ever been to New York?” “Always wanted. Never did.”
“Always wanted, never did.” Robert nodded slowly. “Same as them. You heard: Paris. Rome. London. And this last mate Xanadu. Willy, Willy, we got hold of something strange an big here. I’m scared we don’t do right by it.”
“Well, we’re not keeping anyone out, are we?”, “Who knows? Might be a quarter’s too much for some. It don’t seem right, a natural thing handled by unnatural rules. Look and tell me I’m wrong.”
William looked. And the city was there like the first city he had seen as a boy when his mother took him on a train across a long meadow of heath early one morning and the city rose up head by head, tower by tower to look at him, to watch him co near. It was that fresh, that new, that old, that frightening, that wonderful.
“I think,” said Robert, “we should take just enough to buy gas for a week, put the rest of the money in the first poor-box we come to. That mirage is a clear river running, and people coming by thirsty. If we’re wise, we dip one cup, drink it cool in the heat of the day and go. If we stop, build dams, try to own the whole river …”
William, peering out through the whispering dust wind, tried to relax, accept. “If you say so.”
“I don’t. The wilderness all around says.”
“Well, I say different!”
Both men jumped and spun about. Half up the slope stood a motorcycle. Sitting it, rainbowed with oil, eyes goggled, grease masking his stubbly cheeks, was a man of familiar arrogance and free-running contempt.
“Ned Hopper!”
Ned Hopper smiled his most evilly benevolent smile, unbraked the cycle and glided the rest of the way down to halt by his old friends. “You—-,’ said Robert.
“Me! Me! Me!” Ned Hopper honked his cycle horn four times, laughing loud, head back. “Me!”
“Shut up!” cried Robert. “Bust it like a mirror.”
“Bust what like a mirror?” William, catching Robert’s concern, glanced apprehensively out beyond at the desert.
The mirage flurried, trembled, misted away, then hung itself like a tapestry once more on the air.
“Nothing out there! What you guys up to?” Ned peered down at the treadmarked earth. “I was twenty miles on today when I realized you boys was hiding back behind. Says to myself, that ain’t like my buddies who led me to that goldmine in forty-seven, lent me this cycle with a dice roll in fifty-five.
All those years we help each other and now you got secrets from friend Ned. So I come back. Been up on that hill half the day, spying.” Ned lifted binoculars from his greasy jacket front. “You know I can read lips. Sure!” Saw all the cars run in here, the cash. Quite a show you’re running!”
“Keep your voice down,” warned Robert. “So long.”
Ned smiled sweetly. “Sorry to see you go. But I surely do respect your getting off my property.”
“Yours!” Robert and William caught themselves and said in a trembling whisper, “Yours?”
Ned laughed. “When I saw what you was up to, I just cycled into Phoenix. See this little bitty governmen’ paper sticking out my back pocket?”
The paper was there, neatly folded.
William put out his hand. “Don’t give him the pleasure,” said Robert. William pulled his hand back. “You want us to believe you filed a homestead claim?”
Ned shut up the smile inside his eyes. “I do. I don’t. Even if I was lying, I could still make Phoenix on my bike quicker’n your jalopy.”
Ned surveyed the land with his binoculars. “So just put down all the money you earned from two this afternoon, when I filed my claim, from which time on you was trespassing my land.”
Robert flung the coins into the dust. Ned Hopper glanced casually at the bright litter. “The U.S. Government Mind. Hot dog, nothing out there, but dumb bunnies willing to pay for it!”
Robert turned slowly to look at the desert. “You don’t see nothing?”
Ned snorted. “Nothing, and you know it!”
“But we do!”” cried William. “We–” “William,” said Robert. “But, Bob!”
“Nothing out there. Like he said.” More cars were driving up now in a great thrum of engines. “Excuse, gents, got to mind the box office!”
Ned strode off, waving. “Yes, sir, ma’am! This way! Cash in advance!”
“Why?” William watched Ned Hopper run off yelling. “Why are we letting him do this?”
“Wait,” said Robert, almost serenely. “You’ll see.”
They got out of the way as a Ford, a Buick and an ancient Moon motored in.
Twilight. On a hill about two hundred yards above the Mysterious City Mirage viewpoint, William Bantlin and Robert Greenhill fried and picked at a small supper, hardly bacon, mostly beans. From time to time, Robert
