22 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Christmas crib (castles and little villages and women
with baskets of carrots, a donkey and a motor-car
and a comic man in a top-hat, little caves where
hermits or gipsies sat asleep on moss-covered rocks,
a man on an old-fashioned bicycle, and somewhere
right up in a corner, dwarfed by the world, the flesh
—those bright spring carrots, the devil—the man in
a top-hat, sat the Mother of God with an old-young
child, wrinkled and careworn and cross-eyed, and
Herod leant over a wall with his crown tilted).

Las Palmas

Of Las Palmas I can remember little more: a man
selling women's pyjamas from a rowing boat after
midnight, the women in the '33' with black theatrical
eyes and heavy figures. It was half-past one in the
morning before we got ashore and found a taxi.
Nobody could speak a word of anything but Spanish;
the drink was bad and dear, but Younger didn't
mind. His inevitable expression, "You saucy little
sausage/' could be heard through all the rooms, his
progress was one long slap and tickle and free drink.
The manager followed him round with bills he
wouldn't pay and Phil brought up the rear, the young
shipping agent who was afraid there would be trouble,
who had the unrequited devotion of a page in an
Elizabethan play. Every now and again to keep
the manager quiet Phil paid a bill and the manager
tore it up and dropped it on the floor and wrote
another. Then Younger stole the woman belonging
to a man with a guitar and the man kissed him and