In the morning they sailed for Islay, and later the same day paid a man to row them over to Jura. In Jura, in a boarding house, they sat out two days of storm, the weather dementing against the windows so that they dared not sit too close for fear the glass would come in. Medina took lessons in Gaelic from the landlord, a large man who appeared always to be dithering at the edge of some hilarity and who, above the crashing of the storm, recited phrases about old battles between people with almost identical names. Medina, swaddled in a tartan blanket, called the phrases back to him, was gently corrected and called again. Calley was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room. He wore his coat and turned the pages of a picture book about the lives of Scottish saints, brawny types who put men’s severed heads back on their shoulders, who befriended lions.

“What’s this?” said Calley, breaking in on the lesson. “What lions? There are no lions in Scotland.”

But the landlord detected the uncertainty in his voice and with a smile, a mild blinking of his eyes, told how his grandfather had once seen a whole nest of them up on the Paps, and that they had turned and turned as though they were boiling.

“Yeah, right,” said Calley, but he looked pleased and went back to slowly turning the pages of the book.

The afternoon of the third day they went over to Mull. The wind had dropped but a big sea was still running. Both men vomited on the journey and on reaching harbour staggered among crab pots, shuddered, felt for stone and could not speak. Once they had recovered themselves a little by sitting an hour, boots dangling over the harbour wall (“the sea,” said Calley, “is a fucking disgrace”), they set off walking between the houses and the boats and came soon enough to a narrow way, a half-open door, the glimmering of human forms, the clink of bottles. They went in. Faces turned towards them like stone flowers turning towards the sun. Medina addressed them with a word of Gaelic. Perhaps it was a greeting; perhaps it was the name of a type of outhouse. “We’re engineers,” said Calley. “We’re having a scout about.”