Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather slingstraps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoesoles, the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms. He was feeling a half-sheepish affection for his vantage point that he was leaving.īelow him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defenselessly, like an exhausted fighter. He leaned his elbows on the porch ledge and stood looking down through the screens at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below with the tiers of porches dark in the faces of the three-story concrete barracks fronting on the square. When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.
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