They slept side by side in their coats on the straw, were woken by MacCuish, his voice in the darkness. On the beach the cousin was waiting by the bows of the lugger. They pushed the boat over the sand until she lay half in and half out of the water. Calley and Medina climbed in with their packs, then MacCuish and his cousin shouldered the boat into the shallows, pulling themselves aboard with little flicks of water from their bare feet. They rowed out until they found the wind, shipped the oars and hoisted their single sail. The lugger, noisy before with the rowing, now fitted herself to the quiet of the morning. At first she hardly seemed to be moving at all, then she heeled, very slightly, there was the whisper of water over clinkered wood, and they were under way, the beach, the bay, the island, withdrawing from them in a kind of smoothing.

It was a long crossing—the longest yet for Calley and Medina, who sat on their packs by the bows feeling beneath them the restlessness and infinite tonnage of green water. MacCuish watched everything. The sense was of making the crossing while the weather’s back was turned. No cloud showed itself at the horizon without MacCuish noting its presence. Medina even saw him pick weed from the sea as if that too carried some message for him. In the early afternoon he pointed casually to the south. “A whale,” he said.

Medina looked. He thought he saw something, a black something in the sea’s glitter but could not be sure. How can you miss a whale? Calley preferred not to look but made a face, a whale-hating face, that lasted several minutes.

The moon rose, a waning crescent in a sky the colour of pearls. As night came on the wind picked up and the boat became jittery, the bows skipping from sea-hold to sea-hold. Calley drooped his head over the sea and conversed with it in a series of groans. Medina was in Spain, al Andaluz, a grove of almond trees in spring, the wind running down slender avenues of trees, the air a whirl of white blossom . . .