Hantane towers over the valley. Over the school. It looms over the netball pitch, above the ancient tamarind trees, the convolvulus and hibiscus hedges. Its defies the walls of the school; it brings the swirling mists, that envelop its peak, into the classrooms and fills the heart with terror when the flames rage upwards from the wild, burning mana grasses. But through their childhood, through adolescence, the girls are safe behind the hedges which screen out the voices and dust of the road. The chaos, the turbulence and turmoil of the cosmos lie outside this primal garden where sorrow, bereavement, loss of love, betrayal and death are everyday facts in ordinary lives. The horror of things glimpsed: the woman without a nose, the exhibitionists behind the hedges or in a park—weak and impotent men, the revulsion of seeing their sad exposures; the blind beggar, old, ragged, who sits on the roadside playing on the plangent strings of a violin made of a hollow coconut shell …. But all this is not enough to make them renounce the world—to abdicate, to reject, to escape from the world which tempts them with the apples of sin and guilt in Satanic whispers. They will go out to life, to death. Presagement is just the slightest intimation: ‘Jesus Christ, mein schonstes Licht …’

My Saviour, Thou, Thy love to me
In shame, in want, in pain hast showed;
For me, on the accursed tree
Thou pourest forth Thy guiltless blood;
Thy wounds upon my heart impress
Nor aught shall the loved stamp efface.