Some of them lay where they had been trapped in the rubble of their shattered houses, their limbs splayed, under roofing timbers or steel joists. The corpses were already bloated and discoloured, faces swollen to a youthful smoothness, freed of the contortions of pain, the bloody reality masked by the thin painting of ash. In Newington there seemed to have been a more major fire — the buildings were uniformly razed — and in the main road that threaded through the suburb, they came across many bodies, apparently unburned, men, women and children alike, lying scattered across the road surface. He saw a mother with a baby. The mother had been trying to hold her baby up, away from the road surface. And in that posture they had been petrified.

Evidently there had been some kind of miniature fire storm here. The road tarmac had melted. The people, fleeing the fires, had gotten stuck, like insects on fly paper, and, suffocating, had fallen. Now their corpses were glued in place, cemented to the road surface which had betrayed them.

How must it have been? Ted wondered, staring at the corpses. Not the fact of death itself, but those few seconds, knowing its inevitability: knowing that today was the day, now was the hour, death bursting out of the mundane background of these quiet suburbs; and suddenly there was nothing you could do to protect those you loved, not even the most innocent. How must it have been?

Edinburgh had become a city of tableaux, he thought, of tiny fragments of immense and undeserved suffering, such as this.

Ted and Blue inched around the bodies, trying not to get too close. Flies swarmed, and the stench was powerful enough to penetrate Ted’s protective suit.

They walked on into the heart of the city. The heat of the June day climbed.

At St Leonard’s, Blue cut right, and headed through the few blocks of housing directly towards Arthur’s Seat. Ted followed gingerly.

The damage was so extensive here it was impossible to make out even the outlines of the streets. Everything had been smashed and burned and shattered by the ash flow, so that rubble lay everywhere in heaps that looked, from a distance, almost smooth. Easily negotiable. But close to, much of it was actually hot to the touch and unstable, eager to collapse to a more consolidated profile.

Ted found the going much more difficult, with jagged edges of wall eager to trip him, or rip his suit, or send a miniature landslide down on top of a foot or leg. In some places the rubble was smoothed over by layers of pumice and ash, making it still more treacherous, and even Blue was forced to slow right down, and move forward with much more caution.

From the air they must have looked like two silvery bugs, inching their way across the shattered, transformed landscape.