On a Sunday evening, as Marcia and Domingos readied themselves for a walk, there was a knock on the door. There were consecutive knocks on other doors too. The African students—the men dressed up in their Sunday best, coat and tie; the women in chic two-piece suits, hatted, stockinged, wearing high-heeled shoes, Bibles in their gloved hands—knocked on the closed, locked doors of each apartment, bringing with them the message of salvation, the Good News. Marcia stood in the doorway and watched their reception as the Scottish and English students, their legs stretched out on the tables, showed indifference.

‘We are non-believers,’ they said in unison. The same knocks on those doors in another continent had yielded different results more than a century ago. The African students good-naturedly accepted the rebuff and soon, engaged in friendly, unbiblical, untheological conversation, went off on a long walk with the non-believers.

Yet, the Christians were very alive in this city—the churches always full, with fervent sermons resounding from impressive pulpits, harmonious singing from the choir. Some of the churches, vaulted and embellished with rococo carving, resembled opera houses. But some of the Victorian-looking churches were closed—churches with heavy, red brick walls with exquisite stained glass windows: the deep wine-red, the cerulean blue, emerald green, gold and sunset orange set within the brick-like pages from a mediaeval Psalter. The University had acquired some of these churches and the doors were heavily padlocked.

How cold, thought Marcia, those unheated churches must have been in winter, the Congregation warmed, perhaps, only by the brilliance of colour that was shed from the glowing stained glass windows and by their own lusty singing filling their bodies with blood heat.

Beyond the churches was the Necropolis, the City of the Dead, with its tombs and mausoleums, a whole city of convoluted towers and domed structures inhabited by ghosts. Spirits that always hovered in the air, speaking through the wind. Strange, those experiences of death, and the emptiness of cold rooms that had once been inhabited.