The soldiers turned in the water and waded ashore. They were relieved to find it real enough, the sand steady under the sodden leather of their boots. They put on their coats, they faced the land, looked, listened.

“Where have those cunts brought us?” said Calley, and at the sound of his voice something thirty yards to their left dragged itself from the beach into the sea. A heavy thing in a panic. The men stared (at nothing) then started searching for a path. On their journey together they had developed a deep faith in the ubiquity of paths, that places seemingly untouched, as emptied of life as an upturned box, were always on the way to somewhere. They walked, paused, walked the whole length of the shining beach in their sopping clothes, found no paths, grew weary of the search, and set off over rocks and heather, stumbling, seeing things in the weird bled whiteness of the air, their ears full of the sound of their own breathing. In a hollow they came across a tree, a wind-stunted pine. It cast no shadow, was not much taller than Medina. Should they feel encouraged by it? They moved on, followed the twistings of a gully, Calley in the lead, Medina six strides behind him. Then Medina veered off—some small rebellion against having for his view the back of another man. He started climbing one of the sides of the gully, scrabbled up over loose stones, went on all fours for the last yards, and stood up in clearer air (air like water in which the sediment has settled). On the brow of the neighbouring hill he could see two houses, side by side, both of them ruins.

He peered down into the gully where Calley was peering up at him. He did not have to see the corporal’s face clearly to know the expression on it. He beckoned to him, and watched as he toiled upwards, a mad and dangerous beetle he would one day tell his friends in the south about, and while they laughed at the thought of such a small, ferocious man, he would explain how this Englishman was exactly as he had been made, a blank sheet formed of rags on which the world had printed some outrageous truth, something like—You will not be loved. Something like that. And then, of course, the laughter would have to stop.

In both houses the roofs had tumbled in but one had kept a little of its thatch—the straw more garden now than roof—and this they choose for their camp. They looked out through an empty doorway, crossed over to look from a shutterless window. Perhaps they were at the tip of a large island and further on there would be villages, towns even. But that wasn’t the sense. That wasn’t what they felt.

They gathered the materials for a fire and built it under the shelter of the thatch.