‘I’ll keep it under my hat,’ said Dikon. ‘Gaunt knows, of course. I told you—’

‘Oh, hell!’ said Simon disgustedly.

Gaunt came out and told Dikon he wanted to be driven to the Peak. He offered a seat in the car to anyone who would like it. ‘I’ve asked your sister,’ he said to Simon. ‘Why don’t you come too?’ Simon consented ungraciously. They borrowed the Colonel’s field glasses and set out.

It was the first time Dikon had been to Rangi’s Peak. After crossing the railway line, the road ran out to the coast and thence along the narrow neck of land, at the end of which rose the great truncated cone. So symmetrical was its form that even at close quarters the mountain seemed to be the expression of some grossly simple impulse—the impulse, one would have said, of a primordial cubist. The road ended abruptly at a gate in a barbed-wire fence. A notice, headed Native Reserve, set out a number of prohibitions. Dikon saw that it was forbidden to remove any objects found on the Peak.

They were not the first arrivals. Several cars were parked outside the fence.

‘You have to walk from here,’ said Simon, and glanced disparagingly at Gaunt’s shoes.

‘Oh, God! Is it far?’

‘You might think so.’

Barbara cut in quickly. ‘Not very. It’s a good path and we can turn back if you don’t think it’s worth it.’

‘So we can. Come on,’ said Gaunt with an air of boyish hardihood, and Simon led the way, following the outside of the barbedwire fence. They were moving round the flank of the Peak. The turf was springy under their feet, the air fresh with a tang in it. Some way behind them the song of a lark, a detached pin-prick of sound, tinkled above the peninsula. Soon his voice faded into thin air and was lost in the mewing of a flight of gulls who came flapping in from seawards. ‘I never heard those creatures,’ said Gaunt, ‘without thinking of a BBC serial.’ He looked up the sloping flank of the mountain, to where its crater stood black against the brilliant sky. ‘And that’s where they buried their dead?’

Barbara pointed to the natural planes of ascent in the structure of the mountain. ‘It looks as if they had made a rough road up to the top,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think they did. It’s as though the hill had been shaped for the purpose, isn’t it? They believe it was, you know. Of course they haven’t used it for ages and ages. At least, that’s what we’re told. There are stories of a secret burial up there after the pakehas came.’

‘Do they never come here, nowadays?’