It was the verse which, whenever she had opened her copy of the Qur’an, she found before her. She loved it because she understood it. And she understood it because it spoke to her of something that she had known, had always known, had glimpsed in these hills that were empty but not empty, that were more rough than pretty. Even their colours were unpolished. Her spirit was here where she wanted to be buried. The people who walked at her funeral knew it and now the three women sensed it too in the gentle wind and the tough climb, in the mists that lowered over the dark peaks and lifted.

They had moved, as she had moved symbolically, from the built monastery near the loch to the emptiness of the mountains. Left behind the hushed, thick, sombre atmosphere of organised religion and travelled up to where there was simplicity and balance. Not the indulgence of the secluded life, neither the gratification of service, nor the voluptuousness of identity. No, here was aloneness. The nothing of it. Just to be small, a conscious part of the whole. Lady Evelyn could not help her faith, it was given to her without asking and it paralleled her life unpremeditated, unplanned. It was separate and part of her roles as traveller, writer and mother; her social position, her aristocratic breeding and contacts. Where was Lady Evelyn’s Islam? So deep that when it surfaced it surprised her. When the Pope asked, her reply rose sincere, a reflex, the truth summoned forward by the authority of a man of God. ‘I am a Muslim.’ And where had that come from? From her childhood in Algiers and Cairo, the kindly servants who bowed to Allah alone and not to her parents, the murmur of their prayers, the sound of the azan floating through the window. Little girl, loved as one of them. Carried and fed, clutching the black veil of her nanny because they were leaving the house, the warm calloused hand nursing insect bites and bruises, holding up her chin to look into her eyes, voice soothing to her ears. All that she had absorbed. But her experience was not unusual for a colonial child. As a teenager, she had written in a poem, ‘I felt His Presence within and around’. But this in itself was not an explanation either. Perhaps it was, as she described, the weird cadence of the muezzin’s cry. Perhaps that sound went in and lodged itself years after she came home, her home, here, the unmistakable mauve mountains and glens, grouse and salmon, leaves turning colour, the thrill of the hunt, the smells of fear, blood and the bellows of the stags – these were hers too, her ancestry, her robust health and independence – her toughness, Scottishness and sense of entitlement – all together, one and the same.

‘I can’t go on,’ said Moni, stopping. ‘I need the toilet’.