Before leaving Mingulay, Calley had made clear to Medina, several times, how little he liked these men (were they brothers?), how little he trusted them. But he had grown weary of sitting on the shore watching an empty sea, and the sailors, having brought their boat from somewhere else, having crossed open water and made landfall, must be assumed to know their business. They spoke only a few words of English and Medina’s Gaelic, scraps and feathers of language, served only to deepen the confusion. It was money, the grubby King Georges in Calley’s palm, that kept the sailors from walking away entirely, but they had withdrawn to a sand dune of their own and conferred there, smoking their pipes, nodding their heads like beam engines, occasionally drawing in the sand.

No specific island was mentioned—or if it was, not in a shared tongue. Calley and Medina pointed north along the beach, repeating the word—north! north!—while the sailors looked on like men addressed by gannets, moon-fish. But away from Mingulay, rocking in a slow green swell, they did indeed seem to be headed north. That was good enough, that would do, and there was at least one island at no great distance from them, and beyond that the suggestion of others, perhaps a chain of them stretching up to latitudes belonging more to the imagination than any sensible geography. An hour passed, a second hour. Then came the smoke, coiling over the water from the west and making everything into the shadow of a shadow.

The sailors altered course. A third hour began in which they passed the spectre of land, passed one island and, conceivably, a second. Or was it the same one? It was hard to be sure. It was impossible. Calley and Medina exchanged meaningful glances, then gave that up and looked past each other at the mercury-coloured sea that now and then slopped over the gunwales to swirl, bubbling, around their boots.

Another change of course and the boat slid round a point of land—low, treeless—and entered a bay where the beach was a silver line that shone brighter than the smoke-coloured sea or the smoke-coloured air above it. One of the sailors, the short one, made gestures, briefly spoke. This, it seemed, was arrival. A minute later the boat snubbed her keel on the sand and the brown sail shivered. The sailors were in a hurry now and their language needed no translation. Calley and Medina took off their coats, rolled them tight then slithered over the sides of the boat, standing up to their thighs in the water as the sailors dug their oars into the sand and pushed the boat away from them. At sea, everything is slow until, without much warning, it’s quick as a wing-beat. The brown sail became a grey sail then just an uncertain line, like a flaw in the lens of the eye.