Late in the day the boat crossed an invisible line and the land at last showed itself for what it was. There was no harbour, no bay, no beach, nothing but walls of streaked rock with white birds rising and drifting like chaff. They were closing on it fast now. Lacroix waited for a change of course but it didn’t come. Soon, even he could hear the birds, their incessant calling, could see, with perfect clarity, the sea in a smother around the base of the walls. He looked back at the man on the tiller, at the crew, all of whom gazed ahead as though there were miles of empty ocean before them. Had they gone blind in the night? Mad? Should he warn them? Or were these quiet men, who perhaps he had come upon all too conveniently, not what they seemed at all, but servants of the Furies carrying him to where he could settle his debts in the surf? Then a fold in the wall became a gap in the wall and they were carried through on a surge of current, the way so narrow he could have spun coins from his pockets and bounced them from the rocks on either side.

It was a river, a loch, and no wider at first than its entrance. Then, as they passed a boulder on which a seal was basking, the creature’s grey and the rock’s almost identical, the banks fell back and they were in a body of water calmer than the sea, the land on both sides low and bare.

The boat glided forward, trailing the faint silk of her shadow. The animals, the few that were left, scented the new air. Lacroix began to see houses, all of them small, all built of the same stone they stood on, some with a scrap of worked ground beside them. The sailors dropped the canvas and swung the anchor over. The boat was lying off a shelf of foreshore, a place strewn with smooth stones and weed. Some score of the island’s inhabitants stood there, dun-brown figures, silently waiting. There was a cart and a pony. Also a collie dog that seemed to watch the boat with the same rapt attention as the people.

The sailors gathered at the stern, talking, and though Lacroix could hear only the stone-tap and stray music of their voices (and would not have known their words had he heard them perfectly) he understood they were speaking about him and that his journey was over. One of them came forward, the same he had spoken with at the waterside in Glasgow. Lacroix stood up. “I’ll go ashore here,” he said, “if you will show me how.”

“You must take off your boots,” said the sailor. He spoke softly. If he had just given an order it had been given in a way that was hard to object to.