‘My father told me that the man who had disappeared from Hantane estate had never been found. A bloodied mana grass-cutting knife and bloodstained clothes had been discovered but no arrests were made. There wasn’t enough evidence against the suspect. Perhaps the man who had killed was waiting for the fires to begin—you can see them like beacons on the mountains. But we have stumbled on what was meant never to be discovered—even if all of you go back, I must see for myself … don’t worry, you’ll find your way back. You’ll be safe … I’m going on ….’ Christina has made her decision.

Their eyes so liquid and unknowing hold fear. The picnic was for pleasure, for laughter, for adventure of a different sort, not this confrontation with the slow disintegration of a body abandoned, unclaimed in a waste of grass, corrupting the earth, the air, with its vileness. But don’t the birds of the air feed on its flesh? No, there are no vultures here, no birds to pick the white bones clean.

They can hear, very faintly, the sound of reed-like voices singing through the wind from a long distance away.

No one wants to go any further, to part the grass, to see death, the cold flesh which has lain for so long, shrouded in dews, swept by mist and rain until the fire from the mana grass consumes it. The high convolvulous hedge of their missionary school has protected them for so long and they feel that the earth is a safe world, that no mountain holds danger for them.

He shall not suffer thy foot to be moved
He that keepeth thee will not slumber
He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

These are the words of the school psalm which they intone at Prayers. This is what they believe in. Sometimes Christina has seen the funeral processions pass by her home. The melancholy sounds of Chopin’s ‘Marche Funebre’ played on the silver trumpets with the big drums beating out a sombre tattoo; sad looking men in starched white twill uniforms and pith helmets, bodies bent almost backwards with their weight. Their stiff arms lifting and falling, the upraised batons, the dull, monotonous thud, their measured tread on the hot, tarred road, the black hearse being slowly borne along, the coffin weighed down by the elaborate wreaths of flower. The bereaved dressed in white with hair loosely tossed on shoulders, weeping, clinging to each other for comfort, follow in the old Ford and Austin cars, their grief for all to see. Mourners straggle behind with black armbands, talking in subdued voices. Death is concealed in an ornate, varnished coffin. Here, it is wantonly exposed.

I will lift up mine eyes to the mountains
from whence shall my help come …