So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon.

He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.

With cactus-studded desert mountains plunging into tranquil turquoise bays, gliding manta rays and pods of migrating orca whales, this uninhabited island in the Sea of Cortez, which separates mainland Mexico and the fingerlike Baja peninsula, is every bit the paradise island you dream of escaping to. It's also the perfect place to explore by sea kayak; warm water and sunshine are almost guaranteed from October to May.

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.
But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.

Pete offered tobacco and paper, but Claude brought out his cigarettes and they both decided to try those. Pete provided the match. When he had their cigarettes burning strongly he turned to look back at the road, then straight up ahead. "We'll get there for supper if we get there," he said, and Claude laughed. Pete was a young man, but had a wild old grin stretched all out of shape in the corners and punched full of holes.

Are you the owner of this car?" A cop has something you don't have, something you gave him earlier.

"No, I'm just delivering it to Oklahoma City for a lady. "

"Do you have plates for this car?" A cop needn't be vicious, but he can be so, safely.

"Just those stickers."

"Do you have the registration?" Presidents and premiers can annihilate millions, but only a cop can explain away your solitary murder.