He touched his legs, the damp cloth, the cold cloth, then looked, like a lunatic, at his own bare hands. Where were his nankeen trousers? He felt about himself, looked back at the hill above him, hurried up there hoping for something pale lying on the dark of the heather. There was nothing. He had dropped them. Or he had put them down when he drank from the stream and had forgotten to pick them up again. He went back to the ledge, sat and held his head. He passionately wanted his nankeen trousers and their loss seemed the loss of his ability to maintain purpose, to act purposefully in the world. He pressed the skin of his face, ground at it with the heels of his palms. For three or four seconds he did not know what he was, and when things returned to him—his true name, his assumed name, his rank, his family, his crime—they came without their old solidity as if, one by one, they were being offered to him in the form of questions. He groaned—though it seemed already the moment for such an expression had passed. He let his hands drop. Below him, the moon was rising, the moon at its first quarter, still very low, one horn resting on the earth, then, as he watched, lifting free. He hoped for poetry, something noble and remembered, but managed only to repeat “moon,” wonderingly, until the word lay on his tongue like a silver penny. But he was calm now, packed away by the drug, by fatigue. Even the realisation that he had left the bag and the fiddle down by the landing place did not enter deeply. The fiddle he had been holding on to like his father’s hand; he would do better without it. As for the rest, the pistol, the writing case, somebody would want them.

He rolled on to his side and threw up. Water, whisky. The tincture too, presumably. He waited, trembling, then shoved himself away from the ground, first to his knees, finally to his feet. He was suddenly quite certain that if he tried to spend the night on the hill he would die on it. He would be found up there with a crow on his chest, be buried in an unmarked grave. Or with the name Lovall above him.

He started down. There were people on this island somewhere. He would not ask them for much. Some shelter, a bite of bread. And if they would not open their doors to him (oh, the savages!) he would find a byre and sleep with the cows again . . .