Panteco jerked Toribio towards his table. “Sit,” he ordered. The dog slumped to the floor like a coat falling from a hanger. He lay there panting, his eyes half-closed as Dolores plunged a white hand through his warm thick fur.

Rosita’s voice was tired. She lacked the ease of a loved woman. “Will you never learn, Silkleigh?”

“Rosita, my passion-killer,” said Silkleigh. “Cheer me up. Tell me I’m wonderful.”

She turned from him. She stood with her gold-braided back to the room, one hand rubbing her arm below a vaccination scar.

Silkleigh removed a sprig with yellow berries from the vase on the bar. “This is the plant the cattle won’t eat. Have a nibble, Rosita,” he said. “Tell me why the cattle won’t eat it.”

“Mohamed,” she said. Mohamed poured her a whisky. She was crying.

“Neither in women’s tears nor the skies of the mountain should men put their trust,” intoned Silkleigh.

She bowed her head.

“Oh God, I can’t bear tears. Pass me that cloth again, Mohamed.” She shook her head, burying her face in her arm.

“There, there,” he said. He made an ineffectual dab at her cheeks. After a while she lifted her head, allowing him to pat the cloth below her eyes.

“This is Mr Wavery,” he said tenderly. He rotated her. “The British Consul General who has come to live with us a long way from home.”

“How do you do?” said Wavery, embarrassed. She looked at him, not taking him in. “This is Rosita Amaral,” Silkleigh whispered, lulling her. “The best fadista in Abyla.” He held her in his arms. He was a changed man. He was the diver again, the turtle.

“A long way from home . . . ” Silkleigh tried out the words. “You know, that’s not a bad title,” he said. He unclipped the pencil from his T-shirt and wrote down the words on his bill.

“See how it looks in the morning, shall we?”

Chapter Five

1

WAVERY LEARNED TO ignore the unpredictable chimes from the bell tower. Every morning at six-thirty he was woken by the trumpet in the barracks, after which he lay in bed listening to the horns of trapped cars in Calle Zamora. He rose at seven-thirty. At seven-thirty the tunnel opened its mouth on the Marina Española.

At seven-thirty an enormous worm could be first seen and then heard slithering down the hill from El Hadu, its scales composed of dirty yellow helmets. This creature made up of a thousand workers of all creeds and races, of men who had dug below the earth in Holland and Japan and below the English Channel, had a goal. But there was a sense that at any moment the millipede could twist its blind head up an unfamiliar street and separate into a thousand segments.

For half an hour in the morning and for half an hour in the evening the Marina Española became a place to avoid. Conversations ebbed away, watches were looked at, meetings remembered. Everything possible was done to remove oneself from the tide of men flowing into the dark heart of the earth.