Though it was tempting simply to stay in bed, to lounge there listening to the pigeons and watching the pale light exhaust itself, Medina decided to dress and go out. Some sense that the world might speak to him, might have something interesting to say. He nodded to Mrs. Cooke, who was sitting on the front steps of the house, tamping the bowl of her pipe. He walked out of the alley, crossed the High Street, then picked streets at random until he came out at the shore. He was standing on a wall. Below him was a beach, or rather a shelf of black-veined mud that ended in a fringe of foam and the greasy rumpled green of the sea. A man was down there, sliding over the shining mud on a pair of narrow boards strapped to his feet. He had a sack and into it he placed whatever valuable things he could pull out of the mud, bottles mostly. Medina studied him. There was comedy here but he did not laugh. The sight of this man, who moved over the mud so cleverly, who had found a place, ten yards of stinking foreshore, to make his own, impressed him more than the fleet he had seen from the hill. This was the real English genius. This was why, for a hundred years, they would be irresistible. Eventually, of course, they would grow lazy. They would have somebody else strap on the boards. They would become interested in comfort, would lose their barbarian vitality. But for now, everyone else could simply rest in subservience, wait their turn.

He was still watching (the man was trying to tug something large from under the mud, the rib, perhaps, of a drowned colossus) when a woman came up and stood beside him on the wall.

“You look like a nice one,” she said. He thanked her. She was young, ruined. Lie with her and you would wake up with a fever you would not get better from. They talked about the man on the mud. She said he was always out there. She said she thought he would sink into the mud one day or that the tide would catch him.

“Would he not float?” asked Medina.

She said he would, but upside down.