I recorded everything, and dispatched the footage to SeeNet’s news room – with narration which I hoped would limit the perverse downside: the less dramatic the anarchists’ plight, the less chance there was of any grass roots political backlash against the invasion. I didn’t want to see Stateless discredited, with commentators tutting wisely that it had always been destined to slide into the abyss – but when it took a thousand corpses a day to raise a flicker of interest from the average viewer, if I painted too sanguine a picture the exodus would be a non-story.

The first truck from the coast which I sighted ran out of food long before it came near us. By three p.m., though, with the sixth delivery, two market tents had been set up near one of the water pumps – and an ad hoc “restaurant” was under construction. Forty minutes later, I sat on a folding chair in the shade of a photovoltaic awning, with a bowl of steaming sea urchin stew on my lap. There were a dozen other people eating out, forced to flee without their own cooking equipment; they eyed my camera suspiciously, but admitted that, of course, there’d been plans for leaving the city – first drafted long ago, but discussed and refined every year.

I felt more optimistic than ever – and more out of synch with the mood of the locals. They seemed to be taking the success of the exodus (a small miracle, in my eyes) for granted – but now that they’d come through it unscathed, as they’d always expected, and were waiting for the mercenaries to make the next move, everything had become less certain.

“What do you think will happen in the next twenty-four hours?” I asked one woman with a small boy on her lap. She wrapped her arms around the child protectively, and said nothing.

Outside, someone roared with pain. The restaurant emptied in seconds. I managed to penetrate the crowd which had formed in the narrow square between the markets and the restaurant – and then found myself forced back as they drew away in panic.

A young Fijian man had been lofted meters above the ground by invisible machinery; he was wide-eyed with terror, crying out for help. He was struggling pitifully – but his arms hung at his sides, bloody and ruined, white bone protruding through the flesh of one elbow. The thing which had taken him was too strong to be fought.